Northwest Review Defunct

Northwest Review, the great literary magazine of the Pacific Northwest, is now defunct. The link. This editors at this magazine kindly published three of my stories over the years; these are linked in the list at right. Back issues may be available as described at the website. My stories are included in Volume 29, #2 (1991), Volume 31, #3 (1993, the William Stafford issue),  and Volume 41, #2 (2003).

ACCEPTANCE: SILK ROAD

Silk Road, the literary magazine of Pacific University's MFA program, is picking up my short story, "Horses." Stay tuned.

NEW STORY AVAILABLE

"Maybe I Want to Tell You" is now available in The Fourth River, fall 2011, #8. To order a copy, click on the link!

THE NEW COUNTRY DOCTOR

This story was originally published in Ars Medica, spring 2008 (volume 4, number 2). To order a copy, click on the link.

         I hear a knock at the back door of the priory. A single knock, just as I’m perfecting a new sleight of hand with my waxed Maverick cards. The Cardeeni Single: another trick I’ll never use. Sliding the top card into the deck with my thumb, I am startled by the knock, but do I flinch? Hell no. I turn down the lamp—the nurses and the translator are sleeping in the next room—and I fan out my cards on the fine teak table that the prior left behind. Overhead, fat raindrops rattle the tin roof as palm trees loosen their rain, and I think of my grandpa’s empty old house with the chestnut tree over the porch. I imagine my dad sitting there, dazzling me with his card tricks. His shaky hands. The rain. Now he has sold the old place to pay his debts. That’s what he said in his last letter. I have no place to go home.

         The person knocks on the door again.

         I stuff the deck of playing cards in the pocket of my shirt.

         My dad said cards were for indolent rogues. But he always winked and showed me a new trick. He kept a deck in his doctor bag.

         You know, a knock during daytime is nothing. A mother bringing her son for an exam. Listen to the boy’s breath, do a little hocus pocus with your nickel-plated gadgets, dispense a few aspirin. Sometimes the knock is a patient bearing eggs or fruit. But at night, a knock is always bad. I sleep in my boots. The nurses are not willing to leave the abbey, and it falls to me to run through the rain and stumble in the mud toward who knows what. I set a broken arm here, I watch malaria back away from a hut there. I’ve cradled a wailing baby and sung lullabies my grandpa must have sung to me. I’ve held a cup to the mouth of a dying partisan as he cried out in Portuguese for the Blessed Virgin. I never can tell which side of the fight these guys are on, which color bandana is which, but I do know when life has faded from warm to cold. In the morning, I often lose my way back to the abbey, footprints erased by rain.

         The knock persists, and I open the door.

         A pretty girl drips rain on the porch. She is wearing a man’s loose shirt. She uses her fingers to comb the rain from her hair, which is so long it hangs to her ankles. The girl has pox marks on her face, old scars tight and shiny like the skin on pudding. That’s what salves and prayer get you. But she is pretty, especially as she combs her hair, separating each blue-black strand fine as flax. The girl might not know how pretty she is. I’ve encountered entire villages without mirrors.

         I offer her a chair at the teak table, and I pour two cups of tea. She coils her hair in her lap and sits. She does not take the tea. She abruptly stands. She tugs my hand.

         “Please, my brother hurts badly.”

         Shit.

* * *

         I am a doctor, and I am proud to say my father was a doctor, as was his father before him, and his father too. One of my ancestors was a Cherokee healer named Leaves. The story goes that his herbs and roots poisoned the wife of a Tennessee judge, and he fled to California and changed his name to Jones to throw off the law. That’s what I was told, and I believed that my ancestor was without honor, but when I was ten my dad revealed more of the story of Leaves. He said the judge’s wife had a bloody gurgle in her lungs that did not respond to the balms Leaves rubbed on her chest. She begged for something to end her pain, and when she clutched Leaves’ wrist he understood what she was asking. He gave her something, all right. My dad said Leaves never practiced healing again. I listened to that story, and I imagined the desperate woman’s fingers digging deep into my own wrist. I could not have gone through with it. Nevertheless, I grew up proud of the story and what it said about my family. A little mercy in this world was a good thing. I knew I would become a doctor.

* * *

         The road is mud. My boots sink in and stick. I hold the girl’s hand and let her guide me to the village.

         “You can cure him?”

         “Of course I can. I’m a doctor.”

         No point in worrying the girl. We still have an hour of walking. If death is taking shape on his putty face, I don’t want to know about it yet. I want the girl to sing me a song in her fluttery dialect. She is skinny, and that long loose shirt fits like a dress, and her hair swings around her ankles. There is something bulging under her shirt, but in the rainy season you see that everywhere. A satchel of food. A bandana in green or red. You hope it’s not a gun. Maybe it’s a set of papers. You can still move around the countryside pretty easily if you have papers, if you are bringing help, and especially if you come with a cross in your pocket. The girl leads me past hamlets we’ve inoculated against smallpox. It is good Catholic magic: a bloody jab in the arm keeps you safe. We are doing good work, and it will make for good stories someday. The villagers insist on paying us, and I take what they offer. Fresh fruit, a bottle of honey wine. But you have to be careful. These are not modest gifts, and not intended that way. The parish priests in their rags scowl at you.

         Plodding through the mud, I wonder, What would this girl give to me? Is she a partisan? Am I in trouble? What are the colors on her bandana? Blood is the common color everyone shares. I grip her hand tighter; it is too dark to see colors. There is no choice but to trust the girl. My thumb slides across the pockmarks on the back of her hand.

* * *

         My grandpa used to let me hold his gold pocketwatch, fat as an oyster, with a caduceus engraved on the lid and a distilled version of the Hippocratic Oath on the reverse: refuse no one, and do no harm. During Prohibition, he had done a thriving business in patent medicines, and the watch was his retirement gift to himself. With a flourish of one hand, he could open the lid, set the watch hands, wind the spring, and click it shut. A surgeon’s dexterity. Or a huckster’s. He handed down the watch to my dad, and my dad promised that if I went to medical school, he would give the watch to me. By the time I showed an inclination, my dad had gotten into some trouble and pawned the watch to pay a debt. It was only a watch, I guess.

* * *

         We reach the hamlet and enter a tin shack. Everyone is wearing a bandana over their face, and that would be enough to set me on edge, but their muffled voices greet me courteously. They offer me a seat and a cup of honey wine. Everyone is introduced. A family. Catholic ornaments lean out from the wall. Eyes glance at my little black bag of spells. I show them my shiny American tools, my Portuguese dictionary, and a rosary, and with these talismans we declare the distance between us, and it is not so far. My hands shake a little. Their eyes follow. If I could juggle my instruments, like a parlor trick, it would come off well. Something slips from my bag with a thud. It’s my dad’s book of cures. They gave it to him at the end of medical school. Use this and don’t come back. Rusty copper darts mark the pages he considered important.

         “Is that a Bible?”

         “Sure it is.”

         I wonder about the masks. Are they trying to protect themselves from the germ? Maybe they’re partisans? I’m not supposed to care. The church says we move freely only because we don’t care. I think of the pockmarks on the girl’s face. I tug her hand. “Tell them it does no good.”

         “What?”

         “The masks. They do no good against the variola virus.”

         “Maybe they just don’t want you to know who they are.”

         “Why don’t you wear one on your face?”

         “This isn’t my face.”

         “I’m sorry?”

         “Nothing.”

         “Where’s your priest?”

         “Gone.”

         I set down my cup of honey wine. I drank too much. But my hands are steady as iron. “I’m ready.”

         The girl takes my hand.

* * *

         My father was in the war. Fresh out of medical school he was sent to Italy, and he was stationed in field hospitals at Anzio and Naples when it was really bad. He never spoke of it, but he must have felt helpless, and maybe that was the start of it all. I imagine that if a guy was hurting, my dad gave him a jab of morphine, fuck the dosage, and if someone was bleeding, he stuck his hand on the hole and tried to hold back the blood oozing between his fingers. He picked shards of shrapnel like seeds from the flesh of a pomegranate. He wrapped gunshot wounds that leaked like wet sand along a riverbank. With his fingers pinching off arteries, he stopped a man’s dying even as the man begged him to help it along. He must have known when a soldier’s life was out of his hands, and sometimes he just stood over a dying man and read aloud from his fat book of cures. Maybe they drank whiskey together until the soldier died and my dad had to drink alone.

         He learned how to play cards in the army. He learned the probabilities. He learned how to hustle. But whatever he learned, he didn't learn it very well.

* * *

         In the back of the hut, the boy lies on a cot, beside a picture of the Virgin, a crucifix, an incense tray, and a jar of cheap syrup whose only effect is to sweeten your tongue. Even in the darkness, I can see the boy is hurting, and smallpox is bubbling on his skin, and he will die painfully. I order everyone out of the room. Except the girl, her pretty pockmarked face allows her to stay.

         “Please,” the girl says in Portuguese, “tell him he will not die. Tell him you’ve seen death and it is not him. Tomorrow he will awaken and wear his skin like clean silk.”

         “I cannot help him.” I gather my magic bag. “We have to quarantine this village. You know, we make a ring around it. Everybody gets the vaccine.”

         “Please. He hurts terribly.”

         The girl touches to the boy on his forehead. His skin jiggles like scrambled eggs.

* * *

         When I was eleven years old, I came down with whooping cough. The rattle was in my chest. My father came into my room with a steaming bowl, a remedy he said was handed down from Leaves. I didn’t like the sound of that. He opened his black bag and took out his thick meaty book of cures, and he held the book over my chest and read from it as though incanting spells. He rubbed the remedy onto my chest. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing, doing my best to focus on each breath, in spite of the mumbo jumbo uttered over me. I told myself I got better because I was strong. Still, I was quarantined out of school for two months, and to help me pass the time my father taught me more card tricks. The Bedazzler. The Jack in the Bedroom. Five Aces. Even then, his hands had begun to shake. My hands smelled sweet like juniper berries.

* * *

         The boy’s skin is a bubbling stew. I pull back the girl’s hands. He is my patient now. I lay out his limbs so the sores are not touching. I give him water. I sing lullabies. We pray. The girl slides the boy’s rosary beads, and you can hear the steady click click of the beads through her fingers. I want to go home. I am twenty-nine, and I want to go home. I don’t want to consider anyone’s else’s pain anymore. But there’s nothing to go home to.

         I take out my deck of cards.

         “Pick a card.”

         “What are you doing?” The girl frowns. The clicking stops.

         “Just tell him to pick a card.”

         The girl takes a card and shows it to the boy.

         I place the card back in the deck, shuffle. I split the deck in two. “Is this your card?” He nods. It’s the right card. I did the trick just right.

         I do the Mongolian Clock, and The Stray Dog, and Schmidt’s Magic Ace. It’s a real show. The pretty girl watches me doing the tricks, and her face wrinkles up to where the pock marks are like kneaded bread, and she’s not pretty at all. Then her face relaxes and she begins to understand. She leaves the room. I finish off Dig Your Own Hole, put the cards in the chest pocket of my shirt. I pick up my coat.

* * *

         You know what my father told me? All morning, we were sitting on the porch near the sound of rain. I was doing a trick called Gypsy’s Bluff. I must have been about fourteen. My father had been out all night—some lady with cancer—I imagined my father’s fat book of cures suspended helplessly above her. Now he watched my work. My shuffle. My cut. My deal. His hands had become too shaky to play cards anymore. I was not in a hurry, and I worked with method and care. The rain was heavy in the trees, and the first chestnut fronds of the season were snapping loose and dropping from the weight of the rain. My father said, “You’ve got good hands.”

         “Yeah?”

         “Do you know why you’ll need those hands?”

         “So I can be a doctor?”

         “Do you know, someday, what you will have to do with your hands?”

         “No.”

         “With a pillow and your own goddamn hands!”

         “I don’t understand!”

         The porch was perched too high, and my father stepped off the porch and into the yard as though stepping off the edge of a raft and into the sea. The yellow chestnut fronds were piling on the lawn, glistening with rain, and he waded through them and kicked them around.

* * *

         Standing in the rain outside the hut, I do not wear my coat. I want to feel something, the wet night air bathing my arms. In two years, I have learned five species of crickets by their sounds, and when they fall silent I listen to the beating of my heart. I become aware of my skin against the cold, the tug of the cards in my pocket, and I wish for my coat, but it is gone. I left my coat behind, wadded in a ball, beside the boy’s cot.

         Morning blues the sky. I hear the earliest birds. I need to get back to the abbey. This month was supposed to be the end of the campaign. A few of the nurses are entering a holy order, but most of them are gabbing about the boys waiting for them back home. They gaggle about summer dresses in the latest American magazines, and they elbow for space in front of the priory’s only mirror. They won’t want to hear about this one.

         The girl comes out of the hut and squats beside me. Her hair in a coil hangs from her wrist.

         “I’m very sorry,” I say. “We have to quarantine the village.”

         “You cannot do this. Everyone will flee before you can stop them.” She stands and moves in front of me.

         I say, “We are not partisans. We are with the church. All we care about is the virus.”

         She steps closer. “I am so sorry.” From beneath her shirt, she pulls out a small pistol, and before I can move, she aims her steady hand and fires.

         The bullet knocks me on my back, but I know I am alive. A jackhammer has struck my chest, but as certainly as I can see the shaky blue sky I am alive.

         The girl is screaming. She kneels next to me. Her hair hangs in my face, it piles on the ground, it tangles in her hands, tangles in mine, everywhere.

         Later, I find that the bullet has struck my deck of cards and stopped there. And I thought those damn things would never be useful. I try to roll away, but I’m too stunned to move. My breath is a gasp. “Holy fuck!”

         “I am so sorry. Mother Mary, it is a miracle!”

         I touch the girl’s pockmarked face. She is so pretty.

         “It is a miracle. I am so sorry.” She looks down. She crosses herself. “Mother Mary, Mother Mary...” She puts her hands on my chest and crosses me. My own hands shake too much to do much of anything.

* * *

         I remember the night my grandpa fell off the tall porch. He was laughing at a joke, and he tipped his chair back and went over. He hit his head badly, and I set him back in his chair and waited for my dad. He never did come home that night, and not because of a medical call. It was I who picked the pebbles from my grandpa’s forehead. I daubed at the blood and the crust of pearly fluid. I threaded a needle, and I sewed my first stitches at an age when other boys were tightening the knots on their baseball gloves to play catch with their dads. I never played catch with my dad. In every way, he was a failure. I don't blame him for this. I have said it before: a little mercy in this world is a good thing.

* * *

         I am lying in the hut. The girl is sitting next to me and holding my hand. The boy’s body is gone. The girl lights a candle beside the Virgin.

         “Sing for me.” I lie back and close my eyes. “Fuck, sing for me.”

         “I don’t—we don’t sing right now.” The scars on her face squirm.

         “Then tell me the happiest story you know.”

         “My family doesn’t have any happy stories. Listen, if we tell a story it’s only to get rid of it. We tell a story to put it away, far far away.”

         “Then I will tell you a story about my family. There was a man. His name was Leaves...”

IVORY

Originally published in The Keynon Review, spring 2010 (Volume 32, Number 2). To order a copy, click on the link.

         Susan, feigning sleep, felt the car swerve, a change so abrupt that she gave up the privacy of closing her eyes. Jim was driving with one hand again, the other hand across the back of Susan’s seat. Usually he stroked her hair, cupping his fingers where her hair curled under at the neck. Not today. Susan and Jim had had a fight. She had shut him out. She had even plucked the earpiece from her cochlear implant and clamped her fingers around it, small and lost in her fist. She turned away from Jim, her hair sliding over her cheek. The spruce forest sloped away, and Susan saw the Quihwa village and the bay and, farther, the Pacific Ocean simmering under the grey sky. She looked down. A logging truck was crawling to the switchback, a single giant tree lashed to its bed, thick chains cutting into the bark. The truck shuddered and blew a cloud of black.

         Susan frowned, and with her free hand she signed to Jim, Slow down.

         Jim might have said, “Okay.”

         He eased the car around the switchback. The logging truck inched by.

         Susan set down her earpiece and took Jim’s money clip from the console. She picked at the edge of the bills with her fingernails. Pink nail polish. Green paper. Susan and Jim had come to buy a whale skeleton to hang from the ceiling of their great room. A bird in a cage. The money smelled like perfume.

         Susan spoke. “Are you sure this is legal?”

         “For the thousandth ______________.” Jim was facing the road.

         “Indians are up on this stuff, you know.”

         Jim turned to Susan. “It’s perfectly legal.”

         “Watch the road, sweetie.”

         “_________________ grey area, but there’s plenty of room for inter______.”

         “You can’t do it if it’s illegal. I won’t let you. Kenny is too nice, and Lydia too.” Susan had helped Lydia show her baskets at the gallery in Seattle. She hefted the thick stack of bills. “Besides, it’s not even us.”

         “Sure it’s us, honey. It’s us.”

         “What the fuck is us, Jim?”

         Jim said something, but Susan missed it.

         “I’m sorry.”

         She began counting the stiff 100 dollar bills, peeling each back from the gold money clip with her pink fingernail. She had bought the clip for Jim when he made junior partner.

         Susan shifted in her seat. It had been a stupid fight—it always was. She was willing to try talking again. “And Indians have this thing about being generous. You should not exploit that.” She set down the money clip, took up her little earpiece, and tried to put it back behind her ear. She tilted her head and watched herself in the visor mirror. She smoothed her hair over the earpiece. She wore a one-carat diamond solitaire in platinum, and a Rolex, and beneath her pale blue rain slicker she wore a pink cashmere turtleneck from Nordstrom, nothing fancy, but tilting her head she felt aware of the sweater’s incomparable softness. Jim wore his Peterman jacket. Should they have dressed up more to show respect, or dressed down not to show off? She never knew.

         The earpiece slipped off. Susan looked down for it. Stupid thing. Never worked right anyway. She looked at Jim and said, “They’re just poor Indians. You should offer them enough.”

         Jim said, “Let’s see what they want first.”

         “You should offer more than that, though.”

         They came to the street one block off the water. Grey cottages floated in eddies of weeds and blackberry vines. Fishing boats tilted on sawhorses. Jim turned into a bumpy gravel driveway and stopped. He took Susan’s hand in a gesture probably meant to be conciliatory. Susan felt the weight of Jim’s hand, and the heavy grey sky, and the slumping grass and weeds, and she looked down. Her robin’s-egg-blue rain slicker. The cuff of her soft pink sweater. Her pale hands, her pink nails. Forget the fucking earpiece. Jim kissed her. His lips on her cheek phrased “I love you.” She tugged her hand free and signed it back. In college Jim had said she was sexy when she signed. It was crass, but she liked it. Nowadays, I love you was just another figure loosened from her hands, and when Jim took her hands in that strong firm way, she didn’t always tug free.

         Jim said, “We got us a few minutes.”

         “Speak grammatically,” Susan said. She signed it for emphasis. It’s not funny when you do that. To end the conversation, she turned to the visor mirror and smoothed her hair again.

         “Trust me. I’m an attorney. I speak exquisite grammar when it matters.”

         Susan’s hand slid from her hair. Right.

         Jim picked her earpiece off the floor. “Looking for this?”

         “I’m fine.”

         “Just take it.”

         “It doesn’t work anyway.”

         “Since when? We paid 60 K for that.”

         “I don’t know. I just don’t like it. It’s stupid.”

         Jim put it in Susan's hand, closed her fingers, clenched them tight.

         “I’ll get by, silly. I can understand.”

         “Can you understand this?” He turned in his seat and kissed her long and slow and hard. He caressed her cheek, then slid his hands to the back of her neck. She let him take her arms and pull her close. All the while, that little earpiece floated in her fist, so small she couldn’t feel it anymore. Jim unzipped her blue rain slicker. His hand pressed hard through her soft pink sweater.

         “Jim.”

         “Don’t worry, the windshield is tinted.” He pressed harder. He guided Susan’s hand to his crotch. At first she didn’t unclench her fingers.

         Susan had read that whales gritted their teeth to send out their songs. She had seen this demonstrated on an oscilloscope on Jacques Cousteau when she was a kid. She wondered whether she could feel sounds if she were floating deep in the water. Words pressing against her skin.

* * *

         They walked past a trawler named The Linda Lou. Green mildew spread on the hull, and blackberries had found a grip. Leaning against the garage were the pale rib bones of a whale, and hanging from the eaves were the vertebrae, all in a row, strung on a sagging cable. Other bones lay in piles, overtaken by blackberries, their pale color resigned to a yellow grey.

         Susan rubbed a cool raindrop into the pale skin on the back of her hand. Another raindrop plinked in the same spot. She let it slide off. The earpiece in her fist felt cold.

         “Their Jeep’s gone,” Jim said. “And I don’t know whose car that is.”

         “I wish I had some gum. You could at least supply some minty gum.”

         “Looks like Bremerton plates.”

         Two years ago, Jim’s firm had done work for the tribe, something about fishing rights, and that’s what had started it all. Overnight trips from Seattle. Face time on the local news. A potlatch when the case was won. A row of Lydia’s beautiful baskets at their house in Queen Anne. Now Jim occupied an office in the downtown building, and he wore Allen Edmunds shoes like the other guys. He drove a Lexus, and he would take it through the carwash, first thing, when they got back. He bought Susan the Rolex. They sent the girls to Lakeside. He worked longer hours, including Saturdays, and this trip to the ocean was a treat for them. Time together. Walks on the beach. Bed and breakfast. Jime called it "sex and scones." Simple. Simple except the whale.

         Susan’s toe caught on a whale bone. It was more stout than she expected. Bones lay everywhere, strewn about like bottles after a drunken party. Susan took back the comparison because it was in bad taste, but the yard really was trashy, all those bones lying about.

         Jim’s hand took hers. He tried to give her the money clip, but she wouldn’t open her fist.

         “I don’t want that thing.” She pulled her hands up to her chest and turned away.

         “Settle down, honey. Your slicker is getting all squeaky.”

         “No.”

         “I know you. ________________ need a role.”

         “Jim.”

         He tucked the money clip under her arm. “Don’t touch the bones. Don’t. There might be some female taboo. And if they don’t bring up legal, don’t say nothing.”

         “You did it again! Speak grammatically!” Her arms were crossed and she scowled at him. The money clip pressed against her chest.

         “Smile, girl.” He kissed her. She felt his lips phrase, “because you are so pretty in pink.”

         The door opened as she whispered on the skin of his cheek, “I’m not your bitch.” She didn’t mean it. She felt bad about it. She wondered if he understood.

         It smelled like cinnamon inside. Kenny smiled broadly and welcomed them in. He wore a plaid shirt and dark jeans. Susan smelled coffee now, and wood from a fire. She stood tightly against Jim’s side, her cheek resting against his arm, the fingers of her free hand tangled in his, her other arm pinning the money clip to her chest. The dining room table was set with a lace cloth, ironed stiff and smooth. They’ve made fancy for us, she thought. But maybe they do this all the time.

         “It’s lovely,” Susan said. She looked around. “Where’s Lydia?”

         “Grandkids.”

         Jim led Susan by her arm to the living room. On the wall, Susan took in everything meant to be beautiful: photos of children in school, children in pow-wow regalia, in their Sunday best, in Mickey Mouse hats at Disneyland; one photo showed a young man in a Marine Corps uniform, and another showed older men on the open water.

         “_________ Susan,” Kenny said, “__________ always lovely.”

         She smiled. The room was clean and bright. Beyond Kenny’s shoulder, the kitchen was upside down. Stripped to the bare studs.

         Kenny shrugged. “________________________ cabinets at the Home Depot in Port Angeles. But ___________ fishery closed down, we don’t _________.”

         “It’ll open up,” Jim said. “You know, we’re remodeling too. The kitchen, the great room, the foyer.”

         “So I’ve heard.”

         Jim and Kenny shook hands.

         Kenny winked at Susan. “I don’t even know what a foyer is.”

         Susan smiled politely.

         Kenny looked around. “____________________  drink or eat? ______________ _____________________  very often.”

         Susan shook her head. Her earpiece was still in her hand. The money was clamped beneath her arm. She tried lifting the earpiece to her ear, then brought it back down and kept it in her fist. “No, thank you.” She took off her rain slicker, folded it over the money clip, and smoothed her hair.

         “I don’t need anything either, thanks,” Jim said. He was watching Susan. Susan knew that look. Pink cashmere. The sweater hugged her body and gave her a nice shape. She turned her shoulder and looked back at him. A tease.

         “________________________ something,” said Kenny.

         “Maybe a glass of water. My mouth is sticky.” Susan looked at Jim again, but he didn’t react.

         Jim said, “Kenny, you didn’t have to set a table for us.”

         Kenny looked down. He mumbled. It was probably just a family dinner. Susan could tell he was thinking about it. Thinking.

         “But we can’t stay,” she blurted. “Our girls are with the nanny, and we have to get back.”

         She couldn’t tell if Kenny heard. Jim and Kenny drifted into the kitchen, and their faces were laughing. Susan sat on the edge of the sofa. She held her earpiece and her slicker. The money clip made the slicker bulge.

         Kenny brought a glass of water and a package wrapped in white butcher paper from the kitchen. Even across the room, the package smelled like hickory smoke. He gave the water glass to Susan. Susan watched the package wave back and forth in his hand. He rubbed his thumb across his fingers. Money? Kenny handed Susan the package. Cold white paper. Susan set it on her knees, tapped it with her fingertips. Hickory smoke.

         “What is it?” She drank some water.

         “Susan, come on,” said Jim.

         Kenny said, “It’s alright, Susan. Anyway, Jim, with fuel so high, I doubt we’ll go out again even if it does open up. All you Seattle people, you’ll see how is. Thirty dollars per pound, you’ll see how it is.”

         “It’ll open up,” said Jim.

         “Is this salmon?” Susan asked.

         Jim said, “Jesus, Susan.”

         A man came in from the back. He smiled at Jim and Kenny, and at Susan. He was missing some teeth, but his gums were clean and pink. He wore a clean plaid shirt and jeans. He was wiping his hands on a rag, and he tossed the rag into the kitchen. There was a Marines tattoo on his forearm, Semper Fi, The words right there in his skin.

         “This is my son, Bobby. He’s over from Bremerton. His wife, Allison, she’s gone with Grandma. Allison, she’s a looker. Pretty like you, Susan, if I can say that.”

         Susan smiled. She looked down at all the things gathering in her lap.

         Jim moved forward, then back, shaking Bobby’s hand.

         Bobby said, “My dad says you’re buying some whale bones.”

         His tongue pressed against his gums.

         Kenny said something funny and elbowed Bobby. She saw the word pretty and the word Allison.

         “________________________,” said Jim.

         Susan looked at the television. She looked at Bobby tapping his fingers on his clean jeans. She followed Bobby’s eyes to Kenny.

         Kenny said, “He met her at a field hospital in Kuwait and ____________.”

         “Ain’t legal buying whale bones, but you already know that,” said Bobby.

         Jim said, “Neither is killing whales, last time I checked. But don’t worry. There’s legal, and then there’s litigable.”

         “And there’s Indian.”

         Bobby and Jim smiled at each other.

         Kenny said, “_______ Allison like a daughter.”

         Love?

         Bobby continued, “The Chinook fishery’s closed. Lotta Indians looking for work. Some ain’t looking no more.”

         Bobby was here to make it hard. Susan understood that now. Kenny didn’t want to sell, and Bobby would see to it. She knew it. Bobby was his out.

         She must have projected something anxious, because Jim turned. He spread his arm wide. “Come here, honey,” he said.

         “That’s all right.” Susan laid her slicker as a pad under the cold package of salmon. She held her water glass against her sweater. She wanted to meet this Allison and her pretty girls. She wanted to see Lydia. She tucked back her hair. Jim watched her. She liked that. She stood up. Cradling her slicker and the money clip and the salmon and the water glass and the cochlear earpiece, she walked over to him. He put his arm around her. She leaned into his touch. It felt good. A solid kind of loving. The whale deal would fall through, but Jim would still be have her. Jim was watching her, but he turned back to the men. Susan looked away, at the gray sky out the tiny window, and the faces fell silent a long time. Jim’s arm was firm around her.

         Kenny and Bobby stepped into the kitchen. Shadows moving around. She smelled cinnamon. The TV flickered, a face selling pretty jewelry.

         Susan made her click signal and Jim turned. She adjusted her bundle to one arm and quickly signed, “No.”

         He signed back, “Hush.”

         “No!” She felt the word on her fingers. “No!” She straightened her soft pink shoulders. She shook her head. “No.” She smoothed her hair.

         Jim watched her a long moment. She looked at Jim. His arm around her began to rock her slightly, slowly, and she allowed this. She tightened her lips. She did not raise her hand again.

         Kenny came back with a bone, solid as a baseball bat. The three men gathered around it. Susan kept losing their faces. She could not take her eyes off the smooth yellow bone. Jim spoke a few times. Susan felt his ribs resonate with it. Each man reached out and tapped the bone.

         “What is it?” she asked, but she didn’t look for the answer.

         Kenny was handing it to her. She cradled it in her free arm. It was heavy, and her arms were already full, she had to hold the bone close to her chest. She wanted Jim to take it. She looked up. He didn’t seem to notice. It was heavy.

         “You have a price in mind?” asked Jim.

         “I don’t know about that stuff,” said Kenny.

         “_________ ten thousand?”

         Heavy.

         Kenny and Bobby didn’t say anything, but Susan could tell the price floored them. Susan saw their hands shift. Was it too much? If they thought Jim was good for ten grand, maybe they figured he was good for more. Jim already gave a lot of money to their daughters' school on Lake Washington. He did pro bono work for the deaf community and for the gallery. He did less of that now, junior partner Lexus boy, but still... He probably was good for more.

         Jim said, “With the fishery closed, we want to be fair.”

         “And quiet,” said Bobby.

         “Every__________ quiet,” said Kenny.

         “______________ honor the culture.”

          Bobby laughed. “Ten thousand dollars buys a lot of culture. You sure you can fit all this culture in your nice car?”

         “It’s a big car.”

         Susan wanted to say, It’s really heavy.

         “What’re you gonna do with it?”

         “We have this big room. The whale is going to hang from the rafters. We have this artist ready. I mean, Susan says she has this artist. Anyway, the girls are excited to see this.”

         “They pretty as their mom?”

         “Kenny!” Susan. Pink. Heavy.

         “I got two granddaughters. Prettier than anything. I guess I can do ten thousand.”

         “Are you sure?”

         Kenny looked at Bobby. “We could sell the sperm whale for higher.”

         Bobby didn’t say anything.

         “Too big,” said Jim.

         “It’s a small one. A female.”

         “______________” Jim said.

         “We could finish the remodel.” said Kenny. “Fuel the boat. More money would do both.”

         “I don’t know.”

         Kenny looked sad. “Two daughters. Pretty as their mom.”

         “Thank you, Kenny.”

         “We should just give you the bones. Keep it above board.” Kenny’s arms relaxed.

         Bobby tensed up.

         Susan’s shoulders ached, her elbows were tight against her sides. The whale bone was really heavy. The salmon was heavy. The money clip was heavy. The glass of water was tilting. The slicker was slipping loose. She couldn’t feel the little earpiece anymore.

         “We want to pay you. We want what’s right.”

         “I don’t know. Anyone else got a whale? Dale, he’s got one.”

         Jim said, “The thing is, I want one with a good story.”

         Bobby looked down.

         “I can ___________________________. What kind of story do you want to hear?”

         Bobby put his hands in his pockets and stepped back a little.

         Kenny laughted and said, “You lawyers! Your whole job is making up stories. Susan, you like stories?”

         “I don’t read very much, really. It’s kind of hard to explain.” Her load slipped, the water spilled down her sweater, and she reached to grab the salmon. It was too much. Everything was cradled against her belly and sliding down. She wanted to hear the story about the whale bone. All of the story. She shifted the whole load to grab the salmon. She opened her fist. The little earpiece was gone.

         “Oh no.”

         “What?”

         “Nothing. I lost something. Jim. The earpiece.”

         “What!”

         “I don’t know. I dropped it somewhere.” She looked around at her feet.

         “It costs—”

         The salmon and the slicker and the money and glass and the bone felt really heavy. Susan looked up at Jim. Her eyes began to water.

         “You need to find it,” Jim said.

         “I know that, Jim.”

         “Retrace your steps. Go outside. Think. Think hard. Think.”

         “Just stop it.”

         She made one trip up and down the carpet from the front door to the television.

         “Aren’t you going to help me, Jim?”

         Bobby said, “I’ll help you. You guys are busy telling your stupid stories.” He went outside, left the door open behind him.

         Susan was searching Jim’s face when he said, “You’ll find it. Just go.”

         Kenny ran into another room and came back with one of Lydia’s baskets. He put Susan’s things in there and gave it back to her. “Keep it.”

         “Kenny.”

         “Really. You’re like Little Bo Peep.”

         Jim said, “I think it was Little Red Riding Hood who had the basket.”

         “Bobby,” Kenny turned to the open door. “You got kids. Was it Bo Peep or Little Red had the basket?” He looked at Susan. “I don't know. Somebody girl pretty as you had a basket.”

         Jim said, “So what about them bones out there by the trawler? What’s their story?”

         Did he just say them bones?

         “_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________”

         Susan carried her basket out the door  with both hands. She wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t, not until later, when no one could hear the funny moaning sound she had been told she made. She didn’t know about that, but she knew enough to keep her crying a private thing. My heart is broken, she thought, but to think such a thing was to say it. She mouthed the words. She wondered if anyone heard, but she couldn’t tell. She stood on the yard and closed her eyes.

         For twenty minutes she shuffled around the weedy yard in her pink cashmere sweater under the grey sky. No earpiece. She stepped around the whale bones. A story? Sometimes Susan wanted Jim to think exactly the same things as her. She wanted her name to be on his lips, and nothing else, his hands speechless, all tied up with hers.

         Bobby stepped up. Susan looked.

         “You’re from Seattle.”

         “Yes.”

         “City girl.”

         “I suppose.”

         “You can’t hear me.”

         “I can hear you.”

         “No, you can’t. Not really.”

         “That’s not nice. That’s really not nice at all.”

         “I’m sorry. So what do you do with yourself, with a nanny and stuff?”

         “I’m an art dealer.”

         She felt him sizing her up. She bit her lip.

         “No, you aren’t.”

         “What?”

         “Not really. You work part time in a gallery. I reckon you volunteer.”

         She started to cry.

         Bobby watched her cry. She must have been moaning. He frowned. He said, “Follow me.”

         She followed. They went around some outbuildings and came to a heap in the berries. Bobby yanked the berrries aside and uncovered a long string of vertebrae on a rusted cable. He kicked off the mud, leaving a footprint on one blade of the spine. An ancient crack split the vertebra down the middle.

         Bobby looked at Susan so directly she felt an obligation to look back. “Tell you a story. After high school I went straight to Kuwait. Med-Evac chopper. Not much action in ‘91, not compared to now, but there was enough. I seen things. Enough. Met a nice Indian girl in an aid station, anyway. So I come back a family man, and I start trawling because what else... One night on the water, thump, we hit something hard. I’m thinking it’s a log boom. The boat is banged up real bad, and we radio in, but in the morning there she was in the water, a sperm whale banged up bad as us, just floating there in the pitch and roll. The whale was taking long slow breaths. You could tell it’s awake because of the eye. The body listed, and that greasy eye shone above the water… Slow sad blinks. It didn’t move. And neither did we. So what the hell we do? Just leave it to die? Kill it? Some of the guys got down the shotgun, but I took it from them and put it back. I didn’t like to think about that sort of thing. And then the whale was crying. It cried and cried. I knew it was crying. I don’t know how. I guess it was crying, anyway. You can hear whale sounds, and what makes one sound any different? I just knew it was despair. Confusion and despair. But what could I do? Pat it on the back? Nothing. I was on my own journey then, and ever since, and has anyone reached out to me? Do you know what that’s like, city girl?”

         Susan faced down. She brought her eyes up.

         “And then it was gone. Must have perked up or just sunk away. We got the boat fixed, and I was relieved beyond compare. But a couple hours later we saw it again. The same whale. I tell you, in life, you do what you have to. You get by. You feed your family. You know how it is. You got girls at home, right. These are poor times, and the devil comes knocking twice you don’t leave him out in the cold. So there was this whale, and we had to make a calculation. I didn’t want nothing to do with killing no more, but I didn’t want it on no one else’s hands either. That’s what I say.”

         Susan could see his tongue flipping around searching for words.

         “Some stories you don’t tell.”

         Susan looked at the crack in the bones. She looked at Bobby.

         “This story,” he said. “You can hear?”

         Susan shook her head. Her smooth hair slid across her cheek.

         “But you got all of it.”

         She nodded.

         “That is a gift from god. That is a blessing. Your children too?”

         Susan didn’t move. Bobby reached and touched her chin. She nodded.

         “But they can do this thing that you can do.”

         She nodded.

         “It is a blessing.”

         “Can you show me back to my car please?”

         “Sure. You bet.”

         On the way around the house, Susan tripped on another bone.

         Bobby caught her by the arm. His clean hands on her pink sweater.

         Susan felt the words burst from her mouth, “My heart is broken.”

         “What?”

         “That’s all.” She pointed to all the silent things around them. The log trucks climbing the hill, the gulls circling the bay, the cables dangling from the garage. She held her palm to the wind that pushed her hair in her face. She let her hair stick to her wet skin.

         He frowned and shook his head. “I don’t understand you at all.”

         “I don’t understand you either. The point is that you try.”

         “Yes.”

         “Okay. I want you to do something.” She set down the basket and took out the heavy whale bone. She handed it to Bobby. She turned her head, pulled her hair to one side, and pointed to the place behind her ear. “Hit me with the bone, right here.” She took Bobby’s hand and pressed his fingers to her skull. “Feel that? Right there. Smack it hard.”

         “I’m not going to hit you.”

         She was crying. She fought to make a voice. “Listen. There’s ten thousand dollars in the basket. Here’s my watch. Here’s my rain slicker. Oh, and here’s some fucking salmon. So hit me.”

         Bobby worked his lips against the gap in his teeth. He thought for a long time, looked at Susan like he was sizing her up, and said “What about that diamond ring? Like I said, these are poor times.”

         “It doesn’t come off, asshole, and that’s fine because I want to remember that my heart is broken. Now do it, please.” Susan closed her eyes.

* * *

         She met Jim by the car. Her head was bent forward, her smooth hair was in her face, and she was leaning her weight against the door. She looked up. She waved to Kenny, who stood on his steps. Kind of blurry. Bobby had gone out back. She couldn’t see him. Everything was too bright, and she squinted to see anything at all.

         Jim took her hands. “It fell through. One more visit should do it.” Jim looked glad. He kissed her. “Let’s go home.” He hugged her, and she let herself be pulled in tight. He kissed her again.

         “What’s wrong, babe?”

         “Nothing. I don’t know.”

         “Did you find it?”

         “No, Jim. I don’t know. I don’t care.”

         “You sweater’s muddy.”

         “I guess.”

         Bobby came running.

         Jim said, “He found something!”

         Bobby handed a small object to Susan. She closed her fist around it. She knew what it was.

         “Your earpiece.” Jim tried to open her hand.

         “It’s nothing.” She put her hands behind her back.

         “Let me see.” He reached around. His strong hands took it.

         It was the cochlear bone of a whale, yellow and hard, spiraling like a seashell.

         “What the fuck.”

         “It’s mine. Give it back.”

         “This is so bad.”

         “No it isn’t. I’m not bad.”

         “What’s this about?”

         “I want to go home. I really want to go home.”

         “What’s going on?”

         “Maybe there’s a story, Jimmy, a whole whopping story. A real doozie.”

         “Where’s my money?”

         “I’m not telling.”

         Jim opened his mouth to say something, then paused. He handed the cochlea back to Susan and got in the car. “_________ for nothing.”

         Susan got in. She gripped the spiral knot of bone tightly in her pale fist. The car was climbing the turns when she began to feel sick to her stomach. She clenched her hands against her gut. Her soft pink sweater. Somewhere through the long spruce forest, she leaned against the leather seat and closed her eyes. Don’t fall asleep. That’s what they always warned about. Stay the fuck awake. Tell yourself a story. Mouth it on your lips. It was good to have something you could never share. How did that story go? Like this: ___________.