Cold Storage, Alaska

221 Pages·2014·1.08 MB·English

by  Straley John

Also by the Author
The Woman Who Married a Bear
The Curious Eat Themselves
The Big Both Ways

Copyright © 2014 by John Straley All rights reserved.
First published in the United States in 2014
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Straley, John, 1953-
Cold storage, Alaska / John Straley.
p cm ISBN 978-1-61695-306-5
eISBN 978-1-61695307-2
1. Ex-convicts—Fiction. 2. Small cities—Alaska—Fiction.
3. Alaska—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.T687C65 2014
813’.54—dc23
2013019796
Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.
v3.1
For Sophie Rosen
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Author’s Note
CHAPTER ONE
A the tea kettle on just moments ago. Now it was whistling,
NNABELLE HAD PUT
yet she didn’t get up to attend to it. Recently the past had become a
hallucination constantly intruding into the present moment, so she
wasn’t certain what really needed doing.
She had been thinking about Franklin Roosevelt: the grinning man
with the cigarette holder who was never photographed in his frailty. But
now it was early spring in the last year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, and
all the news was about the president’s failings. Flawed men kept ruling
the world, and the radio in the corner with the long antennae squealed
on and on about it. Not that the news mattered much to Annabelle now.
It was raining hard, and all of the events of her life—past, present, and
possibly future—were taking on the quality of a slightly malevolent
screwball comedy.
She sat in her chair looking out the window. She had been distracted
by so many things lately: presidents, family members, and lost animals
all swirling around her. The glass on the door rattled, and she looked up
expecting to see her uncle, Slippery Wilson, walk in slapping his wet
leather gloves against his pants, even though Slippery Wilson had been
dead for more than three decades. She found herself listening for crying
from the crib, even though both her boys were grown men. The younger
one, Miles, was down at the senior center cooking dinner, and Clive was
getting out of prison.
“Never matter,” Annabelle said aloud to herself. She got up and turned
off the radio in the corner.
Throughout the afternoon, she had been trying to remember the joke
she had heard the day before. It was good, she remembered, and she
thought that it would have been good to tell Miles. But the joke eluded
her in its detail.
Out her window, the hillside fell away to the inlet. Alder trees grew
quickly on the disturbed ground where the boys had built her house. A
gust of wind came, and she thought she saw some darting color. A flash
of yellow, she couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like a match head
exploding. Yellow with red sparks flaring in the trees. She slid her
glasses up her nose and was almost certain that she saw the bird
fluttering up and away.
“Buddy?” she said aloud, as the kettle boiled over and doused the
flame.
O day in April 2000, Clive McCahon, Annabelle’s oldest son,
N THAT SAME
was released from prison. He was thinking about his plan to get home.
He had hated living in Alaska as a kid. His father had assumed he
would become a fisherman. His mother had assumed that no matter how
he made his living, it would be made right there in Cold Storage. Only
his grandma Ellie had told him not to listen and to dream his own
dreams. Having grown up on an island on the North Pacific, Clive had
longed for the great American highway. He dreamed of cars and deserts
and long, straight roads. Ellie had always given him books about cars for
every birthday and Christmas. Cars and guitars, he dreamed of, bands he
heard on the radio and beautiful girls who didn’t know everything about
him. Ellie had understood his itch to move on. Only she seemed to
understand that living in Cold Storage, Alaska, was like being born into
a small maze where everyone constantly bumped into one another. As
soon as his father died in the Thanksgiving Day storm, Clive had left. He
had flown north to Haines, bought a car without ever owning a license,
without ever learning to drive, and took off. He was fifteen. Ellie’s ashes
had been scattered at sea and his father’s body had never been found, so
he didn’t consider that he had anything holding him to his cloistered
island town.
Clive was thirty-five now. It was early April, and the clouds were
clearing away after a morning rain. The air was so clean it almost
burned his lungs. Clive had served seven out of his ten-year sentence in
McNeil Island Penitentiary, and he was wearing his old court clothes: a
dark blue suit his mother had bought him on one of his few visits home
as an adult, now far too tight in his shoulders and upper arms. Feeling
the sun cut through the trees, he set his cardboard box on the ground,
slipped off the coat, folded it neatly, and placed it on top of the box. He
had called ahead to order a cab.
There were only a few people getting off the prison boat, mostly staff
members carrying lunch boxes and rain gear. There was one other
inmate, a skinny white kid with red hair who walked down the dock to
meet an old man waiting beside a sputtering Ford LTD. The convict
approached, the man opened the passenger side door, and a woman in a
blue house dress got out and threw her arms around the boy before he
could put down his gear. She cried and snuffled into his neck, while the
old man rubbed the back of his shoulders.
Clive shifted from one foot to another, waiting for his ride. A yellow
minivan finally rolled up.
“You Stilton Cheesewright?”
Clive was still watching the kid being greeted by the old couple. He
wondered if he had seen the kid inside but didn’t recognize him. He
hadn’t recognized the false name the cabbie was saying, either.
“You’re Stilton Cheesewright, yeah?” the driver said again. He reached
behind and opened the back door of the van.
“Absolutely.” Clive didn’t know why he’d given the cab company a
false name; it was simply the first name that popped into his head and
had nothing at all to do with the plan. He set his box of personal effects
in the back seat, slammed the door, and walked around to sit in the front
passenger seat.
“You want to go to a grocery store?” He squinted at his run sheet.
“That’s right,” Clive said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
“No problem, Mr. Cheesewright. Would you like me to wait while you
shop?”
“Naw … just drop me. I might be a while,” Clive said, but then added,
“You know a place with really fresh lettuce?”
The driver smiled. “I think if you want the really fresh stuff you
should go over to the Farmfresh store down Sixth. It’s good, you know.
They really do buy it from the farmers and everything. It’s a couple of
miles out of town, but it’s worth it.”
“Perfect,” said Clive. The driver punched the meter and wheeled to his
left, down the road away from the prison.
Clive watched the fence posts stutter by. He watched the sunlight filter
through the evergreen trees, and he watched a cow eating in a green
field, a rusty bell hung from her neck. She lifted her head as the cab
sped past, and Clive could imagine the soft clonking of her bell. Clive
asked to stop for a moment; the driver put on the turn signal and eased
the van to the gravelly edge of the road. Clive thanked him, leaned back
in the cab’s mildewed seat, and smiled. He sat that way for a few
moments, smiling and listening for the cow’s bell.
“You do a long stretch?” the driver asked.
Clive nodded, his eyes closed. “Yes,” he said. “It’s time to go home, I
guess.”
“You want me to get going?” the driver asked.
Clive nodded again, his eyes still closed.
“Let’s go get you some lettuce then,” the driver said, and pulled the
blinker all the way down, rolling the cab back onto the road.
C happy and nervous. He had looked forward to this day with
LIVE WAS BOTH
an urgency that few people who haven’t been in prison could know. But
just as it was happening he felt a kind of raw anxiety. He could not go
back to crime, and although he had scrubbed his mind clean, he knew
that in this world of free men he understood little else besides crime.
Crime was now, in his new state of mind, too chaotic, too unpredictable.
Clive wanted to be rooted to something as certain as the rising of the
sun.
McNeil was an old federal prison that had been remodeled as a
medium security jail when it was turned over to the state of Washington.
The Birdman of Alcatraz had actually done most of his time at McNeil.
The main building had the original feel of the place: thick iron doors,
WPA-style murals on the walls of the mess hall. It could have been a
large public library in some small Midwestern town if it weren’t for all
the sex offenders.
In jail, Clive had been known as the “Milkman,” for that’s what the
newspapers had dubbed him. He had been a semi-famous drug dealer
when he had been caught—famous for his method of delivering his
drugs and famous for never snitching on his customers or his partners.
He had seen arterial blood spurting and painting the shower floor red.
He had seen the black holes that handmade knives leave in young white