Hotel of the Saints (14 page)

In the morning he recognized the boat and captain from two years before. And on the other side of the stone arch he found his marlin as though it had summoned him. It charged out, paused, then changed its direction. He let it resist him, let it hurl itself from the water and strain against the line in its tremendous urge to stay alive. He felt the marlin's will, separate from his. Whenever it halted its struggle, Sam regained the line and lured it closer. To keep it from eluding him, he had to tire it, let it play its game, wait it out without exhausting himself.

As he brought it against the boat, its stripes—bluish and black, iridescent—had already dulled. Gulls and cormorants circled the boat—vultures of the sea —and the mate stepped next to him, ready to gaff the marlin. Already Sam could see its massive body fastened to the back of the boat, could feel its cold skin with the flaky scales —coarse if he were to stroke his hand toward its spike, smooth if he were to rub his hand toward the tail —and all at once he wanted to release the fish before the color drained from it completely, watch it shimmer as it disappeared along the boat, think about it when he was back home, and know it still belonged to him in the depth of the Pacific.

“Wait.” He caught the mate's arm and bent across the side to twist out the hook, but as the marlin turned dark and reached
its point of nothingness, he could not abstain from pressing his hands against the taut skin as if to infuse the great fish with his spirit. For a moment, there, it felt as though the scales were coming off in his palms, leaving the outlines of his hands on the marlin, and as he let it go, it darted away, heaving itself into life—forever altered, its colors more radiant than before.

This June,
the Spokane River is running higher than I've ever seen it, spilling in white torrents across the volcanic rocks, dragging trees into its current. The wishbone shapes of their branches trap the river in silver arrows, then release it, yield. Already, two people have drowned: a car mechanic who dived from the footbridge between the Jesuit college and the yuppie condos, and a student from Lewis and Clark who tied a rope between herself and her inflatable raft because she didn't like life preservers.

The fitfulness of the river resonates throughout Spokane. When I take my old dog, Basil, for his walk early this morning, pools of shards glitter in the sun outside the gay bar on the corner of Monroe.

“Watch out.” I pull Basil away from the shattered glass. It has happened here before —some rednecks heaving bricks into the parked cars at night—and it pisses me off, makes me want to smash their windows too. “Damn rednecks,” I tell Basil.

He sways, and I press my palms against his yellow flanks, keep them there, murmur to him while he steadies himself.

“You know what we should do, you and I? Hold vigil here some night. Sit on the curb and wait for those rednecks. And if they ask if we're here to make sure the perverts can dance, I'll tell them that you and I are here to scare perverts like
them
away. All you have to do is growl at them. And look ferocious.”

As a young dog, Basil used to race toward me like a bullet-sleek and powerful, looking ferocious—yet always stopping himself inches before he could knock me over. So polite. But strangers were frightened when he came at them like that, because they had no idea how gentle he was.

“Damn rednecks.”

Throughout Basil's body, I can feel how anxious he is about falling, as anxious as he has been lately about getting up. Often, his legs will splay outward, landing him flat on his belly like a seal. And here I am recruiting him in my attack-dog fantasies. He's the kind of dog who doesn't like looking foolish. That's why he'll hesitate before easing himself down the steps into our yard, before climbing into my sister Ev's station wagon. Dignity is essential to Basil. Dignity and politeness. First thing every day he waits for me by the fridge, nudging me to dip my finger into his fudge jar and coat half an aspirin for him. He'll lick my finger, my hand, lick hard and swallow. Without the fudge, he would spit out his medicine in a second. Whenever I wash his saliva from my hands, I feel sad for Basil. Sad for all I haven't done for him. And fucking scared. For myself. Because he can't last much longer.

“Hey, we're almost there,” I tell him.

He shakes himself almost playfully, tries to run, to pull me along.
Bad choice.
Moments like this, when he forgets his aches and gets exuberant, I can still recognize the puppy in him. He'll
hear the crinkling of cellophane coming off a new rawhide bone, say, or watch me tie my Nikes, and hell try to leap up and down. Inevitably, though, hell get that puzzled expression on his face, because his body will remind him that he is an old dog.

As it does now. Bringing him to a stop. His chest is heaving, pumping, and when he moves forward along the sidewalk and across the street with me, it's on legs that are stiff, so stiff. Twelve years ago, when Ev and I first saw him at the Spokanimal shelter, he was playing in a kennel with another gorgeous yellow pup, his brother, the two of them a sun-colored tangle of legs and tails until his brother spotted us and scurried across Basil to court us with yelps and with licks, showing off by standing on his hind legs and rolling on his back, reminding me of those popular kids way back in school who'd always seemed so sure they'd get picked first. Basil, however, made no effort to win us over, and when I told Ev he was the one I wanted to adopt and why, she smiled and nodded, because she had never been one of the popular kids either. And all along, Basil sat there quietly, one ear cocked, observing us with the dignity of a much older dog.

The dog he now has grown into.

At the Street Café, I slip the end of his leash around the iron leg of an outdoor table, as usual. “I'll be right back with some water for you,” I promise, but when I return with my coffee and his water, he's no longer there. I set both paper cups on the table, step into the road, whistle. “Basil… Basil?”

While I'm checking the rear parking lot, Moss, who works at the Street Café, sticks her head from the kitchen door. “Basil-boy …” she chants, breath warm with milk and granola. Her black hair is spiked, showing its blond roots. “Hey, Basilboy …”

Moss's real name used to be Lucy. Lucy Ferdinand. That was before she left her family and went to divinity school at Yale, where she lasted seventeen months. Now Moss believes she is meant to meditate and cook in the Pacific Northwest. Her specialty is a tangy garbanzo stew with tons of curry and specks of unidentifiable green. When she serves your food, she stands so close you swear she's in lust with you. It makes some customers real jumpy; but after you've been around her enough, you can see that she stands this close to everyone, women and men. If you step away, she only follows.

“I'll help you look.” The screen door slams behind her.

“He can't have gotten far,” I tell her as we cross the Monroe Street Bridge to downtown. “You know how slow he is with his arthritis.”

Usually I stop halfway across this bridge: it's the best spot to watch the rapids—on one side the lower falls, on the other the downriver gorge—where they plummet one hundred fifty feet in the center of Spokane. They're almost entirely white—that's how fast they are—coating my face with their cool breath as wind tunnels beneath them. For me, waterfalls are mesmerizing the way fires are, making it hard to look away. But today, I rush through their mist. On the other side of the bridge, two cars and a truck with a gun rack are waiting at a stop light.

“Basil.” I whistle. “Come here, good boy….” But the only one I see is Moss, leaping into my field of vision wherever I turn to search.

“Basil still has life in his eyes,” she tells me.

“He is old. And not very strong.”

When Basil was younger, I used to walk him on the river trail that starts at the falls and ends near the old Shriners Hospital.
Halfway in between is our neighborhood, a handful of houses that sit high above the north bank, hidden by lush vegetation. Here, the bed of the river is wider than downtown, more lake than stream, the shape of a snake that swallowed a sheep. Though we live just a mile downstream from the falls and the stores, most people don't realize our neighborhood exists. It's so secluded that we might as well be hours away from the city. And we rather like that.

This past year, the river trail has become too uneven for Basil, and he can no longer negotiate the steep path between the trail and our house. When Ev and I were girls, we used to clear that path every May with our father, who was as impatient as we to swim, though the water was still cool; but now we merely whack at the dense weeds and shrubs and sumacs every few years to keep them from absorbing our path altogether into the overgrown hillside that turns amber and dry before the end of summer.

“You think Basil is afraid?” Moss asks.

“Of porcupines. He went in for porcupine quills and — “

“You've told me the porcupine story, Libby.”

“He is also afraid of water. You've seen him—he'll go right up to the edge, but never in, and when Ev and I swim, he just runs along the bank, yelping as if he wanted to rescue us.”

“What I meant was…” Moss presses two fingers against her high forehead and circles them. Her face is all forehead, her hair short like a boy's. She's the only blonde I know who darkens her hair deliberately, and she snips at it every day the way some men snip at their beards.

“What I meant was,” Moss says, “afraid of dying.”

“Not nearly as afraid as I
am
of him dying.”

“You'll know it's time for him to go when the life in his eyes goes dim.”

Moss said the same thing last Sunday to Ev and me when she served us eggplant kabobs. Life is one of Moss's passionate subjects: it's something she “embraces” and “balances.” Ev and I see her at least once a week when we eat at the Street Café. Our regular table is next to the chocolate carousel, the cake display where a dozen variations of chocolate cake revolve behind curved glass. Food at the Street Café never tastes the same twice in a row. That's what Ev and I like about it. That's why we endure the long wait that, inevitably, is part of eating here. Moss is an inspired cook, the only one who's worked at the café for longer than a year and who seems to follow some kind of schedule. At least most days. Employees here change frequently, bringing with them flowing garments and hair, traipsing between the stoves and dining tables in their Teva sandals or combat boots, tinkering with recipes they remember from a grandmother or have unearthed in ethnic vegetarian cookbooks published by communes that dissolved decades ago.

“My boyfriend, he gave me a black rose the other night,” Moss tells me as we walk past the construction site of the new library.'

“The kind of red that's almost black?”

“No. Totally black.”

“Basil … Basil …” I check the street next to the library. Nothing. I'm so impatient for this library to be completed. Our temporary library has been squeezed into what used to be J. C. Penney, and it has to share the building with a discount store that, I swear, employs more detectives than salespeople. You can never locate what you came in for, but there's usually a
man in a cheap suit stalking you. And that's damn distracting. And tempting. Tempting because it makes you want to test how good those detectives really are and, even though you've never thought of shoplifting, to snatch a pair of ninety-nine-cent socks, say, and a three-dollar tie and stuff them into your pockets. The only decent thing we ever bought there was a purple terry-cloth robe for Ev. We avoid shopping there, because we don't particularly enjoy feeling like suspects. Besides, the store has a lousy return policy—store credit only—which means you have to endure another one of those lovely shopping experiences.
No, thank you.

“My boyfriend says they're supposed to last longer.”

“What?”

“Black roses.”

“Make sure to drop a penny into the vase.”

We take the Lincoln Street Bridge back across the river. In the fenced playground of the YMCA, the day-care toddlers are playing, diapers pressing their squat legs into O-shapes. One pale, stocky girl is reaching through the metal links with a plastic shovel to get the dirt on the outside of the fence. I can imagine what my sister would make of that.
“That girl will always be like that” she'd say, “wanting what's outside her own boundaries. Like you, Libby.”

Please.
I used to think boundaries were the lines between countries, but Ev has been talking a lot about what she calls personal boundaries. Her own boundaries. Her professor's boundaries. Our neighbor Gloria's boundaries. Our paperboy's boundaries. Moss's boundaries. Lately even the river's boundaries as it pulls lives into its current, growing fat on souls.

These days, Ev is into textbook interpretations. After twentyfour
years of working with me in the plant shop that our parents started, Ev is now taking psychology classes and telling me that my boundaries are inconsistent. She never mentioned returning to college—not until she started on speed. Legal speed: methylphenidate. Her doctor wrote a prescription for her when she complained about getting drowsy while doing our accounts. Within a week of swallowing speed, Ev built a wooden bicycle-rack, hosed down the walls of our potting shed, designed a stained-glass window in six shades of green for the plant shop, brought home college catalogues, registered for classes, and started dating a student half her age, a chaste and brainy encounter, I suspect, like most of Ev's encounters. She thrives on passion of the mind, prefers it to the messiness of bodily passions.

I know all the reasons why it's foolish to live with my sister when, together, we're a century old. Ev's fifty-one, I'm forty-nine, and we've never been apart. Including the year when I was nineteen and married to Billy Wood, who moved in with me and my parents and Ev. Maybe that's why Billy and I didn't make it to our first anniversary. One Sunday we broke up in Knight's Diner after ordering breakfast. We were arguing, loudly, as we often did the instant we were out of the house, and just as our favorite waitress, Marie, was bringing our plates, Billy shoved his chair aside and stomped out. Since I didn't want to be rude to Marie, I ate my eggs over easy, certain that everyone in Knight's Diner was staring at me while I sat across from Billy's waffles.