Two days short of a month after taking up residence aboard the ship, Wilander descended into the hold, clambered down the ladder, and set out under an overcast sky for Kaliaska, where he intended to make a few minor purchases and hoped to spend the evening, and perhaps the following morning, with Arlene Dauphinée. Their friendship, after numerous long walks and hours of energetic conversation, had reached that awkward stage at which it would necessarily evolve into something more intimate or else plane back into the casual, and he was not confident that things would proceed as he desired, nor was he confident that what he desired was the best possible outcome—he had been without a woman for years, wandering from mission to alley to sewer grating, a world wherein the only women available were filthy, deranged, dangerous, like the young girl he’d befriended in Seattle, saved from the threat of rape and fed and otherwise helped, never once touching her, and then she had stabbed him as he slept because, she later told the police, his eyes had begun to glow, shining so brightly, redly, hotly from beneath his closed lids, they had irradiated the refrigerator carton in which they sheltered and set it afire—and he didn’t know if he was prepared for the demands and stresses of an adult relationship; he valued the peace he had found aboard Viator, the lazy mornings, reading on deck under the linden boughs, writing in his journal about the ship, its curious crew, the woods, the sounds and sights of natural life surrounding him. And yet Arlene was unique. That was the only word for her; beautiful was insufficient a term, perhaps not an entirely applicable one, for her outer beauty had been worn down to the dimensions of middle age, her face whittled by years and eroded by the heart’s weather, so that on occasion he thought of her as a figurehead supporting the bowsprit of a three-master, voluptuous and calm of feature, her core strength undamaged, but her paint faded, wood cracked by seas and storms. Even this minor stress, that created by the dissonance between his desire and his sense of security, was hard for him to bear, and he considered staying home that night, going into Kaliaska the next morning to offer her excuses, apologies, because he believed he needed a fresh start with her, another week or two to pull himself together, and then he would be ready; yet as he walked along the starboard side of Viator that day, passing beneath the linden, idly patting the trunk, he began to feel less anxious, less out of sorts, and though he did not reach a conscious decision, he soon left behind all thought of returning to his cabin.
The forest in close proximity to Viator was improbably lush, a micro-environment that would have been more appropriate to the Pacific Northwest. The black soil was carpeted with ivy, ground apple, and salvia; sword ferns sprayed upward from banks and hollows; mushrooms sprouted in gullies and beneath fallen trees; fungi and moss furred trunks and rotting logs; and, about thirty yards from the ship, a massive uprooted stump lying on its side, twelve feet in diameter, was so artfully decorated with lime green moss, it looked to have undergone an alchemical transformation—the dark circular underside of the thing, ragged with root fragments, some forming a witchy halo, had come to resemble those intricate reliefs depicting the Great Wheel of Life that embellish the walls of Hindu temples, only this particular great wheel was not painted in many hues, but done solely in green and black, and rather than illustrating the passage of a soul along the path of dharma, it presented a demonic version of that passage, a different course altogether, a far bleaker course complete with gnarled homunculi who appeared to have been banished, evicted, or otherwise brought forth from the emptiness at their midst, and whenever Wilander contemplated it—you couldn’t just glance at the stump; it drew the eye in; it sent your eye traveling over the circuit of incarnations suggested by the twisted postures of the little root men and the ornate symbology written by flourishes of moss—he half expected to look up and discover that he had been transported to one of the stations of the wheel, a land ruled by an opal moon floating in a maroon sky where black dragons wheeled above spindly onyx towers. The nearer he came to Kaliaska, the less dense and diverse the vegetation; the ground cover melted away. After a mile and a half, the forest gave out altogether and from atop a brush-covered rise he could see the town strewn across an acreage of gravelly dirt the color of weak coffee: close by the shore, a handful of two-story buildings plated in beige-and-brown aluminum siding, one of which contained the trading post and Arlene’s living quarters, another enclosing a beauty salon/barber shop, and a number of cubicle-sized rooms that were sometimes occupied by men from the freighters and fishing boats that stopped for supplies or were driven to anchor in the bay during storms; a swaybacked wooden dock to which a tug was moored; a gray beach with gray water lapping at it and a rubble of dark rocks jutting up from its southernmost reach; and, farther inland, more than a hundred small houses, many of the prefabricated variety, idiosyncratic in structure, but most of them white, with smoking chimneys, their unfenced yards littered by derelict cars, abandoned construction equipment, upside-down sleds and boats, doghouses, snowmobiles, ATVs. A couple of dogs were nosing along a deserted street near the shore, sniffing at debris. Parked behind the trading post were two state-owned yellow Caterpillar vehicles used for earthmoving and snow removal, and in each of their cabs, unidentifiable behind windows so smeared as to be opaque, someone was sleeping.
Before Wilander arrived in Alaska he had imagined that Alaskan trading posts were uniformly rustic, dimly lit places with log walls, venerable wood-stoves, animal heads and antlers mounted everywhere, disorderly shelves stocked with soup, beans, rice, candy bars, fifty-year-old copies of National Geographic containing articles on the area, exotic locally prepared foodstuffs sold in mason jars, gutting knives, French soap, Russian pornography, bullets, whale jerky, slingshots made from fir and reindeer hide, whiskey, mukluks, sacks of flour, fish hooks, hard candy, fossil fragments, rope, fix-it-yourself manuals, work clothes, a few pretty dresses, canned moose meat, snow-shoes, long underwear, ballpoint pens, native handicrafts of a surpassingly indifferent quality (carved ivory, paintings on bark, handmade dolls), an accordion, a guitar or two, dog muzzles, spark plugs, cooking oil, bongs, feminine hygiene products, grease traps, framed photographs of sunsets, paperback novels, animal snares…but though Arlene’s TP (so read the sign above the door) stocked all the aforementioned items and more, there was no hint of disorder, everything shelved neatly and laid out in display cases, and the atmosphere was of a stripped-down functionality, not rustic charm, the fluorescent lights blazing, walls of unpainted planking, dustless floors, and instead of the colorful types Wilander had pictured sitting around the stove in his imaginary trading post, the only person present that afternoon was a long-haired Inupiat kid named Terry Alpin who helped Arlene out in the evenings and was standing by a bin of CDs, picking over the heavy metal section. Wilander asked him if that was his kind of music and, after a pause, the precise measure of which, Wilander had learned, was designed to convey contempt for white non-Alaskans moderated by a degree of respect due a friend of Arlene’s, Terry said, No, man. It’s for the seals. And when Wilander expressed bewilderment at this response, Terry said, The pups, man. Baby harp seals. They love the shit. You go down to the beach, hide out in the rocks with your Walkman. You slap on some Slayer, kick up the volume. Pretty soon the pups, they hear it, they come over to the rocks. You jump up and bash their heads in and get the skins. It’s a lot easier than chasing ’em.