Someone—the malodorous Bert, if Cat and Roogie were to be believed—began gunning the engine, racing it. The women glared at each other, and Wilander, hoping to steer the conversation back on track, said, I’ve been thinking my problem, the mood swings, they might have to do with me living on Viator.
—Bitch! Cat said to Roogie. What do you care what he does to me? He could knock my eye out and leave me crawling in the mud, that’d be all right ’long as he drives you over to Anchorage once a month.
—I should smack you for saying that! Hands on hips, Roogie faced down her daughter.
—Go ahead! Wouldn’t be the first time!
—All I done for you, how can you accuse me of not caring?
—It seems I’ve always had them, Wilander said. But since I came here, it’s like moods that used to last for months come and go in a matter of hours.
Scowling, Roogie swiveled her head toward him. What the hell are you talking about?
Cat said, You done so much for me, how come I’m still living in this shithole?
Wilander decided to try another tack. Either of you ever hear any rumors floating around about Viator. Anything strange.
—I hear there’s a buncha queers living out there now, said Cat.
—I don’t know where you get your mouth, Roogie said to her. You didn’t get that mouth from me.
—Naw, I musta got it from my real mother!
The engine shut down and, as though its operation had been tied in with the functioning of the weather, the wind died. In the quiet, Wilander heard waves slapping against the dock. There aren’t any scary stories about the ship? he asked. Ghost stories…anything like that.
Cat scoffed at this. You seen a ghost, didja?
Wilander said that he had not.
—Then why you going on about ’em for?
Roogie put a hand on Wilander’s shoulder, her expression a parody of sympathetic concern. Whatever your problem is, Tom, there’s an easy solution. All you gotta do is do right by Arlene, and everything’ll fall into place.
—How am I not doing right by her?
—Arlene’s a good woman. You need to get off the fence and commit to her. You take care of her, she’ll take care of you.
—A good woman don’t charge six dollars for a pack of smokes, said Cat.
—That’s the tax! She can’t help that!
—Did Arlene tell you that? asked Wilander. She’s looking for me to commit?
—She don’t know her ass! Cat said. She makes up shit all the time!
Roogie folded her arms, affecting injured dignity. Matter of fact, I did talk to her. Even if I didn’t, it’s plain how she feels.
Cat took a long swig of whiskey, too long, apparently, for Roogie’s tastes—she snatched the bottle back and lifted it from the paper sack to check how much was left.
—That guy who came off Viator after it crashed, Cat said, he acted like he’d seen a ghost. Walked around staring at shit and giving a jump whenever you come up on him. He was here for a day about…then they came got him.
—Like you remember! You were twelve years old! Roogie said.
—I remember better’n you! Cat turned to Wilander. She was drinking so much back then, she didn’t know about the crash ’til a week after it happened.
—What guy? Wilander was startled not just by her statement, but by a recognition that, until now, he had only considered in passing what must have transpired with the crew.
—The captain. Roogie re-sheathed the bottle in the sack and had a delicate sip, as if she intended to ration the whiskey from that point on. I heard it was the captain.
—How about the rest of the crew? What happened to them?
—He’s the only one I know about, Cat said, and Roogie chimed in, Mark Matchett, that’s the doctor we had back then, he told me the guy was telling some kinda wild story about how come he ran the ship aground, but wouldn’t nobody believe him.
—Mark Matchett’d tell you anything to make your eyes get big, Cat said. So when he slipped his hand in your pants, you’d think it was all part of a story.
—I taken all your mouth I’m gonna take! You don’t know nothing about me and Mark!
—I know he’d give you a wink and you’d drop to your knees! I musta walked in on the two of you a dozen times.
—Goddamn you!
—Him with his back turned, fixing his zipper, and you wiping your mouth off. Didn’t take a genius to figure out what you was up to.
Roogie made to punch her daughter, and Wilander, trying to stop her, catching at her arm, sent her off-balance; she slipped and sat down hard, fell onto her back, somehow managing not to spill the whiskey, and, after giving him a look that went through quick stages of bewilderment, hurt, and rage, finally settling on despair, she began to sob. He bent to help her stand, but Cat pushed him away and shouted, Keep your fucking hands off my mama!
Wilander attempted to explain what had happened, but she screamed at him and Roogie’s sobs escalated into a wail, as if she were encouraged by Cat’s solicitude.
—See what you done! Cat shoved him hard in the chest and he reeled backward a few steps. You keep the fuck away!
Tears leaking from her eyes, she kneeled to console her mother, putting an arm about her, joining her in a community of grief that was founded—Wilander knew—upon no specific ill, but was informed by the sense of impermanence that tars the human spirit, the stuff that glues it to the flesh, a sticky emotional ground where drunks and addicts and other fools are prone to wander, mistaking it for evidence of a grand significance in their lives simply because it’s something they can feel through their self-imposed numbness. She took Roogie in her arms, rocked her. I’ll kill you, she said in a shaky half-whisper, as if the words were an endearment. Touch her again, and I’ll kill you.
The wallpaper in Arlene’s bedroom, a gold foil-like material with black bars of sheet music printed across it, clashed with everything else in the room, but so did each object in the room clash one with the others, and thus from a jumble of color and shape and function was yielded if not a harmony, then a discordant uniformity: a brass bed piled high with pillows and a wine-colored satin spread; a teak armoire hulking up at the foot of the bed, like a beast gloomily observing the activity thereon; curtains of Belgian lace that, when blown inward, reminded Wilander of filmy sea creatures gathering food from a current; a leatherette recliner nearly buried beneath laundry; candlesticks of brass and silver and crystal and pewter, oddly paired, no two alike; glass jars filled with agate pebbles; a dressing table of age-darkened cherrywood covered—as was every surface—with a dozen varieties of clutter, its mirror wreathed by a string of Christmas tree lights; the sixty-inch television set, a different sort of beast, sleek and blandly modern; clothes and books and shoes and change and magazines and toiletries scattered across the floor (Arlene had foresworn the art of housekeeping); and, on the bedside table, a lamp with a lacquered green shade whose dim emerald glow lent a transitory unity to these disparate objects, hollowing the night shadows into the semblance of a mystic cave, an underwater place where might dwell a sorceress who had removed herself from the world in order to master some contemplative discipline. You could not simply enter the room, you were absorbed by it, becoming an element of its dissonance, and Wilander had occasion to think that the decor might not be, as it appeared, haphazard, but rather was so designed to accommodate the haphazard collection of men who had slept there.
That evening, the town still awake, music from the Kali Bar (so named not due to any devotion rendered unto the Hindu deity, but because the owner and a hired sign painter had squabbled mid-job, a slight disagreement escalating into a feud as yet unresolved) squealing in the distance, he sat in bed and tried to sound out the melody of the wallpaper, whistling it under his breath—it was as chaotic as the room itself, a tune such as a child might produce while banging on opposite ends of a keyboard. Arlene, lying beside him, asked, What are you doing?, and, when he explained, she said forlornly, as if the oversight were a sorry judgment on her, It’s never occurred to me to do that.