The House of Frozen Dreams

A.R. told her to forget it. “One winter,” he’d said, “will send you back to Kansas kissing the dry cracked dirt, calling it the floor of heaven. Even with this Depression and all.”

No, Alaska was strictly Lettie’s idea.

The man who’d bought the farm from them for practically nothing was the one who told them about homesteading up north. Lettie thought it his way of trying to redeem himself for taking their land and knowing there wasn’t a mud puddle in the United States they could buy with what he’d given them for it. He’d said, “In Herring Town you can get land for free. Just like in the West way back when, but there aren’t no Indians in Alaska—well, not the fighting kind.”

He’d handed her the photograph. “You just stake out the prettiest piece of property you ever seen in your lifetime,” he’d said. “Trees and meadows, lakes and mountains and the sea, too. And the moose and the berry plants, the fish and clams, the coal just waiting for you to pick it off the beach. None of them’s gotten word there’s a Depression going on.”

A.R. kept moping around after they’d sold the farm and most of their things and moved to town, into the apartment with her Uncle Fred. A.R. moped like a man whose dream had fallen down and died. But the farm wasn’t his dream, after all, she said carefully one morning, while he still lay in bed, smoking one cigarette after the other. “It was your daddy’s dream.” In a rare moment of intensity between them, she grabbed his arm, tight; her fingernails made grooves into his flesh.

“I think,” she said, her eyes filling with tears, “I think you gotta have your own dreams.” He looked at her, blank, apparently as puzzled by her tears as she was. She stood. Staring into the corner of the tiny, crowded bedroom, she tried to explain if only to herself. “It must be like what they say about religion. You can’t inherit your religion. I imagine the same’s true for your dreams.”

A.R. was a man resigned. Had he known, Lettie thought, he’d have been a man torn by jealousy. Because that place—that place she’d only heard about, only seen in a single photograph—had taken her over so completely she thought of little else. One night she woke from a dream that should have been a nightmare. But strangely, it wasn’t. Instead of feeling frightened, she felt a freedom that did frighten her more than a nightmare ever had. In the dream, A.R. passed on. Lettie cried. But she left the funeral before it was over, threw her bags in a car of a northbound train and jumped aboard with ease. Free.

The next morning she ripped up the photograph. The pieces scattered from her hand like snow. “Enough,” she said aloud. She hummed familiar tunes and tried to enjoy the sun on her arms while she hung laundry on the line, as she had before this whole nonsense got started.

But the nonsense refused to let go of her. In a pitiful desperation she pleaded with A.R., afraid of that dream of his death and afraid of her own … was it passion?

When he finally said yes, he didn’t let go gradually, he just let go. “Well, okay. We’ll go to Alaska.” And she did what anyone who’d grown accustomed to pulling with all her might would do. She fell flat on her keister.

“Well, what on—?” he said, reaching a hand over to help her up.

She couldn’t answer. Laughing, crying, laughing.

“Where did you come from, woman?” he asked, dusting her off. “And what on earth did you do with my Lettie?”

When she found her voice she said, “Thank you thank you thank you!” while she kissed him all over his face, feeling a tenderness toward him she hadn’t felt for a long time.

So many times over the next year anyone else might have shaken a fist at her, damned her for getting them there in the first place. But A.R. never did. Not even one I told you so.

There was the treacherous boat trip once they ventured outside the Inside Passage, where she clung to both the fear that they might die and the fear that they might not die, that death might not come and save them from the slamming, slamming, slamming of the sea.

But they survived somehow, and they arrived somewhere. It was called Herring Town. They trudged through icy waves, carrying their bags over their heads while waves leapt at them like children begging for a present. There were people on the shore, too. A man, a woman and—she counted them—ten children. Ten! The Newberrys. All of them round-faced and round-eyed, but their bodies were lean and muscled. All except for the baby, who was delightfully fat, and the toddler, who, later when the sun broke through and slapped color all over the place, ran along the beach wearing nothing but a dirty orange life preserver and a cow bell, his legs chubby and creased, his feet padding on the wet sand.

Frank Newberry had gotten word from the Rosses in Anchor Point, who’d gotten word from Uncle Fred’s next-door neighbor’s cousin, Beck Patten, that Lettie and A.R. were due to come in to Herring Town on the Salty Sally. For three days, the Newberrys watched down the inlet for the promise of Lettie and A.R.

Margaret Newberry clung to Lettie as if she were a long-lost sister. She stroked Lettie’s hair, most of it fallen loose from the bun she’d pinned it up in days before. A lifetime before. Lettie held her breath while Margaret stared into her face, inches away. Lettie knew she reeked of vomit and worse, but Margaret didn’t seem to mind.

Margaret reassured her, reassured her again. There would someday be a train connecting them to Anchorage, and a school. More talk of a store. A post office. And soon, a church.

What Margaret didn’t seem to know was Lettie didn’t need reassuring. A church? Why anyone wanted to worship God in a dark log hovel when a mere glimpse of the water, which went from green to red to pink to blue, depending on what the sun and moon were up to—not as it had been earlier with the torment of waves, but now white with the sun’s reflections, a thousand spots of light leaping and dancing—seemed a declaration to her, Let there be Light!

If she could, Lettie would have stripped off her vomit-crusted clothes, pitched them into the fire and worn nothing but a cowbell while she splashed in the icy waves.

Later, while the young women of Herring Town plotted their civilities, crowded around the Sears Catalog, and tended to their children, the men helped Lettie and A.R. stake out their land. She giggled at the kissing puffins with their strange hooked orange beaks and matching feet, cried when she first heard the lonely cry of a loon. Her heart jumped with the salmon in the river; when she saw their silver streaks through the clear water, she saw for the first time the invisible currents of her own life.

One night she pulled A.R. close to her, unlatched his trousers, snugged them down before he’d even stopped snoring. She was not that type of woman, really. She had always been a lady, though a rather plain one. But Alaska was no place for a lady; the men in Kansas said that to A.R. Even the men on the boat said it. She kissed A.R. on the mouth and he stopped snoring with a snort. And then he said her name—as he’d been saying it for the past few months—with a question mark. “Lettie? Lettie?” but then “Lettie …”

She wanted to give him some of this … what was it? Abundance. It spilled up and out and over her. Let him see it, experience it.

“Now … now … now,” she said, arching her back, thinking that if A.R. went deep enough he might touch this something inside her, take part of it for himself.

The scent of the land got inside her too. A damp, sprucey, smoky, salty scent that she fancied. She smelled it in her own hair, in her clothes and on the tips of her fingers.

She worked harder than she’d ever worked on the farm, right alongside A.R. and the other men. There was a difference between Lettie and the other women—they all soon recognized this. Instead of dissention and jealousy, the difference bore a mutual respect. Lettie had no children. And Lettie did not come to Alaska as a generous submission to her husband’s quest. Alaska was Lettie’s quest.

Quest. Was that the right word? Yes, she decided. Quest and question, too. Alaska was her question. The one she’d had to ask. She’d been a woman who had asked few questions. Her life had been a series of neatly laid out stepping stones, provided for her convenience. She had taken them one at a time, never skipping one or turning over another, never prying one loose to see what might lie underneath. She’d never gotten her feet muddy, so to speak. And then the next expected step was gone; simply not there. She and A.R. had not conceived. There were no children. She hadn’t questioned that, really, either. Tried not to think about it, mostly. Just stayed perched on and busy with the farm and A.R.

Until the photograph.

“Mom? Are you awake?” Snag again. Snag, always trying to reel her back in to the hospital when Lettie just wanted to stay on the land.

Oh, the land. The dream she and A.R. once had to hand it down to their children and grandchildren. She must talk to Kache, tell him what she’d done, get him to go out and see if Nadia was still there. For all she knew, the poor girl was gone now, or worse, dead. As dead and gone as A.R. himself.

Except there he’d been, as close as her own hand, there in her remembering.

SIXTEEN

As he drove, Kache tried to get a grip. He hadn’t slept at all. Forget dandelion root tea, he needed an Americano with an extra shot. He needed answers. He needed some kind of plan. A plan would be good.

The weather could go one of many ways—big gray clouds hung around the mountain peaks, trying to decide if they wanted to get ugly, but the sun was up and shining as if to say, Hey, calm down, I’ve got this one.

Kache didn’t want to turn Nadia in. So she’d been squatting on their property for the last ten years. She’d also saved it from going to ruin. But that meant it had stood empty for the decade prior to her arrival. Ten winters with no one running water in the pipes or knocking the snow off the roof or keeping the shrews and voles and mice from taking over. No way. So she was lying or Snag was lying or another strange person had holed up in the house too and might still be around, which circled back to Nadia lying.

Still, he wouldn’t turn her in. He’d just ask her to find a different place. He’d help her find something suitable. If she really didn’t want to go back to her village, there were people in town who’d probably trade childcare or property maintenance for a room. Then, before he went back to Austin, he’d work on the homestead—she had kept up on it the best she could but he knew it must still need some maintenance—and get it ready to rent out to a cattle rancher or someone who needed a large chunk of the land. He and Snag could deal with it together. It would feel right for them to finally step up, keep a few meaningful things, sell the rest. It would be good. Like the therapist Janie had dragged him to that one time had said, “There’s healing in turning homeward, a wholeness that results from facing your history, an ability to move forward.” Kache hadn’t wanted to hear it and called it a bunch of poetic psychobabble. But, hell, maybe there was something to it.

He pulled up to a drive-thru orange and blue coffee truck called The Caboose Cuppabrews. The brittle air blasted through his open window while a dark-haired boy of about eleven took his order.

“Aren’t you a little young to be a coffee barristo?”

The boy shrugged. “A bar—what?”

A woman laughed from somewhere behind the boy. “We start them working young up here, sir. He’s my son, so we skirt around those pesky labor laws.”

“Marion?”

“Yes?” She bent down and he took in her face. She had the same dark eyes and high cheekbones, and still wore her hair parted in the middle and straight. She had hardly changed. “Kache! No way!” She leaned out farther, spilling the coffee on her wrist. “Ouch! Shit. Sorry. Wait, don’t move.” And she disappeared back through the window, leaving the boy to sponge up the coffee, shaking his head with a small, somewhat parental smile.

Marion had pulled on a parka, sprinted out from the backside of the truck, reached in through the window and wrapped her arms around Kache’s neck before he could open his door. “I thought they were holding you hostage until we agreed to say Texas was the bigger state after all. Lettie didn’t take another turn?”

He teeter-tottered his hand. “My aunt thinks she’s at death’s door. Gram’s confused, but for someone who’s ninety-eight years old …”

“You’ll have to say hi to my grandpa. Remember Leroy? He’s happy as long as they let him fish the hallways. My ex says Leroy’s got the best fishing spot on the peninsula, right there in his head. Lettie’s been so sharp until recently. How long are you here?”

He shrugged. “Not sure.”

“You got someone special?” She smiled that old Marion smile.

“Not as of two days ago. You?”

She teeter-tottered her hand. “Still singing?”

He shook his head. “You?”

“Of course. Playing?”

He shook his head again.

“You’re shittin’ me. You need to come down to The Spit Tune. We still play a few nights a week. Bring your guitar and that voice of yours. Rex will do cartwheels down the bar when he sees you.” She turned toward her son. “Ian, this is Kache. He’s a helluva guitar player and he’s got a voice some hotshot reporter called ‘both wound and wonder.’”

Kache laughed. “Is there such thing as a hotshot reporter in Alaska?”

Several cars had pulled up behind him. “Ha ha. Gotta get back to work, but do not leave town without us catching up. I’m here every morning except Christmas, New Year’s and Easter. Seriously. No excuses, okay?”

He smiled. “Scout’s honor.”

“You dropped out of the Scouts!” she shouted as he pulled away.

Wow. Marion had a kid. Marion was still singing. The band was still together.

His old house, a museum of his seventeen-year-old life. And his old girlfriend, still playing with their band. He might as well make this trip back in time complete. He turned toward the Spit and headed out to see Rex. Since Kache had arrived, he’d already done more socializing than he had in years. Janie would be shocked.

Only two days before, he’d lain wedged in the permanent indent he’d caused in his and Janie’s sofa, the TV cradling him in its familiar steel-colored light. On his chest the cat Charlotte had purred and slept. He’d turned down the volume for the commercial, the warm Austin air carrying aching guitar riffs in D minor along with aromas of barbeque from the restaurant across the street. Another Do-it-Yourself show was about to start. He should get up—Arise! Go forth!—and turn off the TV, but he didn’t. He let Charlotte sleep.

Each step of each project, vivid in his mind’s eye: A version of his own hands performing every task, but calloused, surer, moving with the certainty of the experienced. Not the boy’s hands his father had made fun of. “Explain to me, son,” he’d said, “how the same fingers that spin gold on that silly guitar of yours turn into flippers when you pick up a hammer?”

But some of what his father tried to teach him was at long last finding its way in, if only from a type of televised-osmosis.

Janie was upstairs in the loft of their apartment, spreading on lotion, dusting on makeup, curling her hair. He must have once felt something more for her than he did now, which if he had to classify, fell in the vicinity of a fond affection. They had traveled some, had good sex. He’d moved into her place. They’d cooked, laughed, watched movies, shared a few secrets. And yet he experienced those times as if they’d occurred in a hazy, disjointed dream.

Her footsteps clicked down the stairs and stopped in the kitchen behind him.

“Sure you don’t want to join us?” she asked again.

Gently he lifted Charlotte off his chest and propped up on his elbow so he could see Janie in the shadows, the jutted hip and crossed-arms stance of late. Charlotte leapt down and began winding herself through and around Janie’s ankles. “No thanks.”

He sat up and twisted around to face her in the kitchen, his back sore with stiffness, his arm now slung along the top of the sofa in order to show her he was making an effort, paying attention. She flicked on the light. She had her hair up loose the way he liked it best and she wore a dress he hadn’t seen before. “You look nice,” he said. “Really pretty.”

Without a smile she shifted her weight, unfolded her arms so they hung by her sides, her pale palms facing him. “You might surprise yourself and have fun.”

How to explain the impossibility? “Not really up to it tonight.”

She kept her eyes on him. She was gracious enough not to ask: Did you apply for any jobs today? Did you make any follow-up calls? Did you even return your aunt’s call? It’s ironic, you know. Watching the Do-it-Yourself Network all day long and never doing a damn thing.

She spun away, the air barely lifting the edge of her dress, said, “I’ll be home late,” and closed the door with force, but not quite a slam. They didn’t slam doors. They didn’t shout. They’d been together over three years and never had more than a low-heated discussion, where nothing ever boiled over, just simmered on and on until they had reached this state of bone-dry evaporation.

Kache got up to find something to eat. He stretched, muscles tight from lying down so long, his vertebrae a series of hooks and sinkers.

Janie blamed this funk he’d been in for the last six months on the fact that he’d been let go from his job. A buyout. He’d received a generous enough severance package. They called it the Golden Parachute, but he was too young for that. Maybe the silver? Not even. Brass. The Brass-Can’t-Save-Your-Ass Parachute.

It wasn’t that he needed the money. He’d invested well, lived far below his means. There was just nothing he could bring himself to do. In the quiet of their kitchen he spread peanut butter on wheat bread. He could do that much.

The job had provided a masquerade that kept Janie from seeing the obvious: He’d been asleep for the last two decades. A relentless fog descended upon him that god-awful day and it remained, through his college education (with the help of a fair amount of weed) and then through his job in accounting at a small hi-tech company. He’d quit the weed by then but hid in the numbers for years without anyone realizing that he wasn’t quite … there. They shrugged it off, thinking, he supposed, that he was merely distant, quiet. They, including Janie, chalked it off as personality traits of a numbers geek.

But no one in Austin had known him before the plane crash. Way back when he wrote songs and played the guitar, when he talked too much and argued with passion and was “too touchy feely for his own good.” While at work, he’d lost himself in the black and white of the numbers; their rigid columns and graphs had held him in a tight cocoon of space. Math became his new music, but without the emotions, which was a welcome relief. He had not turned out to be a “lazy-no-good rock and roller,” after all. Unlike Kache’s father, Rex would find that disappointing.

SEVENTEEN

The Spit Tune was one of the oldest buildings on the Spit. It had survived the fire in 1918 and the Good Friday earthquake of 1964. Peanut shells and sawdust covered the floor. Signed dollar bills from every corner of the world hung from the ceiling and walls, and when Kache was a high school kid, he figured there was enough money there to fund their first album. Now he knew just how naïve that had been. First of all, there wasn’t nearly that much money, even twenty years later. And secondly, Rex, who’d owned the place forever, was fond of saying he’d shoot anyone who even tried to take one dollar down. “I won’t hurt you real bad,” he’d say. “Maybe just take off a finger or two to remind you to follow the rules.”

Rex, himself, wasn’t one to follow many rules. Kache and Marion, Chris, Dan, and Mike were all well underage when they started playing at the bar. Sometimes Rex even let them drink a few beers if they promised not to tell.

But Rex wasn’t around. Kache didn’t recognize the bartender, a young bearded guy who told him Rex was vacationing in Phoenix. Kache sat down anyway and nursed his coffee.

“Can I get you something stronger?”

“Not yet. Mind if I change the channel?”

The bartender handed him the remote. “A friend of Rex’s can do anything he wants.” Kache found the DIY network. His favorite show was about to start: it was the father and son show called The House that Jack and Jack Jr. Built. The hosts wore their tool belts low on their hips just like Kache’s father and Denny once had, sharing a similar comradeship, and when the hosts patiently began showing Kache How to Build a Fire Pit, he felt the smallest hint of a burning in the pit between his heart and his stomach.

The hosts acted like they believed in Kache, even the father, Jack Sr. From the screen, they spoke with reassuring confidence, as if Kachemak Winkel could, in fact, do it himself; he could do any goddamn thing, if he ever decided he wanted to. He could prove his father wrong again and again. He wanted his father to be wrong. That his father had been dead since 1985 didn’t matter. Kache had never wanted him to be dead, just dead wrong.

It was crazy, he knew, to desperately need approval and understanding from a dead man. But he did.

“Pussy Hollywood boys think they can tell us Alaskans how to build shit ourselves? I’d like to see them build a fox trap or skin a bear, am I right my friend?”

A large, strong-looking man sat a few stools down. Kache hadn’t even heard the guy come in. “You sound like my father,” Kache said. “And my brother, for that matter.”

“Is that right? There’s a couple of fine men I’d like to meet.” He smiled warmly, eyes teasing.

“Can’t. They’re dead.”

“Sorry to hear that. My papa too. And my mama.”

Kache nodded. “Yep. Same.”

“How?” The man motioned for the bartender to get Kache a beer.

“Plane crash.”

“That is harsh.”

“And yours?”

“Bear.”

“As in a bear attack? That’s harsh.” Kache took a swig of the beer. “Were you there?”

The man said he was, but that he hadn’t been hurt. “No scars you can see. You know what I mean, my friend.” Kache did know what he meant, even if he didn’t think quite think of him as his ‘friend’ just yet—he did already feel an odd kinship with him, knowing what they shared. The man had a Russian accent but was clean-shaven and sitting at a bar drinking a beer. Clearly not an Old Believer. Kache had grown up with a lot of Russians, and he wondered if they knew any of the same people. But when Kache asked him, he replied that he’d just moved here from the north slope after another failed marriage, lived in an old hunter’s cabin. “Only place in town I go to is here for booze and music. The rest I do myself. Not pretend, like bozos.” He motioned his beer toward the TV. “Don’t need anybody. Tired of thinking marriage might change me. It won’t. Can’t. What about you? You with beautiful woman?”

That required a complicated explanation so Kache just shook his head and turned his attention to the television, but soon his mind looped back on Janie.

The other night after she’d left to hang out with friends, Kache had noticed a light glowing from the guestroom and went to investigate. Janie had left her computer on. Janie never left her computer on. She worked for the electric company and always not only turned off, but unplugged every appliance, light, and electronic gadget they owned. She’d been spending a lot of time on the computer, and Kache sometimes wondered if she’d found someone to love on the Internet. He understood why she might.

He should just turn the thing off. But the fact that he was even curious at all gave him a rare surge of energy, so he clicked the mouse and the screen filled with tan and cream and that teal color Janie always liked.