Correcting the Landscape (18 page)

“How so?”

“Civil disobedience, man. Don't you read at all? Peaceful protest. No one gets hurt.”

“You mean knock them down? Into the river?”

“Look at the position I'm in. I've got a big, ugly statue, a D7 Cat, a clear dark night, an empty street. When will I ever be this close again?”

“Close to what, Tad?”

“I don't know. Making a difference. Taking care of something. Taking a chance, for once.” He opened the truck door and jumped down. I followed him.

“Twenty minutes,” he said. “I'd need twenty minutes, absolute minimum. But let me take a closer look.”

We walked over to the statue and stared at the low, thick concrete base, paved with the split stones from Pedro Dome.

“What about this moat?” I said. “How does the Cat get across this?”

“Damn,” he said, “I forgot about this part.” The empty basin of the fountain made a gap of several feet between the outer ring and the statue itself. “Cat'll rise up and fall right in. It's like they anticipated me.”

“And what's more,” I said, “you won't use that machine again. Maybe you could do some damage to this obscenity in front of
us, but you'd ruin your machine for good. Be like throwing it away.”

“It's insured.”

“Against what?”

“Oh…accidents. You know, I didn't pay a hell of a lot for it. It's an old one I bought cheapish from a guy who—well, who salvaged it, let's say, after the pipeline was finished. Alyeska abandoned a few of these machines in the late seventies. Too much trouble to bring them out of the tundra. This one is salvage. Good machine, for all that. It might survive. The blade, no, the blade won't survive.”

“So what about this moat?”

“No go. Guess it's a fantasy after all.”

I was briefly dismayed and relieved at once, as if I hadn't been completely sure that we were joking.

“Good while it lasted,” I said.

“A fantasy,” Tad went on, “that we could neatly dislodge this thing and drive it straight into the river. Over the edge. A nice slow crack opens in the ice, the family sinks into the frigid black water. I could almost see it happening.”

“Almost be worth it, too,” I said. “No one gets hurt. I like that part. No one gets hurt.”

“That would work in our favor. But we'd have destruction of public property. Criminal offense. But then again, isn't this a public common, this space?”

“Yeah?”

“I mean it's yours and mine, our space. What the fuck is this doing here on our riverbank? I'm not a lawyer, but hell, destruction of public property—isn't that what we're looking at right now?”

“Well, Tad. You took out the trees downstream without much of a second thought. Left a clear-cut behind.”

“Maybe I've wised up a little,” he said. “Maybe I was a complete jackass back then.”

We studied our intended victims a bit longer.

“We're not going to get it into the river. In fact, I see now that we will have to take out the outer ring,” Tad said thoughtfully. “The statue weighs a few tons, and that's no problem. But I wonder what this outer ring of stones weighs. Put them together…we'll be lucky to get the statue to keel over. Face forward at that.”

“If you could fill up this moat with snow,” I said, “a good bridge of snow that you could ride right up to the statue. But that would take time.”

“Oh, yeah. Time we don't have. No, we have to do it the hard way. You're right—it could be the last job for this Cat.”

I looked up at the Family. Each person locked inside a great, deep parka hood—isolated even from each other. There was nothing inspiring or insightful or even artistic about them—they weren't riding a horse, or hitching up a team of dogs, nothing. Come to think of it, most Alaskan subsistence activities might not be that heroic a thing to observe—tying traps, hanging fish to dry, scraping skins. Picking berries. It's hard work and the heroism's in doing it day after day, no matter what the conditions. But a statue of someone really showing off, say fending off a grizzly, would have been laughable. So the sculptor opted to have them doing nothing.

“Well,” I said, “it's been fun.” I meant, it's been fun talking like this.

“Yeah,” he said, and we both turned and headed back to the truck. I climbed in and he didn't, not right away. I briefly entertained a vague pity for his crude manners and physical limitations, and then suddenly the cab in which I was sitting began to vibrate. I heard behind my head the unmistakable sound of a powerful engine coming to life. It seemed that Tad was not going to climb in beside me. Instead he had climbed up onto his trailer and started the Cat.

Oh Christ.

I jumped out of the cab and ran around the truck in a panic. He gave me a wave from the cab, a signal. There was no point in shouting above the noise. I jumped up and down, shook my head, drew a finger across my throat, waved my arms like railroad crossing gates. “No, no,” I cried. “Read my lips! No!”

He worked some controls. The machine started to reverse down the trailer. I could run behind it, put myself in harm's way—he wouldn't run me over. But I didn't want to. Boy, did I ever not want to. Up close the thing was scary. I fell back in astonishment as he backed right off the trailer, onto the street. The machine stopped, and I made a gesture as if to climb up into the cab. He stood up, leaned out the door, reached out an arm.

“Want to see?” he yelled. I could climb up in there and fight him for the controls, and when he knocked me down, as he easily would, then I could grab his knees on my way down and pull him off his feet. If we were both horizontal I wouldn't be at a disadvantage. I had a semester of wrestling in high school. I could do something!

I stepped up onto the treads and grabbed the rail on the door; his hand shot out and pulled me in.

“If we're both in jail, who's going to tell the story?” I screamed at him.

“There's always lawyers,” he yelled back. “Hang on, it bounces some.”

Before I could lunge at him he sat down in the driver's seat, gestured at a hunk of metal for me to sit on, and started working levers. In front of us the blade rose in the air about a foot. I watched his left hand on the gearshift. He moved it from Reverse to Drive, to first gear, and we crawled up the sidewalk. He went forward a few feet, jockeyed a bit until the blade was facing dead-
on to the statue, about thirty feet away; then he slammed his foot down on the decelerator and stopped.

Could he have been planning this all along, since the night of the poetry reading?

“You want to get off now,” he yelled.

“Hell no!”

“Jump down!”

“What for?”

“I'm going to open the throttle and drop the blade. We're both going to get down.”

“After it's moving?”

“That's how they work, Gus, we only have twenty minutes, let's not blow it!”

It's hard to deal with complex emotions over the noise of a D7 Cat. It seemed as unreal an experience as I'd ever known, all of it, from the rusting yellow controls to the terrifying power of the thing, Tad's hands resting so easy on throttle and gears, the thirty feet separating us from the Unknown First Family—it seemed unbelievable, but it was real: the only thing separating me from the solidity of it all was my own inexperience, my own virginity. My own hand doing the deed. For my own sake. I was in it now. For my own sake, see it through.

“You got to get down!” Tad yelled. “Just step out on the treads and jump.”

“What about you?”

“I'll follow you when she's underway.”

“No!”

“Shit, Gus!” His foot came up and he yanked the gearshift into third, pulled back on the throttle; the Cat moved forward. A nice steady speed. He stood up and edged to the door, reached over and lowered the blade. Then his hand gripped my arm and stead
ied me as I stood up to follow him. I could barely take my eyes off the target.

“We're going to jump off,” he said. “Follow me. Wake up, Gus. Now!”

He jumped onto the tread and then hurled himself forward, onto the snow-covered ground. I followed after with the adrenaline of angels rushing through me. I crashed to the ground and didn't feel a thing, scrambled on all fours away from the moving Cat, got to my feet.

We turned and watched the blade hit the outer rim of bronze plaques and Pedro Dome granite at full throttle. And keep going.

I stopped watching for cops. As the huge stone ring began to crack and crumble, the Cat moved by inches toward the towering statue.
All it has to do is connect. Go, go
, I begged silently. The blade filled up with stone and debris, the treads began to grind forward again, and the machine's load at last touched and then began to grind itself into the base of the statue. By this time I had stepped backward up onto the lawn of the convention and visitors bureau, next door to the park. I heard sirens, above the terrific noise of the machine and the grinding rock. I guess by the time the first two policemen arrived, Tad and I were standing up on the lawn like two slack-jawed spectators, and the two cops joined us. We all four stared as the Cat shoved itself relentlessly forward and the stone base of the thing began to cave. The Family slowly tipped forward, slowly fell into the metal roof of the cab. Four tons of bronze slowly, utterly flattened the roof, but the machine moved forward just the same, inch by inch, up over the rubble, a load of debris the size of a car spilling from its blade.

We watched it struggle on a straight line toward the river. Inch by inch. Just shy of the bank, it came to a stop. There it hung, crushed, the Family with their heads buried inside Tad's Cat. Just a couple more feet and it would slide over, deliver that statue to the
riverbank like someone delivering a four-ton pizza. But the engine died.

“Oh, geez,” said one of the cops.

The other one said, “What do you two guys know about this?”

“It got out of control,” said Tad. “The damn thing got away from me.”

“Who the hell are you? Were you plowing snow?” said the cop.

“I think I want to call my lawyer,” said Tad.

Handcuffs had appeared. I stared at them.

“Those aren't necessary,” I said. “What do you want us to do?”

“Why don't you-all get inside the patrol car,” the cop said, speaking with some difficulty. I knew how he felt; my mouth, too, was locked open in amazement.

N
OREEN AND SHELLEY SULIMAN ARRIVED
Saturday afternoon to bail us out, speechless for once, the two of them. Then, in the hallway of the court building, walking toward us, I saw Gayle.

She came down the lime green hallway with a severe look in her face, blue parka unzipped and her head to one side as if struggling to understand something. The sight of her landed in the soft place inside of me, I don't know how to put it. Like a dog offering its belly to a human hand, I just rotated inside. At that second I entrusted myself to her, just like that. We all stopped in the hallway, facing each other.

“Gayle.”

“Hello, Gus.”

“We got 'em out, Gayle,” said Noreen.

No one said anything more for a second.

“Ms. Kenneally, over here, I'm Phil Sloan, and this is Robin Rowe from the public defender's office.” The rapid voice coming up behind us was unmistakable. It belonged to the fast-talking detective we had interviewed about Cathy Carew.

“I'm going to be deposed,” Gayle said softly. “I'm going to tell them.”

“Tell them?” repeated Noreen.

“What they don't know about Cathy's boyfriend. Lucerne and I talked it over. We decided to come out with what we know. I made up my mind.” She let her eyes wander over me. “I can't live with this on my mind anymore. I can't live like this.”

“I'm sure you are doing the right thing,” Noreen said.

“Well, Gus,” said Gayle. “I'm glad you're out, at least. Hate to think of you locked up.” Then she stepped around us and went off with Phil Sloan and a lawyer in pinstripes. I could not have been more let down. I was stunned.

Noreen looked at me with, I thought, a hint of sympathy.

Shelley and Tad turned politely away from my disappointment. We left the court building in silence. Before Noreen and I climbed into Noreen's car, I could see Shelley across the parking lot beginning to lay into her ex-husband. She waved her hands vigorously, slicing the air like a salesman. Tad ducked and shrugged and tossed off her blows, happy to be sprung.

Noreen drove home past the park, where a vast royal blue tarpaulin covered the new hole in the world. Cat and statue had been hauled away. Son of a gun, there it was, all circled around in yellow caution tape: the disputed ground. I had been in a case of mild shock for the past twelve hours. Suddenly I couldn't help myself. I smiled out the window. And to think no one got hurt!

I thought of how it had looked the night before. Tad and the cops and me with a front-row seat on the lawn of the Visitors
Bureau. And for all its weight, there was a dark hollow within that bronze.

“Did they find anything inside the statue?” I said, as we drove past the wreckage.

She gave me a strange look. “Inside the statue, Gus? Is that why you did this?”

“No. But…did they?”

She was silent for a moment.

“You mean like a dead body, a stash of jewels, the Maltese Falcon? No, Gus,” she said, and her lip twisted up in a grin.” It's a hollow bronze statue just like it is supposed to be. What did you expect?”

“Nothing important. No, I didn't expect anything.”

She chuckled unexpectedly.

“What's funny?”

“Oh, you. Why not laugh? I'm so mad I hate to give you that much, but do we stand here blubbering like babies or do we go to Istanbul? Admit it, that's what you were going to say next. Why shouldn't I laugh?”

“You have the wrong idea,” I said huffily. “I never thought…I never had any such ideas.”

“Well, you're not going to Istanbul, Tino. Or anywhere else, for a while.” She laughed again. “Holy cow. I can't believe it. What got into you guys?”

I shook my head. There was a laugh inside me, too, inside my confusion. So Gayle was mad at me, so what? Give her that, for Christ's sake! Where did this hilarity come from? It was over, I survived, everyone survived, and now we were all on the other side. Instead of living with that mockery of an idealized first family, we were stuck with ourselves again—and no one got hurt.

I didn't want to go to jail. Incarceration terrified me. Plea bargain, that was the thing. Whatever it took, I sure didn't want to go
to jail. But right now there was a laugh in this, and why the hell deny it?

“That Robin Rowe,” said Noreen. “Know him?”

“The public defender?”

“Shy guy with a ponytail? Did you know I went out with him a couple of times?”

“No!”

She sighed at the memory. “Anyway, he's real good. He actually likes criminals, too. I'll talk to him. He seems to be organizing Gayle's deposition today. But I'll talk to him. He'll know what to do with you.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You're more than I deserve, No.”

“Don't I know that.”

 

THE HALF-EMPTY BOTTLE OF BEER WHICH I HAD STUCK IN THE
cup holder of Tad's truck worked in our favor, according to Robin Rowe. Although we didn't seem drunk to the cops, they had pounced on that open container and had ordered alcohol tests. Happy to find an explanation for what they had just witnessed. Tad barely attained the legal limit and I was far below it, but at least drunkenness played a part in the escapade, making it necessary to file certain charges; these actually turned out to weigh slightly in our favor. There was no malicious intent.

Tad insisted to his own lawyer that I kept trying to stop him, that I was completely innocent. I denied that.

“I doubt I could have stopped it,” I told Robin, “And I didn't try. Every second was worth it. The experience, the outcome were worth it. I encouraged him. I played along.”

“You won't say that to anyone else,” he returned mildly. “Do me that favor. Let me do all the talking. But, as you know, if you do take some of the blame, and both of you plead no contest,
then the prosecutors get two guilty parties—and they might be happy enough with that to lower the charges, do you follow me? Because otherwise, there is a chance that you, Gus, could get off, completely.
You
maybe could. They'd have Tad, but not you.”

“I can't send Tad to jail for giving me the best night I've had in a long time,” I said.

“Oh, yes you can.”

I thought back.

“I didn't have to be there.”

Robin was not a reactive guy. He studied me quietly.

“No guarantees,” he said at last. “But obviously, you heard Tad the night you were arrested—taking the blame, taking the credit. If he sticks with that, you have some chance of walking away.”

“Let's go with the plea bargain,” I said eagerly. “I'm in. Regardless of what Tad does. I'm in.” And maybe we could both stay out of jail.

The daily's headline,
BELOVED LANDMARK DESTROYED
, above a huge color photo of the Unknown First Family buried headfirst in the Cat, the whole thing hanging on the edge of the riverbank, was followed in subsequent days by a dozen letters to the editor in hearty agreement, bemoaning the tragedy, and maybe three or four times that many weighing in on the opposite side—
Beloved, my left foot
! being the gist of most of them. Why not replace the plaza with birch trees, benches, and delphiniums, they asked, a gazebo for musicians, a speaker's corner, an espresso cart? Students from the university organized a music and poetry fest at the site. Despite the Caution tape, they filled the plaza, passed around Mary Oliver and Gary Snyder, took turns bellowing into a microphone.

The Anchorage paper published a photo of this event. Our own local paper ignored the living display completely—even though it took place right across the river from their plant, and
reporters and photographers crossed the bridge on their lunch hour and partook of the cultural feast like ordinary spectators.

Making their usual editorial statement, the daily maintained an official silence. No photo, no editorial comment. A few letter-writers commented on this, incensed. In a weird way, I admired the paper's choice—I wouldn't have done that, but I admired something about it. It was arrogant, it was blatantly editorial to ignore the kids reciting out there, earnest, impassioned, freezing cold—and maybe that's why I admired it, ever so slightly. The editor, or more likely the publisher, was owning to an opinion. They were demonstrating that opinion shapes the news, a truth they often denied in print. They knew what they were doing. Actions speak louder than words. Boy, I wished I was running a paper, I wished I was at least teaching journalism that week! I really wanted to be talking to someone about all this. Instead I wrote.

I wrote every day. My confessions. Tapped away at my laptop for a couple of hours every morning. Went back in time.

Three years earlier, the
Exxon Valdez
had run aground in Prince William Sound. The single hull impaled itself on Bligh Reef, and somewhere between eleven million and twenty million gallons of crude oil poured into the wild waters of the Sound. A day after that horrible news broke, as I was walking through a building on campus, someone came out of an office and cried out generally to the people in the hall and specifically to me, when he met my eyes, “The captain was drunk!”

We were astounded. How could such a trivial, stupid, personal action as raising a fourth gin and tonic to one's mouth lead to a public disaster on this scale? Nonetheless, in time, we believed it, and we also understood that drunkenness was only part of the cause. Captain Hazelwood somehow was able to share the blame with a multinational corporation.

The
Exxon Valdez
loomed in the backdrop of Tad's case like
some kind of weird comparison. The campus newspaper, bless their hearts, picked up on this and responded with a political cartoon.
Call that drunk driving?
a caricatured Joe Hazelwood asked in the campus paper, studying the Cat with its load of statue. Compared to Hazelwood's, Tad's criminal mischief paled, and everyone knew it.

An unexpected and almost perverse sense of community pride stirred in the public breast, maybe the same sort of pride that led eighteenth-century revolutionaries to sing “Yankee Doodle” or that nerves gay people to call each other queer. Pride that here in Fairbanks, we still handle things in a crude, homemade fashion—a stupid pride, sure, in the very thing that the respectable people wanted to see the last of.

Robin Rowe told me we were lucky in drawing a good judge, that the humor of the whole sorry episode was not lost on Judge Nona Sticking, “but don't laugh in court, don't smile, don't take any of that away from her,” he warned me. “That's her purview, the smiling. You smile, you're dead. You don't trivialize this. Practice not smiling. Would you do that for me? Practice holding it in.”

So I did.

“Again,” he said. “Make your mouth flat. Can you make your eyes go sort of dead? I want you to
chill
. Got it?”

 

AND THE HONORABLE JUDGE STICKING DID SMILE, BUT SHE WAS
a bit of an intellectual, too. She drew herself together and delivered a pretty serious admonishment when she passed sentence, even quoting Robert Lowell to us—“some people would say that monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat,” she announced. “But what I find offensive is your reckless disregard of the public process. The legal process that holds our community above casual violence of all kinds.”

She gave Tad three years' probation, a gruesome fine, two
hundred hours of community service, and mandatory alcoholism evaluation. She acknowledged my accessory role with two hundred hours of community service.
As if you know how to do anything else
, Tad wrote to me later.

I called Gayle several times and left messages but didn't hear from her. So one day I drove over to her house. She let me in with an unnerving calm. At first we avoided meeting each other's eyes.

“Come on to the table,” she said. She set out cups and tea bags, a jar of honey.

“I wonder what you think of all this,” I said at last.

“I think I almost lost my head over you,” she said. “For a while there.”

Something did a somersault inside my chest. “I'm the one lost my head.”

“You doing okay?”

“A funny thing happened,” I said. “An Anchorage radio station called. They want me to guest-host a talk show once in a while, just once a week—and see how that goes. Unbelievable offer. There's no steady income at all in that, but it did surprise me, just the same. I think I'll do it.”

“You'll leave town?” She sounded dismayed. My heart leaped again.

“Oh, no. I'd commute. What's there to leave for?” Shy, I thought; maybe she's shy. She's tongue-tied. That's all it is. Surely.

“So I'll be around,” I continued, feeling pretty shy myself. “Do you know if you…do you, I mean what do you think, Gayle, could we…”

“Lot of work, getting to know someone,” she said. “I don't mean you and me especially.” And she sat back in her chair, pushing away from the table a bit, as if the effort of using that phrase,
you and me
, was causing a physical strain of some kind. “But just about everyone. Lot of work.”

“It is hard.”

“Take you, for instance.”

“Let's not.”

“I suppose you're loyal. You're loyal to your friend Tad, even loyal to your own past. I mean, you wouldn't tell stories on yourself, would you?”

“'Course I tell stories on myself. I'd be crazy not to see the humor in what I've done.”

“That's not what I mean.” She got up from the table and returned with a hot kettle, poured water into the cups. “What I mean is, you don't pretend to do an about-face. You own your stories about yourself. You don't run out on yourself. There's a connection between Gus of five years ago, ten years ago, and the man here with me.” I thought she lingered on the last part of that sentence. I liked it, too. The man here with me.