Point of Direction. Rachel Weaver

another two and dropped them into the suds. “You working on one of the boats?”

      He nodded. “Heading out tomorrow.” He waited until I looked up again. “I’ll see you when I get back.”

      “I don’t know.” I set two mugs in the drying rack, wiped my hands and moved down the bar, away from him.

      Six days later he was back. I poured him a Jack and Coke. The night before I had listened to my own screaming, the sound absorbed, lost in the dark ice, I had watched each finger of my right hand turn black from frostbite and then break off. I had kicked and flailed myself awake somewhere around 3am and had walked the rainy streets of Neely until the rest of town woke up.

      “Can I buy you a beer?” he asked.

      “No.”

      “How about dinner?”

      “I already ate.”

      He raised his eyebrows, laid a hand heavily on the bar. “You’re going to make me work harder at this than I already am?”

      My eyes burned with lack of sleep. I thought about that night on the tundra, wondered again if that one night of actual sleep had something to do with him.

      “C’mon,” he said, “I know there’s a lot of us to choose from up here, but I’ve got all my teeth and a job.”

      I laughed.

      “And I’m really glad you got in my truck, even if you did ride in the back the whole first day.”

      I studied his face and that same feeling I’d woken with that morning on the tundra flooded me, pushing out the exhaustion. I decided it was him. “Probably not too much harm in you buying me a beer.” I pulled one from the cooler.

      “Not when you’re at work. Sometime when we can hang out.”

      I watched him stand, noticed again the way his body had been shaped by work, the length of his forearms outlined in muscle from pulling nets.

      “When do you get off tonight?” he asked.

      “Ten.”

      “I’ll come back.”

      I watched the door close behind him, cracked open the beer and thought of all the reasons I should not meet him at ten, and then did anyway.

      * * * *

      Kyle fished all summer, four and six day trips, with a couple days in town in between. I found a small apartment with slanted walls in the attic of an old cannery, and moved in for the season. Kyle stayed with me on his days off and left me his truck to use when he was out fishing.

      I’d kept to myself over the past two years. If I went to bed with a man, I made sure I left before I fell asleep. I steered clear of anything resembling a relationship, not willing to attach myself to anything at all.

      Kyle somehow absorbed the dream from me or perhaps he was like a thick blanket that it couldn’t get through. Every night that he wrapped his body to mine, I slept uninterrupted. I began to think of him as some sort of miracle, a sign that I was where I should be, that I might possibly be forgiven.

      It was like adding flour to cake batter, my life into his. A certain dissolving, thickening, inseparability. I would hear him, after so many days away, climbing the stairs to the attic. A certain step, a certain weight that made me stop what I was doing. My body pulling toward his, surprising me with the specificity of need. Always, two knocks and then he was pulling me toward him, that look that was for me alone. He smelled of time spent outside, the salt of the waves carried by the wind, buried in his neck. My hands would begin to move independent of my mind. Words were in the way. I was unable to make measured decisions, only blind leaps.

      “Most people don’t like to picnic in the rain,” he said one afternoon at the height of summer, his hand moving slowly across my back as I made sandwiches in the misty rain at the hip of a slow moving river. We’d been together for a couple months at that point.

      “Have you seen these trees?”

      He shook his head, moving closer. “I love that nothing about you is normal.”

      I smiled into his shoulder as he moved close. “I just like trees better than walls.”

      “I can’t believe I found you on the side of the road. What woman hitchhikes to Alaska alone?”

      “Here’s your sandwich.”

      He took a bite of turkey and cheese. “You never have explained why an avid climber would come to southeast Alaska where all the rock is covered in moss. Why do you make me ask for any and all information about you? Being mysterious is sexy, but it might get old sooner or later.”

      I kissed his neck and ran my hands up under his shirt. He set his sandwich down on the rocks. “It’s raining,” I said. “Your bread’s going to get soggy.”

      “I don’t care,” he said and reached for me.

      When September came to a close and the sideways rain began to pound the shoreline, Kyle said, “Come to Mexico with me this winter.” We were in town at the diner. Pancakes, eggs, toast, bacon and coffee spread between us. I had been in Neely five months. I had picked up the pay phone on Main Street once, dialed the phone number, and hung up before the first ring finished. If I kept my head down, never looked up, I didn’t have to notice the ice above me.

      “Okay.”

      He tilted his head back and laughed, reached for my hand. “It’s that easy?”

      “Apparently.”

      We left Neely on the last day of September, as the wind blew the rain hard against the side of the truck. I settled in next to him on the bench seat as we started up and over the mountains. I liked the way the small cab perfectly contained us from the rain that beat against the trees and the road.

      “Tell me more about the town,” I said. Despite my Spanish skills, I had never been anywhere I could use them.

      “It’s right on the beach. We’ll drink cheap beer and surf every day.”

      “Sounds glorious.”

      “Every fall I think about checking out somewhere else, but when fishing’s done and it’s time to drive south, that’s always where I want to go.”

      “I can’t wait to put my raingear in a box.”

      “It’ll be sunny and warm all winter. We’ll pick up odd jobs—a friend of mine owns a restaurant and another guy I know runs a construction crew, but mostly we can just chill out.”

      I put my hand over his where it rested against my thigh. The idea of spending every day with him for months on end sounded better than anything else I could think of.

      The hours of driving stretched into days. The truck had only a tape deck so we took turns buying tapes at gas stations. I stuck to old country legends and he went for eighties’ classic rock.

      At night we slept in the back of the truck in state parks, in rest stops, or campgrounds. I made us coffee in the mornings in a plastic French press while he stirred oatmeal over the camp stove.

      As we passed through the southwest, Kyle asked if we should stop somewhere to climb. “This is where it all happens, right? I saw a sign for Joshua Tree. You could teach me.”

      “I don’t climb anymore. I quit.”

      “You quit because you moved to Neely where there is no climbing. C’mon, I want to learn, I want to see you in your element.”

      “I said I quit. I gave away all my equipment.”

      “Why?”

      I took a deep breath, watched the lines of the road. “It was a diversion. It wasn’t leading me anywhere.”

      “Oh. And working in a bar in Alaska is leading you somewhere?”

      I looked across