The Fair Banks

The man sits in his truck with the engine running while his son gets his coat on. The boy gives him a passing kiss and says, “Dad, you’ve got a cactus on your face,” runs off into the building. He watches the boy until he is only a yellow coat in a crowd of other coats. Over the building entrance, a blue airplane of mosaic tile flies through a kaleidescopic sky beneath the word EXPLORE. The loudspeaker on the building reminds parents tomorrow is Friday in Fairbanks and he makes a mental note to pack an orange with his son’s lunch. The boy doesn’t eat enough fruit.

It is snowing again, hard and cold for this late in the spring. The man drives the corners slow to avoid spinning out and eases the Ford into the parking lot of a bar to have an early beer. He pushes through the door into brown-paneled gloom where the Eisen twins are sitting at a table by the window. Two old men with matching hearing aids and beaked noses, eating a plate of nachos and drinking iced tea. He knows and he knows the bartender knows that when she is not looking they spike the iced tea with a flask of Jim Beam.

On the television behind the bar, college kids run up and down the court, glistening with sweat, the resolution of the screen showing it all too clear, too bright. The bartender empties various bottles into a glass beaker, when it is nearly full she splashes in a few drops of blue curacao. “Easter drink,” she says, “I’m thinking of calling it The Rising.” He tries to say something encouraging, but the blue liquid looks like after shave.

 “It looks....sweet,” he decides.

“You tell me. It might be too much.” 

She pours him a shot glass and wanders off to check her text messages. The drink is minty and viscous, like mouthwash. But he tells the bartender it is just right because he wants another freebee. Instead she throws out the whole thing and starts over, pours him a beer which he cannot really taste now, as if he has already brushed his teeth. He watches a short white boy on the television take and miss one three-pointer after another. 

When he gets home, he decides against fiddling with the carburetor on the snow machine, takes a pair of snow shoes and a length of yellow tie down webbing down from the garage wall. He starts out onto the ice of the Tanana, hoping the logs he has sawn are still to be found on the berm in the middle of the river. The red Toyota was there the day before, his competition for the last birch logs washed up in the summer, now sticking out of the ice like pick up sticks. He doesn’t need the firewood, but he sawed it up before the Polaris went balky and he thinks of it as his.

Out on the river, the snow has stopped falling. He shuffles along, the ground barking, and wonders if the boy’s mom will remember to buy oranges. As he walks he smokes, first with his right hand and then with his left when it goes numb. 

He gets to the pile of birch poles and choses a small one, one that he can pull on foot. He sets a choker with the strapping and begins pulling it back to the shore. The going is easy where snow machines have left a track. He sweats into his long underwear and imagines his clothes becoming stained with blue, sticky sweat. 

The wind hits him in the face as he crests a rise. Just a little wind, but a wind in the face now and not at the back. It blows in past his hood and down over his shoulders. He stops and finishes his cigarette. The fog of his breath clouds his glasses, the snot in his red mustache slowly turning to icicles. Something blows into him with the force of the wind, a feeling more than a thought: a person could die out here, on a day like this.

A person could die out here, a mile or so from the northern-most Denny’s in the world, thinking about oranges and listening for the midday jet to descend into town. He could turn into a corpse hauling a pecker pole of firewood with a cell phone in his pocket and a warm room full of blue cocktails just up the road.

The feeling pleases him; he will not freeze to death. He needs to get home and stoke the fire before the boy and his mom get home. He puts out his cigarette, re-cinches his burden and shuffles along toward the shore.