Correcting the Landscape (8 page)

“Cathy's on the run from Allakaket,” said Gayle. “She wants to try something new.”

“I remember you told me about her.”

“Lots of us have to leave home to save our skins,” said Gayle.

“I thought I was a wild young woman in Mobile,” said Lucerne, “but there was some serious hard living out in Allakaket. Too bad. It goes over the edge sometimes.”

“I married to get out of there, and I don't fault myself. Accomplished that much, anyway, it brought me to Fairbanks,” said Gayle. “The marriage didn't take. Nor the next one. Not sure that babysitting Cathy is going to take, either, Lucerne.”

“We'll give it a few more days,” Lucerne said, her voice low and soft.

We stepped outside as they spoke, and moved back to the street.

“Going to go look for Jack,” said Gayle.

“I'm going to bring these gloves back.”

“No, you're not, you don't worry about those,” said Lucerne. “Mister Traynor, it was nice to meet you.”

“You could probably teach me about culture shock,” I said. “If there is such a thing.”

“Oh, there is,” Lucerne responded. “Anyone thinks this is all one country, doesn't know the half of it.”

I said good-bye to Gayle with some reluctance. With my gloves and a garbage sack, I felt obliged to tail after the Boy Scouts, but as I set off up the street, I carried with me the sensa
tions of standing next to her in that entryway—she was almost playful, next to Lucerne, as if playing the younger sister. Except for the slight, odd shadow of the cousin's presence. Gayle had seemed like a person who wants to play, to tease—a certain energy was on display that she kept subdued much of the time. She had seemed more certain of who she was and what she was doing. Well of course, why not, in her home with her longtime friend, rather than in the Mercury office, why wouldn't she relax and fool around a little?

I heard the garbage truck a block ahead. The cheers when that ugly couch sailed into the truck—where did those cheers come from, if not from a feeling that people were getting free of a bondage they despised but could not afford to think about most of the time? Or no—that was no symbol, was it? That was a real and hated couch, where a man slept who is not missed, whoever he was.

I'm the one who lives among symbols.

There's an entertainment value in newspaper work, but lately the entertainment had started to wear thin, wasn't enough. Journalism, the news of the day: it's a form of writing that by its very nature spins deceit, because you have to start somewhere, and you have to have coherence in your story, and real life is not like that. Rarely does a beginning present itself when you're covering the news, in all honesty. It all goes back farther in recent history than we can afford to pursue. A reporter steps into the mess and says Okay, I'll start here, I'll elevate this detail to the starting post. It begins with this.

And once he's done that, the need for a coherent narrative threatens to dictate the next detail, and the next. There's so much left out.

Readers need to read for what's left out.

Overhead a ragged line of sandhill cranes turned in the too-
bright sky, hunting for the fields of barley out on College Road. They were like letters in the sky, Felix wrote in a poem: “
Lovely serifs, their long necks and long legs
.” He sometimes composed in the newsroom on the weekends. Cranes, he insisted, had inspired the alphabet, in ancient times. How does anyone know that?

I missed a turn and outwalked the Boy Scouts. At the corner of Twenty-seventh and Wilson, I suddenly felt alone, a little overwhelmed. Too soon exhausted, I decided to drag myself around one more block. Past a small log home with a caribou rack above the door, a pickup with a camper shell in the driveway.

As I walked past, a woman came out of the door and stood in the yard with her hands on her hips; she wore a loose pink housecoat and running shoes. She looked around the neighborhood in a sleepy, territorial way, and just as the indifferent sweep of her gaze took me in, she began a yawn, a big wild yawn that closed her eyes and made her shake her head in recovery. When she opened her eyes again she nodded at me and looked away, down her street.

I couldn't help but smile, being yawned at like that.

To get this business of writing the news to mean something, the way sticking a plow in the earth used to mean something—to make that much of a difference, to come up with a story that powerful, you have to tell the truth. You have to find the truth. The
Mercury
was a damned good idea, because I think it takes more than one person to get the truth out, and the newspaper made it possible—but I suddenly saw the danger that all my words over these years amounted to nothing more than, say, a tablecloth. Making Fairbanks look good to itself. Was that it? Was that all it amounted to, this sticking with the ongoing story through good times and bad, that I've become a sort of interior decorator?

Someone Shelley Suliman might run after (“Oh Gus, Gus Traynor! Can we have a thousand issues?”), but that woman back there—she couldn't stop an oncoming yawn at the sight of me. I wished I could yawn like that. Lose myself in it like a big old cat, because nothing's going to interfere, certainly not some dreamer walking by with a garbage bag and someone else's work gloves.

U
NDER THE ONSLAUGHT OF PUBLIC TESTIMONY
, legislators in the statehouse began to attach amendments to the infamous timber concessions bill—first one, then another: legislative scrutiny, local hire, how much this would cost the state. The effort to giveth away our resources and in the same motion taketh them back made the bill even more unworkable. At last, near the end of the session in May, the bill died a quiet death as a midnight bell struck for final considerations and it still had not come up for a vote.

I ordered a pot of gumbo from the Palate to celebrate. “Timber Bill Dies in House,” we headlined in a last triumphant story; and set one citizen's testimony up inside a box, in fourteen-point boldface: “Veneer plant a shortsighted use for this great forest. We'd be cutting Sampson's hair and giving it away.”

The whole episode fascinated me; for once, there was no “party line” of attack on this bill. It truly was a case of citizens leaping to the microphone with a variety of reasons why it should die. I did not see a mob of greens vs. a mob of developers: it was a
crowd of individuals, some of whom saw eye to eye on nothing else. Their testimony brought out the complications hidden in a proposal that had initially seemed so simple to its author.

“We've learned a lot, we've woken up to the value of what's around us,” I announced as I ladled gumbo to my writers and partners. “Well, to an extent, anyway.”

“
Everybody's
learned something, including the guys who wrote this bill,” Noreen said. “They won't be so blatant next time. They'll be a little more subtle. Watch 'em like a hawk, Gus. Mark my words.”

“And what do you mean by that?” I asked her in private. “You talk like you're going somewhere.”

“Are you eager to get rid of me?”

“Hell no, but you always said this was temporary.”

“Eventually I have to make some money again, Gus. And try to find…you know. I'm not getting any younger. Maybe I'd like a family someday.” She shrugged and turned away. A hole in her world. She covered it over with drama.

As for me, perhaps I had all the family I wanted, with the
Mercury
, its partners, its underpaid staff, and Gayle Kenneally in the newsroom from time to time, and I wanted to savor the completion of a story we had really stuck to. It gives you a boost, I thought, for the next time you need it, the next raging controversy, oil spill, or colossal moral regression on the part of this same community, like objecting to Southside Cleanup Day or damning a sexy book or voting down a school bond.

Every July the Visitors Bureau puts on a show, during our annual parade, to dramatize the founding of Fairbanks in 1901. Grown men shoot cap guns at each other for no historical reason whatever, and agile women line up to do the cancan. A few saloons in town join the fun and try to attract tourists to their versions of the story. With different embellishments all these shows
include the same kernel of truth: ninety years ago a man with a handlebar mustache and a shady past came up this way by river steamer, hauling 135 tons of goods and hoping to build a trading post on the trail to the Klondike. But as the steamer ventured deeper into Alaska's interior, the water level in the smaller tributaries to the Yukon fell lower and lower.

Finally the captain of the steamer, terrified of grounding, stopped at a high bank with a stand of good trees and refused to go back downstream with such a heavy load. He'd run aground for sure, be stuck for the winter. “This is as far as I can go with your goods,” he announced, and hustled the man and his wife ashore. The crew began unloading boxes; the trader protested; his wife, dumped without ceremony in the wilderness, wept into her shawl, though now there are streets named after her. The trader stalked around wondering what to do, when, even before the steamer had pulled away—a miracle!—out from the forest stepped a hungry prospector, an Italian immigrant, carrying the secret of a recent find.

And so, within weeks, the trees on that well-timbered riverbank came down. It took a lot of wood to fuel this town and the riverboats that supplied it in those early years. Photographs show a skinned floodplain, log cabins set amid the stumps, vertical plumes of smoke from woodstoves rising instead of trees. Cords of fuelwood are stacked literally to the horizon. But eventually Fairbanks built a coal-fired power plant; bush planes and the Alaska Railroad replaced sternwheelers. When the gold rush ended and the creeks were abandoned, the woods grew back in a jungly way over collapsing mine shafts and abandoned narrow-gauge railroad beds.

It was as if the gold rush was a natural disturbance that swept through the forest, cleaned out thousands of acres, and then receded. The forest grew back in its usual stages, as it does today
after a fire. The black spruce trees in the shadier places are thick as platoons, the kind of woods you fight your way through. On the south slopes of hills grow the woods you stroll through, aspen and birch and white spruce. Prime stuff, in comparison to the low-lying bogs. When you grade parts of the forest as if you're harvesting beef, you call the white spruce prime. And that's what the timber companies wanted, a lock on the white spruce. Not just yet, the people said. Or so it seemed to me.

 

THAT WONDERFUL SMELL OF A NEWSPAPER COMING TOGETHER
isn't completely a thing of the past. Some pages come together nicely on the computer, but some require a little handicraft, a little hot wax. I walked into the office one afternoon and saw Gayle bent over the light table, building a page. She wore a bright yellow cotton parka, like a dress, and black jeans, and she had her shoes off. The sole of her left foot in a thin black sock curved provocatively over her right heel. I studied it for a second. My hand imagined the shape of her footpads and that slim ankle, the curve of muscle in her calf, the smooth valley behind her knee.

My palms were warm. I stuck them into my armpits and walked into my office. Startled and pleased.

I turned on my computer and brought up a near-complete story and sat there in front of my own sentences, daydreaming.

Patter and bold assertions did not impress her, I had noticed. Well, my own didn't, but come to think of it she must have been impressionable from time to time. She'd been married four times, was it, and switched careers a few times already. She must have her impulses.

And she drew her strength from a place I had neglected in my own life. The quiet connections that she had, with this land, with this country. Too quiet to survive, almost. “With proper manage
ment the forest can be bigger and better than ever,” a legislator had trumpeted at one hearing. “If we don't harvest we will lose trees to butt rot,” another said, also no poet. When Gayle showed me these quotes she looked, well, hurt and puzzled at the same time. “They don't know what they are talking about,” she said, “or what a forest is, how it works. What do I do?”

“Write about the hearing you attended,” I said, after a minute. “Not so much the forest. It's a different subject.” You have to do a little violence to yourself, I thought, separate the parts of your brain. “In our pages people in the community talk to each other. They do the talking, we are neutral. At least on page one and page five. They rant and rave, we're Switzerland.” And she understood me.

Too soon today, Noreen's ferretlike visage came around the door.

“Gus, why don't you ever have your radio on? They found a body under the Cushman Street Bridge. One of us should take a little trip downtown.”

“Or we could wait for the police blotter,” I said. “Why are you knocking yourself out? You need to take a few days, think about your options. It would be okay.”

“Something needs doing. I see that and so does Gayle.”

“Go on, then.”

“Gayle wants to come.”

Whoa; where'd this disappointment come from?

“She's got her camera. Do you mind?” Noreen looked at me funny.

“Why should I?”

“I don't know. How about it?”

“Yeah, if she wants.”

They organized themselves and were out the door. I returned to my office with a restive feeling and after a few minutes more
of fiddling with that editorial, deserted it in order to take over the copyediting that No had set aside. Felix came in and took over the page that Gayle had been building. As soon as this one is put to bed, I thought, I'll have time to follow up this problem with our display ads. We've got to build the revenue up. Judy Finch said we must do the important tasks and let the universe provide. Get busy, universe. Provide, provide.

A graduate student from the theater department brought in a review of
Macbeth
, the current show at the city playhouse. This was an assignment he had arranged with Noreen. He slid into a chair near Felix while I read and touched up his piece and trimmed it to fit on page 7. He'd probably expect money for this, but right now the sensation of authorship sufficed, put on his face that childlike glow I have come to recognize in freelance writers.

He and Felix slouched low in chairs and muttered softly to each other while I worked. When I turned around from the computer I was taken aback to see how the two of them almost formed a circle, curved spines at opposite ends, long legs bent toward each other. Bruce, the graduate student, listened to Felix with parted lips. Felix spoke in his softest voice, like fog moving against a rock. At times I didn't understand a word Felix said to me, his voice was that soft, the inflections so different from casual American speech. But this afternoon I heard him clearly.

“
Dog
and
God
, for instance,” Felix was saying.

“They have the same internal vowel,” said Bruce. “The sound itself carries the meaning over to the next line, like an echo.”

“
Honesty
,” said Felix, and they both turned the word over in their minds, gazing at each other.

This is how poets talk to each other—fog and nonsense, god and dog?

But evidently they were hearing just the right thing. Their words fell into ears long denied the pleasure of another poet's
company. Felix's face lit up, if you can imagine cold marble lighting up. They eyed each other in a shy, off-guard way that almost embarrassed me, it was that touching. Bruce had short dark hair and a very neat mustache and goatee; his skin had a slight caramel cast. He was as tall as Felix, and slouched in their chairs they looked like illustrations from a book called How to Ruin Your Spine.

I didn't say anything, but they seemed to become aware that my face had turned in their direction. Felix shifted his body upright and ran his fingers over the mess on his desk, as if feeling out what needed to be accomplished next. Bruce didn't move. I got up and went back to my office. I'm not completely insensitive. I didn't know why I felt extraneous at that moment, but so I did.

I turned on my radio and, standing next to its ludicrous blare, wondered what I had just witnessed. The two boys were spellbinding to each other, somehow. They had let me see vulnerability. Then they reined it in.

They didn't know me well enough to be simple with me.

Well, son of a gun. The secrets people live with.

I went through the weekly checklist: we had everything now, except whatever Gayle and Noreen showed up with, and if they weren't here in half an hour, I'd plug the cartoonist's art into that spot and put the
Mercury
to bed. And head downtown to touch a few new prospects for display ads. What were the two boys in the other room doing now?

Aw, come on Noreen, I muttered. We want to go home. But I had to wait for her arrival. We hadn't donned the winged sandals of the twenty-first century yet, here at the
Mercury
.

“Will I be off, then, Gus?” Felix appeared in my doorway. In his face something slightly goofy. He didn't need my permission. Why was he asking me?

“See you later, then, and thanks for the extra help,” I said, and looked out at Bruce. “And thanks for the review. Great to have it.” The theater critic was now lounging in a standing position against the front door. He stepped suddenly to one side as No charged through.

“Oh, sorry,” she said, and, “Gus!” She went straight over to the light table with a folder of fresh black-and-white photos and spilled them out for me. Emergency medical technicians were climbing the riprap on the downtown riverbank, across from the Unknown First Family. There was a covered stretcher in the background.

“The dead woman was Gayle's own cousin,” Noreen said.

“Cathy?”

“You knew her?”

“I met her once. Gayle still went ahead and took pictures?”

“She didn't know at first. She was snapping away, I interviewed the trooper. We found out just as we were leaving. The poor woman had nothing on, Gus, but a windbreaker.”

That pale youngster with the sleepy face and the slow smile in my direction, wrapping herself around the door frame at Gayle's house? I looked down at the photos.

“Oh damn,” I said. “You're going to write something up? Or wait—what do you suppose Gayle wants us to do?”

“We went straight from downtown up to the university, where she developed the pictures. She wanted to do this job, that's what she said.”

“Okay. Well, shit. How about this photo with a six-line caption. Let's put a box around it. We need a small headline. Let me think.”

“Can I help?” said Felix.

“Do you think we have everything under control, No?”

“Oh, Felix, you should have seen the poor girl.”

“No, can you do a paragraph on this?”

“Yes, yes, I composed it in the car.”

“Why didn't you call me before she developed the pictures, I mean she didn't have to do this.”

“She wanted to do this job, she said. She seems fine, Gus—I mean stunned and sad but fine.”

“That girl was living with her.”