Chapter 1.4

How the boy got into this mess is a very long story, one that I’ve started to hint at, but one that needs background. All of this so far is background, really, on either side of the Event. The Event is the big climax—so big that Mutt himself could never write of it—something like had never happened in my life and a strong sign, I think, that the world has changed. And not changed like seeing light bulbs on a dock for the first time, either, or seeing women become doctors, or seeing Finlanders build houses in the suburbs like everybody else. Changed like light becoming dark is more like it, or water turning to ice. Like an ice age, only inside of folks. I was mostly a cruel s.o.b.—I’ll grant that, and I won’t hide it, but I never destroyed anything I truly loved.

Back when I was shadowing his long-hair cousin, that’s when I first crossed paths with the mutt. That’s not entirely true, because I didn’t die until a year after he was born, and I can say for certain now that I only saw him once back then, setting him and his momma off screaming with my vodka and cigarette cackle. But I never saw him after that, until this hitch, after he come up to the Maki farm to visit that long-hair cousin. He stayed about a week, taking saunas with long-hair, playing cribbage and guitar, splitting firewood. He was swift, a nice ride compared to that stonestill egghead. At night, they would look over maps of the road up to Alaska. And pictures, too, of Tauno back in the war when he worked for the Corps of Engineers building that road with the Canooks. It came clear to me that the Mutt was heading up that way for the summer in the kraut van. I had never left the valley since I died, suppose I sort of embraced the idea of haunting the old tavern, but with my own dead and gone there was less to keep me here. Middle of April we headed west on a wet morning with the creeks about springing their banks.

It’s a wide country once you get beyond the trees and out into Dakota, a long country too, and slightly uphill most of the way. He drove south of the border on the high line, old number two, until we could see the Rockies up ahead on the horizon. I would have sworn it was a storm brewing for the first hour or so, looming larger as we bounced along. But we got close enough, just before he hung a right up into Canada, to see the slaty peaks of the front range, single mountains as big, I reckoned, as all the land I ever had under deed. Heading north we stayed in grassy country for so long I started to wonder if there was ever a tree in the west. We passed two cities full of glass boxes, but mostly it was just wheat rows to the horizon and plump Canadian farmers riding their fancy tractors.

Past Edmonton the dark woods started to close in again. The Mutt had driven hard all this way so far, stopping only to sleep, and he was wearing out at the end of this third day, shaking his head to rattle a few more miles out of his brain. We came over a rise, and the road wound down into a foggy valley, the mist yellow, and he began to look like he was sucking a lemon. There was a small sickly town down on the river surrounding around a giant pulp plant spewing the cloud. They were working three shifts there for sure, all lit up here at night and the stacks spewing forth atop strings of glittery lights. It looked like old Cloquet smelled after it turned from lumber to paper, only bigger. The trucks steamed in like nothing I had imagined, three backed up at the stoplight when we came through. Must have been armies of bastards out in these woods! We met at least another twenty trucks careening and hammering toward us as we passed east and out of the valley. He climbed all the way out of that stink before pulling over to sleep, exhausted.
The next day we passed through even more farms before the land settled back into being the north for good. We might as well have been in the upper Cloquet country with those bogs creeping right up to the highway, spindly awkward spruces throughout, and a forlorn moose every ten miles or so looking at you like you just walked off a spaceship. I think we saw as many moose as other cars from thereon to Anchorage. I suppose I knew the world was big—in a New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong sort of way—but never before understood how big were the empties. They were big enough running alongside that highway, but you could have turned that road at any angle and kept driving through those spruces for days on end. There were mountains on that drive, too, and great rivers, but the spruce empties stick with me most.

That van was no royal coach, I’ll tell you. I was ever thankful to have no sense for leaf springs with all the miles I put in that deathtrap. I suspect he rattled loose most of his good sense in all those wanderings, that explains part of it. Throw in the fact that they grow frost heaves in those parts like were dug by surly bears on overtime, and that highway could be an adventure of its own. But he drove on, seven days in all. Only place he stopped aside from gas and sleep was a hot springs about halfway up, where a moose waded through the steam like some lost hairy dinosaur. He had a long bath there, and I drifted up into the mist and enjoyed the stillness.

Anchorage was gritty, the way a winter city gets when the old snow is splashed over with dirty water from traffic. He kept right on going though, down that Kenai peninsula to a town of Homer at the very end of the road. Can’t go farther than that without something that floats. That was what he looked for: work aboard some boat. He walked the docks the first few days with no success. I suspect they knew he was a finlander and thought he would bring them foul luck or just make them look bad. He kept going back to a group of three little tubs on the far end of the dock that set off all by themselves. They was crazy lookin’ fellers what were baiting up a bunch of tubs full of hooks and line. They had scraggly beards and wore these old-timey shirts without collars and none of them, it seemed, had eyes that looked in the same direction. I saw that they had Russian words scrawled on important things, scribbles that I couldn’t read. The boats weren’t much to look at if they had been heading out on some little lake in Minnesota, let alone the big ocean out yonder. Wood boats, all splintery rails and a plastic bucket for a biffy. All the other boats baiting up along the dock were plastic and new, with computer gizmos running on the dash and a radar whirligig on the roof and antennas sprouting everywhere. These Russkies had a leaner operation, but after enough pestering, they took the mutt in and set him to that bait work, then mostly just sat around and watched him. He sat there all day long the next two days with a big galvanized tub between his legs, putting chunks of herring on circular hooks.

He crewed on the flimsiest tub, with one of the long-beards and a boy couldn’t have been more than twelve. The mutt was green as they come, and got greener every mile as they set out the fishing lines. They weren’t giant killers, I guess. Only hauled in a dozen or so of those big flat fish, halibuts you would call ‘em, but one was about the size of a dining table. I suppose they didn’t count on him being much help, and he wasn’t. He had both hands ahold of something the whole time they were out there, and pretty much turned himself inside-out with heaving. That little boy sure worked though! Scampered around the rails like a cat like he was scared of a beating! They never went too far from shore in that little tub, but far enough to get into a trough, and the horizon passed back and forth through the window while Mutt sat in there sipping on a pop. They unloaded the boat and cut him just over forty bucks for a share, and he had his first hard lesson in working cheap for cheats.

He slept deep after the voyage, lost the look of gills that had creeped into his neck. Whatever ideas he had about being a hero of the seas must have vanished. He took up with some idlers that were camped on that long spit of land with their tents. They were ragtag, like gypsies, huddling in the lee of driftwood logs, eating from communal pots, smoking the green tufts, drinking canned beer, standing in circles kicking around a tiny leather bag. They were waiting for the salmon to run so the canneries would hire them up, and the mutt went in and got himself applied too.

That was how he spent the summer, which did finally come to that spit of land after the damp, grey, winter-spring. The sun stayed later and later until there was nothing but light. But the mutt spent his days deep inside a wide metal cavern. He yanked racks of fish on wheels in and out of freezer rooms—forty below when they cracked them open—and heavy fog clung so low that no one could see. He looked beat at the end of each day, and each day led right into another. Once he really got rolling he was only off from midnight to six in the morning, and if he was lucky he would get a half-hour at lunch and dinner. He was thankful, I suppose, for a floor that didn’t go a-tilt, and the shared misery of his companions. At least he got to move around—some of those drones spent all day in a single spot with their gum boots deep in fish guts. But his movement was tight and regular and forever indoors, and I began to question the sense of following his path.

That drudgery didn’t go on forever, though. Early in September things ground to a halt, and they cut loose those gypsies to scatter in the wind. The mutt slept long nights in that van for a week, and reveled the days away, squandering some of his stake in a rickety bar with a low ceiling along the beach. What that place could have used was a few shacks out back to winter over these gypsies, and harness the steady cash trickle of their idling.

When the sun started getting back to the kind of schedule that regular folks keep, he pointed that van south, which in that country meant pointing it north and east for a few days first. And he wasn’t alone. He packed three gypsies in there with him, and I noted every day my pleasure at having left my sense of smell behind. Up front with Mutt was one I called the chocolate snowman, a rotund jolly colored with thick ropes of hair coming out of his head. He played guitar almost all the time, seemed to carry on his conversations that way. In back was the Librarian, a tall girl who never said much behind her little round glasses. Sprawled across some baggage was blonde tonto, a long-hair always decked out in injun finery. He tanned up so quick after getting out of that cannery that I thought he had the jaundice.

That van was no rocket sled with just the mutt and my weightless ether. But with this load—cases of beer in the back, spare parts under the seat, packs and bikes strapped on the roof, a gypsy but denting every seat—we could have made better time in a canoe with a decent tailwind. We were passed by big trucks, buses, and motorhomes, and once, on a long uphill stretch, by two lean fellers on bicycles. The gypsies drove straight through until the Canadian border, where the van was thoroughly searched for half a day. I noticed that the mutt stuffed a big sack of that green smoke down his pants before they got there, and the snowman did the same.

The road was a real piece of work on the Canadian side, stop-still right angles in the middle of nowhere, as if somebody had kicked that road and bent it. The path followed every nick and dent on the ground. It was as if the Canooks were suggesting that you might as well stay home, trying to slow the invasion. The mutt stopped twice, after bottoming out in a pothole, to check the damage, and he barely kept things together with duct tape and baling wire. It held, though, through ingenuity less than luck. What he didn’t count on was a blown head gasket. That bitty engine lost its thrust as we snaked along a gravelly river, and the mutt brought progress to a dusty halt. He biked forty miles up ahead to a wayside called Destruction Bay and found a garage to tow the van. The gypsies and their unseen pet spirit kicked around in that windswept high country for three days, waiting for a head gasket to show up from Calgary.

I recalled how Tauno’s role in building this stretch, and suppose I blamed him for the way things was laid out. Not that he was an engineer or any such thing—he’d have been lucky if they let him drive a cat on that crew. But it just peeved me to think of one of mine being involved in something this big and not be able to get it right, or at least pilfer enough off the big shots to set up a fishing lodge up here or hire some locals to haul rocks. Them gypsies seemed pretty laid back about the troubles, though, taking every day as it came, kicking around their leather sack. They seemed impressed with the picture of Tauno that the Mutt kept clipped to the visor above the windshield, a spindly sad man holding a survey stick. That’s my Tauno: somebody else’s prop.

Once they got rolling again they rolled ahead slowly and certainly. The highway was smooth on either side of Whitehorse, which I suppose you would call a city. But soon enough the Mutt took a right turn on an unpaved road. That gravel led due south for three days through dark green forest, climbing up and over high ridges. They camped twice beside swift streams, red salmon skitting out over the gravel bars. On the last day, they climbed up into some moist country, and we saw the first real snow of the fall. The Mutt clutched that wheel and clung to the roadside with the wipers flashing. Almost hit three wild sheep that wandered in the snow, and he had a loose spinout to tame after he dodged ‘em. Coming down into the next valley it looked like the end of the world. The clearcuts ran as far as the eye could see, and that was no mean distance. There were whole shorn mountainsides that looked to be five miles away. Those gypsies pulled off the road and kicked around and looked like they’d been punched in the gut. They must have forgot it was the world of men they were traveling through.