Threadbare

Class and Crime in Urban Alaska

Mary Kudenov

• Publisher: University of Alaska Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781602233416
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Alaska's perch at the geographic corner of civilization isn't all wilderness and reality TV. There's a darker side too. Above the 49th parallel some of the nation's highest rates of alcoholism, suicide, and violent crime can be found. While it can easy to write off or even romanticize these statistics as the product of a lingering Wild West culture, talking with real Alaskans reveals a different story.Journalist Mary Kudenov set out to find the true stories behind this "end-of-the-road" culture. Through her essays, we meet Alaskans who live outside the common adventurer narrative: a recent graduate of a court-sponsored sobriety program, a long-timer in the Hiland Mountain Correctional Center for women, a slum-landlord's emancipated teenage daughter, and even a post-rampage spree killer. Her subjects struggle with poverty and middle-class aspirations, education and minimum wage work, God and psychology. The result is a raw and startling collection of direct, ground-level reporting that will leave you deeply moved.

PART ONE

I need mercy

to make life that easy in this world.

If not that, I need to harden my edges

but mercy is a word

that leaves me open instead.

—Linda Hogan, “Mercy, the Word”

MERCY

I.

My brother Corkey rented the big gray house near the airport, and it was grander than anything I’d lived in, still as cement, quiet as a picture frame. It was quiet because I didn’t hear the single-engine planes anymore, rising and falling like giant mosquitoes from the swampy shores of Southeast Alaska. I was quiet, too, during the long stretches when he was away at logging camp or on a construction job. I waited for him with Tracie, my brother’s young wife, who would be sending me north to live with my mother as soon as the wild grasses turned to straw and Sears released the Back-to-School catalog.

The voice in my head was transforming into an echo of grownup imperatives: Put on clothes, something clean that Tracie will like. When you go downstairs, don’t tromp. At the long breakfast table, I sat across from Tracie and asked if my mom had called. When she said no, I asked for Captain Crunch.

“Say please.”

“Please. Did she call last night? After I went to bed?”

“Get your elbow off the table. No.”

I held my hands still in my lap while she poured the cereal. Someday, I knew, someday I would be a lady, like Baby on Dirty Dancing. Even Tracie thought my manners were getting better. Soon nobody would be able to tell I was raised by two teenage boys. I washed my hands before meals and never commented on bodily functions, no matter how funny. I had donned the internal corset of good manners: Stop talking when you chew; it’s gross. Go play outside.

Somewhere off the airstrip, our cat Bogus hunted for mice in the tall grass. Her kittens played in an old shed that smelled like kerosene and sawdust—my favorite place. It was big enough to hold a small plane and maybe it had once, but in 1988 it was full of old shovels and rusty saws. Spider silk hung from corners and spanned the firewood stacked neatly on the dirt floor.

Sunlight, yellow and hot, fingered in through the cracks in the boards. I sat in the puddles of light, watching Bogus’s kittens fight and play. Occasionally they would stop their games and sniff the corners looking for their mom. She didn’t care if I held them or named them. Cali. Oatmeal. Charlie. Morris. I could spend hours in that shed. A single strip of sun warmed Cali’s fur as she slept in my lap, stretched out like a slinky.

Bogus shot past us on quiet feet, her mouth full of something. She set a live mouse down in the dirt in front of me. I could see its little heart pulse against its ribs, the only movement of its brown body. A scared baby mouse, pulled from the grass. Bogus was teaching her kittens to hunt. They must. And I knew I shouldn’t interfere. It was agony watching the kittens bat him around while he froze in fear. Cali crouched, shook her butt, and pounced.

Save him, said the voice.

I grabbed the baby from Cali and held him in the center of my palm. He was bleeding, barely moving. Suffering.

Just put him out of his misery, I told myself. Give him back.

Oatmeal batted him to Cali. Cali flung him by my feet. It was time to make a deal with myself: if I picked up the mouse and he was still breathing, I would nurse him back to health. I held him right in front of my eyes. His chest was barely moving. I poured my prized white pebbles out of a silver Sucrets tin and put the mouse inside. The kittens gathered at my feet, waiting for my next move. He looked beyond saving. I made another deal with myself: if he was still alive in five minutes, I would give him back, and if he was dead, I would bury him.

I knew enough about the cats to assume they were never going to eat him. It’s the hunt that kittens like.

Dig a hole.

There was soft ground on the far end of the driveway. Packing a shovel out of the shed would only invite Tracie’s attention. Instead, I used my hands, ripped up the weeds, and dug into the dirt with my nails. The earth was soft but gravelly, just enough soil for the strong wild grasses that grew past my waist.

It doesn’t have to be deep.

I wanted it to be over with. I ran back to the shed and grabbed the tiny coffin.

Don’t look inside. Just get it over with.

After, I went inside to wash up, taking time to scrub my black fingernails back to a ladylike pink. Tracie would like that. But the moment I was satisfied that my hands were clean, I realized I never checked to see if the mouse was still breathing when I buried him.

The sun was high, so high that nothing had shadows—not the house or the shed, not even the grass. The consequences of my first act of pity were rooting into me like a weed.

I dug him up and sat back on my ankles looking at the box. Had I buried him alive? Was he still suffering? I couldn’t bring myself to look. Instead, I leaned over and pressed my ear to the tin.

Listen.

II.

The next-door neighbor, Mark Andrews, shot more than twenty of his huskies on Mother’s Day. The good shots killed, quick and neat. Twelve dogs found alive had to be euthanized later at the animal shelter.

I heard it that night, lying in bed. Bang. Bang. Bang. The shots interrupted my teenage reverie of boys and bikes and summer’s-almost-here. The bang rang in my head and rattled through my spine. I told myself not to be scared. You’re almost sixteen years old. People just shoot guns around here. Bang. Bang-bang. Right next door.

The Anchorage Daily News and the Seward Phoenix Log reported on it, a big story for sleepy Moose Pass, Alaska. A few months earlier, in January of 1996, troopers found 284 marijuana plants in Mark’s home, enough to live on, off the books. Enough to assure a long stay in Seward’s Spring Creek Correctional Center. But what neither paper mentioned was that after the bust, the signs went up: Free Huskies. An ad in the classified section. I heard it on the radio in town: Free Huskies at Mile 29. By March I could see their rib bones; he fed them only every other day to make the food last.

The neighbors said that Mark walked down to the Moose Pass Inn that night, bought a fifth of Canadian Hunter from the only liquor store in town, and drank it. Sometimes I wonder if he cried. I bet he did. I try not to think about it.

Bang. Moose Pass stirs with the muted ghosts of barking dogs. The whole kennel has gone quiet.

At sixteen years old, I was still a mystery to myself, and I didn’t know Mark apart from what I’d heard in town gossip. But I believed something, and it grew out of me like a dandelion: what the papers didn’t report, couldn’t (because what kind of person can sympathize with the monster that “stacked the dead dogs ten-high like cord wood”?), was that somewhere in that mad, gun-slinging drunkenness, was a sick man ready to skip town and desperate to show one last act of mercy.

III.

Jade’s eyes move in their sockets like flies in a jar. This is not the kind of woman who does one thing at a time. I watch Jade wipe off the desk in the education center with disinfectant and close drawers with the nudge of her knee. A small radio rests in the breast pocket of her scrubs and she has pulled the headphones down to her neck to talk. Pop music blares from the small speakers, and Jade rocks with the beat as she talks and cleans.

Jade’s hot-wire energy didn’t make me nervous like it once had, like it should have after working in Hiland for two years. Don’t get soft, I told myself and inched my hand a little closer to the radio that could instantly connect me to the nearest guard. I forced myself to read Jade’s dull yellow scrubs, the bold, black font that said PRISONER.

Jade was telling me a story. She said, “She looks like a wolf now. Howls like a wolf. Hair all crazy and shit. She just paces in there, day and night. You know? They haven’t let anyone talk to her for like a year.”

Jade was talking about another inmate who had been confined to the Solitary Treatment Unit of Hiland Mountain Correctional Center, where I teach remedial math and creative writing. Solitary was the prison inside prison. Prison squared.

“It’s fucked,” Jade was saying. “They act like she’s an animal. She can’t even talk to her mom.” That really irritated Jade, whose own mother had died less than a year before.

“No one is allowed to talk to her? Not even other women in the hole?” I asked, stretching my voice into obvious skepticism.

“Nope,” Jade said.

I was thirty years old at the time of this conversation, and the thought of no human contact made me squirm, and I could see that it made Jade squirm too. No words, no touch, no pity? I remembered feeling so lonely once that my insides had turned into air and I disappeared inside a big gray house.

“I’m never going back to the hole. Fuck that,” Jade continued. “You know that girl?” She was still talking about the Wolf. “She’s been in there two years. Every night she cries, and no one will talk to her. So here’s what I do: I’m mopping, right? And I know the guard who’s working this one day and she’s cool; she doesn’t look. I’m mopping and mopping and mop right over to her cell. I squat down by the meal slit, like this—”

Jade crouched to demonstrate. With her thick muscular legs and short black hair, she looked like a wild momma panther, might spring any minute.

“I say Psst. Psst. Come here, girl. But she’s scared of me. She thinks I’m some big, mean dyke. So I say, no girl—come here. I just want to talk to you. Come here.” Jade motioned to me like I was the wolf woman, pacing behind the steel bars like a zoo animal.

“I say, It’s okay. It’s okay, girl. I just want to say hi. You want me to bring you a book or something? I’ll bring you a book.” Jade delivered the last lines of the story in a high register, like she was talking to a little girl after a nightmare. For one long second, an expression of perfect charity softened her features before they turned back to felon’s stone.

At first, each act of humanity I had witnessed in Hiland looked naked and brave. But I began to wonder if they were all around me. I wanted to believe that when people do something bad, horrible even, they do it with misguided benevolence. I took my hand off the radio and leaned into the story. I wanted Jade to say she opened the door for the wolf woman. I wanted the woman to see her mother, to feel the touch of another human being.

“Do you think they will ever let her into open population?” I asked.

Jade stood up, wiped her palms on her thighs, and said, “No. She’s wild now.”

I’d been holding my breath, and when I finally let it out, I pretended to blow the cotton-tipped seeds from the orb of a dandelion. Close your eyes. Don’t worry about the radio. Inside you’re as big as a meadow. The seeds floated out of the education center and over the razor-wire fences, floated away.

A HISTORY OF SMOKING

Amber stuffed the hollow stalks of old cow parsnip with dried grass, lit the end, and smoked it like a roll-your-own. We were so young, first or second grade. Our babysitter, Buffy, a brown terrier-poodle mix, investigated nearby bushes but never wandered far. Leaning against the log-sized roots of the Traffic Tree, we pretended to be older, like the big kids who smoked “weeds” out of soda cans here. In the very spot we enjoyed our first cigarette, we’d once watched a game of spin the bottle, secretly observing locked-lip teenagers. We could be ninja quiet in the right circumstances, but there was no need for it that day. We passed the smoke between us like old pros.

Amber’s well-worn sweat suit hosted an alphabet collage, A through Z in multiple colors, the white letters yellowing and the knees threadbare. Amber lived next door to me with her father, brother, and sister. I was a little jealous that she had a dad, and he was home most of the time, while my mom was often working. Learning my father’s name was growing into an obsession, and Amber understood—she had her own mysteries to solve. A couple years before, her mother went out for drinks and never made it back home. She might have been somewhere called Seattle, Amber thought.

Amber held her makeshift cigarette with her whole hand, sucked in as hard as she could, and coughed when she exhaled.

“Does your mom smoke?” she asked when she could talk again.

“Yeah, I guess. I broke all her cigarettes a long time ago, when I was like three,” I said. I didn’t really want to talk about my mom. I didn’t really want to smoke either, yet the fake cigarettes had been my idea. I closed my throat and tilted my head, letting the smoke escape from my open mouth before it got too far inside.

Sunshine fell through the spruce in tiny patches, spotting us with yellow. Buffy, satisfied that the woods were safe, lay down and rested his head on my knee. He smelled like moss and wet dog and I probably did too, sitting as we were on damp ground.

“Did your mom smoke?” I asked to be polite. Amber always wanted to talk about her mom.

“I don’t remember,” she said.

On nights when my mother didn’t come home before I went to bed, I watched HBO with my big brother, Seth. Children of the Corn, Friday the 13th, Creepshow, Fraggle Rock. When she did come home, she smelled like pancakes and sausage and fries—the Bamboo Room aroma, a scent that wafts off all diner waitresses. I would sleep in the living room with her just to be near it. If the tooth fairy left quarters, they were sticky with maple syrup. Every day I asked my mother for information about my father, and she pretended not to hear me. Seth told me it was probably Frank, and I understood that was likely the truth, but I needed my mom to say so.

It poured in Southeast Alaska, pennies and frogs and buckets of rain. When our straw...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author