The Smell of Other People's Houses Read online

  —

  “Will we still be able to go out on deck and look for orcas?” Sam asked, as if he needed a better excuse than just getting away from my mother’s awful boyfriend, Nathan Hodges.

  I don’t want to talk bad about my mom. I mean, I think she waited around for a while, hoping maybe Dad wasn’t really dead, but she gave up a lot sooner than me and definitely sooner than Sam.

  At some point I noticed Mom started looking tired all the time, and I realized she’d been sneaking out every night, hooking up with someone. In hindsight, the sneaking out was a lot better than bringing the guy home. I couldn’t believe it the first time I saw him. Nathan Hodges was short and squat, with stubby legs and Neanderthal arms, and fat sausage fingers. He gripped his beer can so tight, one hand could cover all but the last r in Budweiser. So, looks aren’t everything, but instead of words he grunted out commands that Mom jumped up to follow, and then he slapped her on the ass as she walked by. And it didn’t help that Nathan Hodges had some kind of grudge against Jack, which Mom seemed powerless to do anything about. How does someone go from being a decent mother and having a husband who treats her like a queen to bringing home the first mangy stray dog she finds on the street?

  “You’re too young, Hank,” she said to me, the one time I asked her what the hell she was doing. “You wait until your whole world falls out from under you.”

  “My world is falling out from under me,” I said.

  “Your dad was a great guy, but he was never home. You boys have him on a pedestal because that’s what kids do around here. They all have these romantic notions of the mysterious dad out fishing, while the women stay home and do all the work. It’s easy to make a martyr out of the guy who goes and gets himself killed. I’m just another fishing widow, left with a bunch of mouths to feed.”

  She was looking deep into her cup of Hills Bros. coffee. As if that cup of coffee was the only thing in the world that understood her now. At that moment, I kind of hated her for being the one who lived. I’m ashamed to admit it, but there you go.

  “At least I got a guy who comes home every night,” she said, like she was a deflated balloon that had been flying around the room with a slow leak and was relieved to just finally land.

  “Right,” I said, “because that seems to be working out real well for all of us.”

  —

  I pretty much avoided her after that, which wasn’t as hard as you might think. It hurt to hear her say my dad wasn’t what I’d thought he’d been. It nagged at me for days, like a splinter under the skin. So it was no surprise when I ended up in the garage going through my dad’s old boxes, trying to get a better picture of the man I couldn’t stop missing.

  The boxes smelled like my dad’s aftershave, Old Spice. I thought maybe a bottle of it had gotten shoved in somewhere, underneath his old news clippings or the fishing magazines with huge glossy covers of rugged, bearded men holding up halibut as big as them. Dad was a news junkie and he saved everything. But no aftershave bottle.

  There was stuff about the territorial governor and the statehood commission. I forgot that when we were born Alaska was still a territory. There was the headline from 1959—“We’re In”—and I could almost hear my dad’s voice saying sadly, “That’s sure going to change things.”

  I wished I could ask him what he’d meant and if it was different now. But everything really was different now. I couldn’t blame statehood, but if there was a way, I’d consider it.

  Jack had come in just then and said, “What’s that smell?”

  “It’s Old Spice,” I said. Jack had been too young to remember what our father smelled like.

  “It’s creepy,” Jack said. “Feels like someone’s in here.”

  “Stop it, Jack.”

  My brother has this really weird streak—like a sixth sense. Sometimes Sam and I will joke about it, but I didn’t find it funny just then with my dad’s stuff all around us and his very distinct smell lingering like a ghost. Jack raised an eyebrow at me and shrugged.

  He knows more than any fourteen-year-old kid should know about people. It has the unfortunate effect of making me want to leap up and protect him all the time, because I don’t think the world knows what to do with people like Jack.

  “I’ve been reading through the newspaper and cutting out stories,” he said. “You know, the way Dad used to.”

  Jack picks up on things easily. He knew that Sam and I missed this seemingly insignificant detail about our dad—the way he saved news clippings—and so he’d try to do something about it. “Look at this,” he said, showing me an article he’d clipped out. It was already two months old.

  May 5, 1970, Fairbanks: The tripod on the Nenana River fell at exactly 10:37 a.m. yesterday to mark the end of the 1970 Nenana Ice Classic and signal the beginning of spring. Five lucky winners will split the $10,000 pot. One of the five is a sixteen-year-old native girl, who has asked not to be identified. She is the youngest winner yet for the Ice Classic tournament, which was started as a betting pool in 1906 as a way for miners to entertain themselves in anticipation of the spring breakup.

  “She’s going to get two thousand dollars, that girl is,” Jack said. “That’s a hell of a lot of money.”

  Jack isn’t a jealous person, but he was obviously jealous about this.

  “Jack?” I said. “What would you do with all that money?”

  “I’d leave,” he said, without even thinking about it. “I’d take that money and I’d get on a ferry and I’d leave.”

  Right about then the window blew open, banging against the garage wall and making us both jump. A cold wind started blowing all the old newspapers and receipts around the garage. It sounded like the flapping of a hundred invisible wings whipping up the last bits of my dad, trying to resurrect him. When the dust settled, all I could smell was that Old Spice aftershave, and right then I knew I had to listen to Jack.

  “Let’s go,” I said to him. “Let’s get Sam and let’s go.”

  —

  “We won’t have to stay hidden the whole time, if that’s what you’re asking,” I told Sam in answer to his question about looking for whales. “But I think it’s rare to see orcas.”

  Sam remembered every single fishing story Dad ever told us. I could hear my mother’s voice in my head—you boys think those fishing stories are so mysterious and romantic, always keeping him up on a pedestal—but I pushed it away and thought about what Dad told us instead, about the time he was longlining for black cod. The baited lines sit on the bottom of the ocean for a few hours, then get pulled up by hydraulics, hopefully loaded with fish. By the time they were pulling in the gear, orcas had totally surrounded the boat.

  “Gorgeous animals,” Dad said. “So quick, so powerful. They can pull bait right off the gear. The only thing left on the hook after we pulled in the line was a pair of black cod lips.”

  Sam hung on to the stories like the lips had hung on to the hook, and he could recite every single one, even though it’s been years since Dad disappeared.

  Sam was the poet, the one who would keep Dad alive regardless of the facts. Those facts included his entire boat being swallowed in a tsunami. The one that hit right after the Good Friday earthquake had rocked the rest of the state—houses broke in half and slid into the bay in Anchorage; broken roads twisted all the way from Valdez to Turnagain Arm. But hundreds of miles away from the epicenter, it was the ocean that wreaked havoc, swallowing a whole fleet of boats, including our father’s.

  I had begged him to take me on that particular trip to Massacre Bay. I was eleven. It was his favorite place to fish because the mountains jutted straight out of the ocean. “It feels like they’re hugging your boat and keeping you safe while you pull in the fish,” he’d said. I could not imagine a place called Massacre Bay feeling safe and secure like a hug. And I was right about that, wasn’t I?

  I’ve never been able to shake that feeling of Dad’s hand on top of my head, ruffling my hair while he said, “You stay home
and be the man of the house for me this one time. There will be other trips.”

  I didn’t realize that being the man of the house was going to get so goddamn tiring.

  —

  Hiding in the baggage cart is getting tiring as well, but since we didn’t win a pot of money like that girl in Fairbanks, it was the only way I could think of to sneak aboard. Thank God people have so much baggage when they leave Alaska. Just in this cart alone there are duffel bags, suitcases, boxes of frozen salmon, padded gun cases—and us. I move a box covered in duct tape closer to my left foot, trying to hide my legs. The shutters on the cart open and a wave of yellow sunlight bounces off my shoelaces. I hold my breath as someone pushes a cage in nearly on top of my foot. Inside it four mustard-brown hens squawk loudly. You have got to be kidding me.

  “They’ll be so lonely. Are you sure I can’t take them above deck with me?” a woman’s voice says.

  Sam’s mouth crinkles around the edges and I’m afraid he’s going to laugh. Jack stretches and yawns loudly, but the chickens are squawking so much, nobody is going to hear anything over that racket. I relax a little as the ferryman leads the woman away. We can still hear her high, protesting voice, and apparently so can her chickens, which call out to her in a chorus of mad clucks that luckily drown out Sam’s laughter.

  “Hush, Sam—” The cart is starting to move down the ramp.

  The car deck is a sensory overload of diesel, mold, and exhaust from all the vehicles. Jack wakes and tries to stretch, then looks around, disoriented. I press a finger to my lips and he stops moving. Jack nods and stays quiet. He is so easy. Unlike Sam, who is already giving me a can-we-please-get-off-this-thing-now kind of look. I’d really like to get as far away from town as possible before we show ourselves to the general public. That way there will be less of a chance of getting sent back if we get caught. If we could at least make it to Ketchikan or Prince Rupert, in Canada, that would be okay. All I found in my mom’s peanut butter jar was sixteen dollars, and I’m no idiot. That’s almost like having no money at all. I just want to be somewhere else before I worry about every single detail. We got this far, didn’t we?

  A million tiny needles dance under my skin all the way down to my toes, and I realize Sam is shaking my leg, which is fast asleep.

  “I’m getting a headache from this diesel smell,” he whispers. “And there’s going to be a car deck call soon. People are going to come get their bags. We have to get out of here anyway.”

  He’s right. We’ve done this trip enough to know the basics, even if it was a long time ago. Our parents brought tents and we camped up on the solarium. Jack was probably two or three; I doubt he remembers. It’s weird to think about how much stuff we brought along back then. Dad had to go back and forth to the car to get the cooler, the sleeping bags, the tent, and shopping bags full of food. This time all we’ve got is the sixteen dollars and two coats apiece, which we’re wearing in layers on our backs. At least it’s summer, but we can probably sleep inside in the forward lounge anyway, where it’s warmer.

  Sam squeezes my arm and I nod in agreement. Time to make a move.

  We slip out the back of the cart and slink behind the parked cars with blocks shoved under their front wheels to keep them from moving. We lurch from side to side, trying to find some kind of rhythm with the sway of the boat. Sea legs take a while, and ours are still asleep.

  The chicken lady sits hunched in the stairwell, her head in her hands. She’s waiting for the announcement saying it’s okay to go below deck. The way her frizzy gray hair hangs over her face makes her look like a mossy spruce tree, bent with age.

  “Your chickens are fine,” Jack says without thinking. She looks straight through him like he’s not even there.

  We go up to the bow and sit facing the wind, gladly trading diesel fumes for salt air, even if it does take our breath away. Sam scans the horizon for whales.

  “I’m hungry,” says Jack.

  “I know.” I’ve been dreading this moment.

  “Let’s wait a little longer. We can get some leftovers once people leave their trays.”

  Jack wrinkles his nose.

  “We have to save our money,” I tell him. “You’ll see. People just leave perfectly good things. Sometimes they don’t even touch it if they’re seasick or whatever. It’ll be fine.”

  “I want to stay and look for whales. You guys go ahead,” says Sam, staring out at the ocean.

  “We have to always stick together, Sam,” I say. “And if possible, we need to look like we’re with parents. Just sit close to people so it doesn’t look like we’re all alone.”

  “I can’t miss the whales,” he says. God, is he going to be this frustrating the whole time?

  But his voice tugs at something inside of me, that long-abandoned belief that my father might really come back. For Sam, Dad and the whales are one and the same. I’m a tiny bit envious that he still gets to have that. “All right, we’ll bring you some food. Stay right here, Sam. I mean it.”

  So Jack and I steer ourselves past the purser’s station, looking for all the world like any other normal, paying passengers. Except maybe puffier, because of our extra coats. I hear a twang, twang, twang behind me and turn to see Jack playing with something in his hand. “What is that?”

  He holds a skanky red rubber band in my face. It smells like shit.

  “Where did you get that?” I cover my nose.

  “One of those hens was pecking at it inside the cage. I was able to grab it through the wires.”

  “You’ll get a disease from that thing,” I say.

  “I think it’s a good-luck charm.” His face is all lit up with possibility. Remember when I said I was the most level-headed one in my family? If we survive this journey, it will be nothing short of a miracle, thanks to my brothers, who are starting to make me very nervous.

  “I’ll go give it to Sam,” Jack says. “It might help bring in the whales.”

  In spite of myself, I smile watching Jack run back to where Sam is still rooted to the deck. There’s Sam, still hoping Dad will come back, and Jack, trying to help find ways to make it so. What I feel is a mix of crazy love and jealousy—for both of them. And even after everything Jack’s been through, he still believes in good-luck charms. Did I stop believing in everything all at once, or was it so gradual I just didn’t notice?

  “You are absolutely washing those hands before we get food, even leftover food,” I tell him when he gets back. He smiles one of those break-your-heart-every-day kind of smiles, like he feels sorry for me because I have no imagination, but heads into the men’s room.

  The dining hall looks just like it did when we were here before. The long line at the buffet counter, the man flipping burgers at the grill in the little blue boater hat, and the sound of popping grease in the fryer. The smell is enough to make me waste money on our very first day. I realize we haven’t eaten in almost twenty-four hours, since we sneaked out around midnight and dinner was our last meal. Dinner, as in bowls of cereal before going to bed fully dressed. Mom and Nathan came home from the bar and I thought they’d never stop fighting. I could see the whites of Jack’s eyes staring up at the ceiling. I realized then that Jack rarely slept at night. It’s why I used to find him curled up in the oddest places in the middle of the day, sound asleep. We should have left a long time ago.

  I can tell Jack doesn’t like my plan. He’s staring at the plates left on the tables, a disgusted look on his face. This is the same kid who just ten minutes ago was holding a rubber band covered in chicken shit and telling me it was lucky.

  “I have money, Hank, I’ll buy us food,” he says as I inspect a whole banana, more brown than yellow but still in its peel. I put it in the plastic bag I brought along just for this reason. My planning skills are minimal, but I did think of a few things. I toss in half a bag of chips and a chicken leg that looks totally untouched. I leave the gross, soggy hamburger drowning in ketchup.

  “You don’t have money, Jack. Whe
re would you have gotten money?”

  Just then the cashier eyes us suspiciously and I pull Jack along by his coat toward the other end of the cafeteria. If we just keep our heads down, hopefully it’ll take a while before we stand out, maybe forever—we look almost normal compared to some of the rough-looking passengers. We steer clear of a guy with a skullcap dressed all in black leather. The girl he’s with has a raven tattooed on her cheek, and she appears to be wearing a sleeping bag. Her bare feet are sticking out of the side zipper, making her look like a puffy mermaid.

  Jack grabs a Parmesan cheese container from the condiment rack and tips it back into his mouth like a drunken sailor. Good Lord, Jack, really?

  —

  Back on deck, Sam is nowhere to be found. Have we been gone that long? Jack seems unconcerned as he munches on the chicken leg. He seems to have gotten over his phobia about the meal plan. We circle the boat, stem to stern, my adrenaline picking up with every passing minute. Why did I leave him out here alone? I notice the chicken lady standing almost exactly where we last saw Sam. She’s clutching the railing and the wind is whipping her hair into a cylinder shape on top of her head, like it’s being sucked up by a vacuum.

  “My brother,” I say to her, “he was standing right here, looking for whales. Did you see him?”

  She sniffs the air. As she turns, her hair rockets skyward and the wind grabs it and whips it in the opposite direction as if an invisible puppeteer is operating from above. It would be comical if I weren’t so worried about Sam.

  “Did you see my brother?” I am inches from her face. She says nothing and I grab her by the shoulders, gently shaking her into focus. It’s like holding on to a cobweb. At first I think she’s going to disintegrate right in my hands, but then she grabs my cheeks and pulls me right up to her face. Her breath is old and dusty. “Nobody knows what it’s like to be you. Nobody! Do you hear me?”

  I close my eyes. I can feel Jack without even seeing him. He has thrown his arms around the woman’s waist and he’s hugging her so tight, it slowly makes her loosen her grip and drop her fingers from my burning cheeks. I hear Jack’s voice shushing her. “It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s all right.”