We Know

The cold interrogation room, the car ride with Slim and the big guy, the coerced drop-off at LAX- they left me unable to catch my breath. At the Alaska Airlines counter, my hands shook so badly I could hardly count out seven of the traveler's checks from the envelope. I didn't know that oneway cost more than round-trip, and it took the agent to say, "Then just buy a round-trip and don't come back."

She looked mystified by my expression. I could only imagine what / looked like.

A moment later she frowned down at my driver's license. "I can't issue you this ticket. You're not eighteen for two more days."

I showed her the number written on the envelope and waited, melting in sweat, as she called and explained the situation.

"Oh, okay, sir. Right away, sir." The reverence in her voice and her lack of eye contact seemed to seal my fate as a nonentity. She hung up, printed my ticket, and handed it to me without further comment.

I spent half the flight in the cramped bathroom, sitting on the toilet and rocking myself while impatient passengers banged on the flimsy door. My running made me look guilty, but it also kept Callie clear, and that was a trade I was willing to live with. But how would I know when it would be safe to see her again?

We set down in Anchorage, the wind on the tarmac cutting me at the neck, the shins. I didn't even have a jacket. I followed a matronly woman who'd been on my flight to the terminal and boarded the same bus. I suppose I was clinging to anything familiar. She got off an hour in, and I watched her vanish into the white morning haze, my breath steaming the window. I rode on, watching the permafrost roll by, as blank and lifeless as I felt. I woke up half dead at the end of the line in Ketchikan.

It was light till ten-thirty at night. I got a job in a cannery, cutting the heads off salmon. No one asked questions. All those felons in Alaska, everyone on the run from something. Deadbeat dads and bail skippers. My own private Siberia.

I worked the line next to a massive bearded guy named Liffman who wore an eye patch and a maniacal grin. He brandished his knife with skill and zest that left me wondering.

After a few weeks, at bedtime, I called Callie just to hear her voice. I had to assume that the house was bugged, since they'd known about my conversations with her, but I needed to know she was safe. After she said "Hello" a third time, I hung up. I couldn't sleep, so I pulled the phone onto my little rented bed and curled around it, as if it held some imprint of my mom's voice.

I watched the news obsessively for some news about an attempt on Caruthers's life, but as the months dragged out, I tuned in less and less. Winter got so cold it froze the ears and tails off cats. I jerked awake at 2:18 every night, my arms clutching at Frank as he bled out. After six months Callie's home line was disconnected, so I risked a call to her at work.

Leaning against the pay phone at the back of the poolhall, sticky with sweat and trapped air, I pressed the familiar buttons. I'd gulped down a few beers to shore up my courage, and my buzz turned the whole thing into a dream-the sound of her, my shaky words, so much resentment and pain that neither of us could stop talking to breathe. She demanded to see me. When I told her it wasn't safe, she yelled at me until I eased the phone back onto its cradle.

I spent a sleepless week worried that they'd monitored the call and were coming to throw me in jail, but there wasn't anything I could do about it.

A few nights later, I came across Liffman outside the bar, shooting a pistol at a moose-crossing sign. His night-vision goggles were askew, and he staggered under the weight of the booze, but he cracked that sign again and again. The cops had wisely parked at a good distance and sat smoking on the curb, waiting for him to pass out. But Liffman, I'd learned, never passed out.

As he fumbled with a reload, I approached. Callie had never let Frank take me shooting, but I'd been around his guns enough to be calm in their presence. "Liffman."

"Yuh, Nicky?"

"What do you say we get you some sleep so tonight doesn't cut into your drinking tomorrow."

It took a few moments for him to decipher the words through the booze. Then a smile cracked his wind-chapped face, and he slid the gun into his pocket and trudged home. The cops waved as we passed.

The next day at work, while whacking the head off a sockeye, he gave me that missing-tooth grin. "You ready for when they come for you?"

I kept working.

He lopped off a few more heads, flicked them to the bin, the pink spray specking his corded forearms. "/ am. I'm ready for those motherfuckers. DEA, IRS. Shit, when the black suits come sniffin', I'll be a trace in the wind. Or a round in their chest."

When the whistle blew, I followed him out to his truck. He never turned around, but he unlocked the passenger side first, left the door standing open. I got in.

I said, "I don't want to be at the mercy of anyone ever again."