And She Was Read Free Page A

flowers. The kitchen was immaculate. And all geese. The curtains were flocks of geese, likewise pot holders, dishtowels. A line of white geese, dainty blue ribbons around their necks, walked around a wallpaper border. A goosey cloth flowed down a round dining table, topped with a goose-painted empty vase.
    Bellie waved her jeweled hand toward the kitchen table and disappeared into the narrow hall behind the living room. I sat in one of two folding chairs. She returned with a book-size mirror, etched with a prancing unicorn, dumped a little mountain of coke over the unicorn’s horns, and quickly laid out four narrow lines.
    Bellie sat back. “Who you here with?”
    “Fisherman I met up with. Thad Rouke.” She offered me a short pink straw, and I held my hair back with one hand while I sniffed.
    “Thad’s not bad. Just get in on the ferry?”
    “Yeah.”
    Bellie reached for the straw and did her lines. “You won’t like it here.”
    “How do you know?” I smudged my ring finger through the blurry residue.
    “I can tell.” She laughed, covering her mouth, and started a pot of coffee.
    I didn’t know what to say to that. And it pissed me off. So I laid out two more lines to buy some time. I’ve never really liked coke. But Iliked doing it. The feel of razor against glass, the chopping and sliding and the perfect lines drawn together. At least in the company I kept, snorting coke was communal and ritual, the prelude to seemingly meaningful conversation, secrets revealed.
    “The thing is,” Bellie said above the sputtering Mr. Coffee, “it’s not the kind of place you should come to by accident. And you,” she said, eyes taking in everything from my boots to my hair, “look like an accident.”
    I sipped at the coffee she offered in a goose-spotted cup, wondering if she was right. Is this what I’d been feeling before the ferry docked? The disgrace of coming so far from everything by accident. I looked up at her, raised my eyebrows, and smiled. “Fuck you.”
    She snickered again, behind her jeweled hand, and sat down to snort her line. I watched her. The left hand, the one not holding the straw, moved to her forehead, fingers moving over the line between hair and skin. And I saw the mark. A birthmark white as the cocaine, bright as a spotlight against her brown skin, peeking through that curtain of black hair.
     
    At 7 A.M. I was heading back down Bellie’s rocky road toward the HiTide. The coke was wearing off, leaving that edgy, needy stain behind. Not that I wanted more blow. I wanted something necessary to do. I looked toward the ocean: 800 miles to Anchorage, 1,100 to Seattle, 2,000 to Russia. I kept thinking about the words scrawled on ancient maps to warn sailors when they neared the boundaries of the known world—Beyond here be monsters. Bellie was right; I’d missed the warning, floated across and landed on terra incognita.
    Of course, I was used to missing the warning signs. I’m blond. I miss things. I neglect things. I ignore things.
    When I say I’m blond, I mean that I’m really blond, that the color is real and that it’s very blond. The color of loose women and trailer trash. It’s the kind of hair that demands a sleazy respect. I didn’t realize how much I’d let my hair control me, define me, until I came to Dutch Harbor. Until I met them. The Aleutians were made for people with black hair. Straight, shiny black. They were a dark background that revealed my image slowly, then all at once, like staring at a MagicEye poster. And when I got it, when the squiggles shifted into form, it wasn’t pretty.
     
    “I could show you the Elbow Room,” Thad said two hours later while we shoved eggs Benedict into our mouths at the HiTide dining room.
    “Sure.”
    “You’re going to love it here.” Thad’s grin was all boyish yet tinged with sexual promise. I swept my hair away from my face and grinned back. Thad had that kind of infectious smile. He lived in a sunny world. It made sense