“Yeah. At least he won’t have to go to your funeral.”
“Huh? I don’t understand.”
“My grandpa did. He had to go to his son’s funeral. Just seems kinda weird, that’s all.”
I know he didn’t understand. I probably made no sense at all. Mr. Morris just shook his head and nodded. He didn’t speak to me again until the last day of school then he called me aside. “Samuel, I have a gift for you,” he said, handing me a book from one of those church publishers. I think he was glad to see the last of me when the final school bell rang and we all ran screaming into the sunlight of summer vacation.
I never read the book, but I kept a card that Becky gave me. It was a valentine with a red heart and a Cupid with wings. She signed it, “Your girlfriend, Becky.”
Chapter 4
On the last day of May, the Bargers drove down Hollywood Drive to our new home in the Hollywood Arms Apartments. Unfortunately, Hollywood Drive in Anchorage, Alaska, had no resemblance to the Hollywood that the rest of the world knew about. Ours was one of dozens of two-story apartment buildings scattered like Monopoly hotels on Government Hill across Ship Creek from downtown Anchorage.
We drove into Anchorage from the south and except for the mountains behind it, Anchorage looked like a city in a geography book, with neighborhoods and groceries stores and gas stations. As we neared downtown, the buildings closed in around our car, and on every block it seemed a building had collapsed or stood empty, damaged by the big earthquake the year before. Suddenly, the downtown ended, and the stores and other building were gone. Most of them were crumbled by the quake and then hauled away in dump trucks. It left a bare hill right on the edge of busy downtown.
The hill leading down to the railroad and the docks was empty. At the base of this hill, Ship Creek crossed under the railroad tracks, past the docks and the rail yards, and slid through the mudflats into Cook Inlet. We drove across and up the opposite bluff to Government Hill, where most of the traffic was headed for the air force base. Our neighborhood was on the bluff above the railroad yard and two blocks from Elmendorf Air Force Base. Hollywood Drive seemed, even to a bush kid, to be in the middle of nowhere going nowhere.
We parked in front of the Hollywood Arms and started unloading the car. Mary complained as soon as Mom was out of earshot. “You notice nobody asked what we wanted? This place is a dump. I can just imagine what the kids are like.”
“It’s not so bad,” I said.
“Not so bad! When you get to be my age, Humpy, you’ll be more particular. Peeling paint the color of chicken vomit, dirty, broken windows? It’s a dump!”
“So it’s pretty yucky. Well, orphans don’t get many choices,” I said.
“Oh lose the drama, Sam. We’re not orphans.”
“Wanna bet?”
“Don’t start that. Orphans go to orphanages or get adopted because they don’t have parents, moron. I think if you look, Mom’s in the kitchen cleaning cupboards.”
“I’ll find the dictionary and show you, as soon as we get unpacked.” And I did too, showing her in the dictionary that a child who loses one parent can also be called an orphan.
“You’ll see, Humpy. Orphan or not, when you go to school next year you won’t be the tallest kid or the fastest runner or anything. You’ll just be another stupid freshman in a big school. And I’ll be that junior girl that nobody knows or wants to.” She stomped off with a pair of boxes and disappeared through the dirty green door that led to our new home.
The sky was suddenly full of noise, and I looked up to see a trio of fighter jets roaring in low to land at the air force base. It was amazing to see real jets flying just above my head like the ones on the model airplane boxes. It wasn’t long though, after the flash and roar, that the ribbons of exhaust across the sky became just part of the incessant noise. Distant thunder behind the storm of cars, kids, and trains.
Our new home was a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor. Five rooms with white walls: a kitchen with an electric stove; a complete bathroom glistening with porcelain and chrome; two bedrooms and a living room with windows that opened to let the musty air escape.
My room had a window with a view of the gravel and potholes of the parking lot. Beyond that was the natural hedge of cottonwoods and alders along the bluff, and beyond that the screech, chug, and whistle of the railroad yard that carried a hint of mystery and adventure. No room for snares or traplines, no snug hummocks where a boy could hide and daydream, but I had to admit that back home had no railroads, fighter jets, or playgrounds. Luckily, for the time being, the excitement of newness had me forgetting the leaving part of moving.
I had three boxes piled on the bed. One box was jeans, T-shirts, and underwear that I sorted into the bottom drawer of a metal refugee from an army barracks. It matched the single metal bed that took up most of the space. The room was small, but it was mine and the first time I’d had a room of my own. In the coming months it would become a refuge from all things that weren’t.
The other boxes were the important ones. One was a Black Label Beer case. The bottom was reinforced with tape and packed so full of comics that I barely made it up the stairs without a rest. Half of the comics made a neat stack on the corner of the bureau; the rest went under the bed.
One box remained, a Smirnoff Vodka case with bottle dividers in place. One by one I removed the models packed in newspaper, slowly rolling the paper out in my hand like these were the last Christmas gifts under the tree. Each one had an importance that extended beyond the values of plastic models, glued and painted piece by piece.
There had been tough choices when I packed my things in Ninilchik. Mom gave me one box for my books and models, and I’d had to sort through boxes of treasures to find pieces that meant something, that would help me remember. Everything else went into two other boxes, one for things to give away and one to be stored in the attic of the cabin to wait for the day I returned. I could only believe that all of this was just temporary.
My plastic models that made the cut were a Ford station wagon, an X-15 rocket plane, and a Corvette convertible. The others were glue-stained or missing parts, so I put them on the closet shelf. The X-15 and the 1965 Corvette I lined up on the windowsill. The Corvette was from Becky, when she drew my name for the class gift exchange. I kept it to help me remember her. The rocket plane had been a birthday gift from Dad, the last, I realized. Now all I had were these pieces of plastic and paint and a strange sick feeling when I thought of them.
The Ford station wagon with wood grain trim was just like the car we had taken Dad in to the hospital when he had his first heart attack. When I set it in place on the bureau—a new place in a new room—I felt a warm knot in my throat.
Once we settled in our apartment, it became a home without a mother. Each day, Mom was up by five, showered, and sitting at the table with a cup of coffee in her robe looking out the window before she dressed and caught the bus downtown. She worked at the big hotel there. She was a waitress until three then a hostess or cashier until closing. Most nights she didn’t come home until ten. By then, she wanted her “sippin’ and slippers”: a short glass of whiskey and her sheepskin slippers. With those two comforts and a kiss from her kids she would sleep on the couch until it was time to start again.
There was no more fresh bread in the house. No hot stew with dumplings. The mother I’d had for all these years moved out and left her twin. This was a mother at work, going to work, home from work, or tired from work. She didn’t make jelly and she bought Wonder Bread.
Mary and I had a list of chores for each day, including cleaning and laundry until finally, Mary even admitted we had become orphans. I determined to get along by doing anything I chose for as long as I could, undisturbed. I daydreamed and read my comics, and Mickey Spillane detective novels. I inherited Mickey Spillane from Joe, who didn’t think I would understand them, but I did. Spillane wrote stories about tough-guy detectives, urban Tarzans taking