Juneau: Wisdom Tree 4

  Inkerman & Blunt Publishers Pty Ltd

  P.O. Box 310, Carlton South

  Victoria 3053, Australia

  www.inkermanandblunt.com

  First Published by Inkerman & Blunt in paperback and ebook form in 2016

  Copyright © Nick Earls 2015

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted. This book is copyright. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, and apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publisher

  Book design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

  Cover and internal images by Virginia Kraljevic, virginiakraljevic.com

  Typeset in 13/16 pt. Granjon by Mike Kuszla, J & M Typesetting

  Printed in Australia through Book Production Solutions

  National Library Catalogue-in-Publication

  Creator: Earls, Nick, 1963– author

  Title: Wisdom Tree: five novellas / by Nick Earls

  ISBN: 9780992498573 (paperback)

  Series: Earls, Nick, 1963– Wisdom Tree

  Notes: Gotham—Venice—Vancouver—Juneau—NoHo

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  Creator: Earls, Nick, 1963– author

  Title: Juneau / Nick Earls

  ISBN: 9780994480811 (paperback)

  Series: Earls, Nick, 1963– Wisdom Tree: 4

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  1

  GOTHAM

  2

  VENICE

  3

  VANCOUVER

  4

  JUNEAU

  5

  NOHO

  4

  JUNEAU

  My father has both hands on the wet railing, bracing himself against the depthless view. He is in his walking boots already, rubber soles steady on the humming steel deck.

  There is fog in the Gastineau Channel. I can just make out the boxy shapes of houses, outlines on the dark hillside. A single car makes its way along a street, only its headlights visible, moving faster than us, but not much. The ship’s foghorn sounds a long metallic note that fills the air, as if it’s a reverberation from the entire channel, from the mountains themselves.

  I ask my father what he hopes to find, and he says, ‘Something.’ He keeps his eyes on the fog, checking it for details, anything to measure against the Alaska of his imagination. Anything to begin this day. ‘The truth. Some sign of him. Why he never came home.’

  His jacket is zipped up against the cold and his hair is still damp from his shower, parted and slicked against his head, white curls starting to lift away from the back of his neck, finding their own shape again.

  ‘I don’t expect I’ll get all that,’ he says. ‘I’d settle for something.’

  I know Thomas Chandler from one photograph only, a family portrait taken at the gate of their Dorset farm when he was a teenager approaching his father’s height. Thomas and my great-grandfather, Edward—his older brother—are standing at opposite ends of the group, with their father and two young sisters between them. Edward is immediately to his father’s left, his shoulders drawn back like a soldier on parade. He is the tallest of them all, though it might just be his posture. Their mother sits in front on a wooden chair, nursing a baby.

  It is tempting to say Thomas looks haunted, but they all do. They are keeping as still as they can, their eyes wide and fixed on the camera box. It’s a portrait from around 1890 and all family portraits from 1890 look like that, lean people in their best dark clothes, staring down death.

  Thomas was gone from Dorset by 1893. In 1895, he wrote a letter from Alaska, from a hospital in Juneau.

  My father fumbles his swipe card as he pushes it back into his bumbag. Every passenger has to swipe on and off the ship—all two-and-a-half thousand of us. The card clips the zip, flips from his hand and drops to the deck. A crew member bends to pick it up, and his head and my father’s almost meet. My father reaches for the table edge and straightens up again, leaving it to the much younger man to make it all the way to the floor.

  ‘There we go, sir,’ he says in his West Indian baritone, placing the card back in my father’s hand.

  This time, my father tucks the card away successfully.

  ‘You have a great day in Juneau, folks.’

  My father’s hand is still guarding the bumbag as he thanks him, keeping the card trapped, but the crew member is already turning to the passengers behind us with their arms full of coats and bags and cameras fresh off the scanner. This is any day in port for him, and it’s his mission to keep the elderly and their possessions united through the security checks and onto land.

  Lauren is ahead of us, with Sam and Hannah, the three of them already in daylight, clunking down the ramp to the wharf. The sun has burnt the fog away.

  My father looks up at the sky as he steps out. It’s bright blue now, a few high clouds blowing by. With his attention no longer on his feet, his next step is less steady, and another crew member reaches for his elbow. The crew are lined up at every turn, every uneven surface. After a few more steps, my father stops and peers across the wharf, past the huge timber welcome sign, past the neat curved garden bed behind it and the nearby row of ticket booths. He’s looking at the buildings on the far side, all of them shops now.

  I have had a lifetime of reading my father’s silences. The people passing us just see an old guy sizing up the view, but I know he’s imagining the 1890s, placing tents and shacks from black-and-white photos in the scene.

  I hold my spot behind him, making them walk around me, giving him time.

  From the top of the ramp, modern Juneau looks Nordic, like Narvik or Tromsø, but the mountains are even more present here, more of a force, muscling right up against the buildings and herding them into a cluster at the edge of the water. Everything I can see of the city is made small by the peaks behind it, the government buildings low concrete cubes with windows dotted in, houses more compact versions of the same shape, built to box in the heat.

  The Norwegian fjords were the site of my only other cruise so far, with Lauren before the kids came along. That was three days, though, and this voyage is a week, with Juneau day five and Ketchikan to come. We are not natural cruisers, not inclined to consign ourselves for days on end to decks full of the same Midwest Rotarians, retired franchisees and other jokey spenders of their kids’ inheritances. From the moment we boarded in Vancouver, the five of us have moved in close formation through the Radiance of the Seas, but despite that conversations strike up at the lifts, the buffets, even the hand sanitiser stations. They are a gregarious people, cruisers, and not deterred by closed body language.

  ‘So, where you guys from?’ Our accent is usually their way in. Lauren is best placed to take it from there. She does small talk well and never lets it get past medium-sized. I’ve been waiting for them to ask if I’m on vacation, backing away with that question in mind, but of course they all just assume it. Can you take a vacation from nothing?

  ‘You brought your dad along,’ they say instead. ‘Great.’

  And then my father says, ‘I brought them along,’ every time, in that clipped tone of his that suggests it should be obvious. And he lifts his chin and draws his bony shoulders back inside his oversized tracksuit top, and they misread him as some eccentric patriarch, throwing his fortune at his family and gifting them exotic locales. No family is that simple, though it was his idea, and he did insist on paying.

  We have never holidayed with my father before, not even for a weekend. If Thomas had stayed o
n that farm in Dorset, we would not be here now.

  It could have been my sister Jenny and her family here with our father, but she’s indispensible at the hospital, the way she tells it, and I can’t say that’s not right. It could have been our brother Rowan, but he has court dates in his diary well in advance. I am not here as my father’s firstborn or most favoured, but as his most available.

  I have a second interview for a job as soon as we get back, a position managing some assets at the Saint Lucia uni campus. It’s a couple of rungs down from the job I am qualified to do there and might have applied for at a better time.

  ‘That’s good, Tim,’ Lauren said when I told her they wanted to see me again. ‘Of course they should want you.’ No eye contact. ‘They’d be lucky to get you.’ No congratulations.

  Her response was perfectly on the money, as usual. Congratulations would have killed me. Congratulations would have been right if I’d scored the job twenty years ago, one step after starting out. I am not an easy person to help through failure, but who is, really?

  Lauren, Sam and Hannah have their backs to Juneau, waiting for us to disembark. Sam’s hands are in his jacket pockets and he’s looking at his foot as it draws broad wet lines out from a puddle. Hannah is wearing her beanie and matching gloves, even though it’s at least as warm as a Brisbane winter morning and they never leave her wardrobe there. Minimum eleven, maximum thirteen was the forecast on the daily briefing sheet that was slid under our cabin door some time before dawn.

  She waves at her grandfather, with a circular motion like someone cleaning a window. It’s Alaska, it’s cold, I have gloves—that’s what she’s saying. He lifts his hand and waves back, making his wave into a rough semicircle to acknowledge hers.

  Yellow plastic temporary fencing is being unloaded from two utes parked on the boardwalk. By this afternoon, it will be set up to corral the five hundred passengers deciding to board at the last minute.

  ‘So, do we get to pat them?’ Hannah’s saying to Lauren when my father and I reach them.

  They’re booked on an excursion to a husky farm, including a sled ride.

  ‘Probably,’ Lauren says, her tone set for expectation management. ‘The website said probably, remember? Though it might just be the puppies at the end.’

  ‘Puppies.’ Hannah claps her gloved hands together.

  ‘As long as we also get the ride,’ Sam says, still looking down at his feet.

  He’s eleven, she’s seven—they are two different species of creature and Lauren and I hadn’t planned for that.

  Sam is not here for Alaska, not for an Alaska that limits the adventure excursions to people sixteen and over. He is on the trip for the five days at Anaheim, starting on Wednesday. He has already decided that they will be five solid days of being thrown around the rougher Disneyland rides—he’s seen the YouTube videos of the Matterhorn and Space Mountain—with his best friend Charlie, who he misses terribly without ever being able to say it. Charlie lives in LA, at least until early next year. His sister, who is twelve, is trying to break into movies. Their father is back in Australia, presumably pumping cash across the Pacific to finance his daughter’s dream.

  Charlie and Sam skype every week or two, in a boy-to-boy code of half-sentences and nonverbal sounds that seems to fill some gaps without fully satisfying either of them. It will be good to see them running wild at Disneyland.

  ‘I wish I could have Charlie’s life,’ is now Sam’s go-to comeback whenever he is pulled into line, or life forces anything dreary on him. Charlie does school remotely, presumably from a carriage on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disneyland, while between movie premieres. He once saw Vin Diesel buying milk and sent Sam the photo to prove it. It’s a selfie, with a well-muscled T-shirted back and tanned scalp visible behind his shoulder, in the distance. It could be any guy under fifty who’s shaved his head and put in the gym time.

  Meanwhile, forty minutes from home, Johnny Depp is filming at the Gold Coast, a place awash with theme park rides, but that’s all boring. Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz have been sighted taking their kids around Movieworld.

  ‘So, I think it’s over there that our minibus will pick the three of us up.’ Lauren points towards the Mount Roberts Tramway base, a dark red building with a white upper level jutting like a prow and sending cable car lines threading up and over the hill across the road. She checks the tickets in her hand. ‘J9.’

  There’s a turnaround area for buses, with signs designating the pick-up points for particular excursions—Mendenhall Glacier, chopper flights, glacier hikes, the huskies. It’s on the other side of the tramway base, which obscures all but three of the bus bays, but I saw the website over Lauren’s shoulder a month ago. There were a dozen options, maybe more.

  My father breaks from his stare at the buildings and looks at his watch. It’s eight-fifty.

  ‘Should have made it nine o’clock,’ he says. ‘Or half past.’

  It’s the city museum that I think he’s been searching for among the buildings. We both know where it is on the map. It’s a Sunday, the one day of the week the museum is closed during May to September, but my father has lined up a volunteer called Hope to meet him there at ten.

  ‘Maybe ten worked better for her,’ I tell him. ‘Maybe she’s got church.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Well, who knows what we might see on the way there?’ It’s how I would treat Sam if his patience was flagging, urging him forward, keeping it good.

  My father points across the street, to the buildings opposite. ‘There was a mudslide in the thirties, so everything along here is post that.’ Most of them are timber and look older, but perhaps that’s by design. He drops his arm and sticks his fingers in a pocket, hooking the thumb out over the edge. ‘But, yes, who knows? There might be something on the way. The Russian church. Things like that.’ He nods to himself.

  ‘We’re due back at twelve,’ Lauren says. ‘So, how about we meet over at the minibus place then and have some lunch?’ She points past the tramway base again. ‘You two might see somewhere nice on your travels.’

  She smiles. It’s more of a smirk. It’s only for me. She knows the itinerary my father’s put together, an old church, a cemetery, an office or an archive room inside a closed museum.

  ‘I want sushi,’ Sam says to the puddle, which is now smeared across the concrete, jagged as a cartoon explosion. ‘See if you can find somewhere with sushi. I haven’t had sushi for weeks.’

  ‘We had sushi in Vancouver.’ Hannah isn’t even trying to pick a fight. She’s just stating a fact. ‘Tuesday. No, Wednesday.’

  ‘Just that one time. You can do it, Han. Sushi’s good.’

  ‘And we agreed there could be sushi once in Alaska,’ Lauren says, ‘so maybe this is it. And if there’s sushi, there’s likely to be noodles. And, if not, gyoza. Everybody wins. Now, huskies.’ She turns to my father and says, ‘Good luck, Ken,’ in a businesslike tone. She knows well enough to make no more of his mission than that, even if he’s crossed the world for it.

  He nods and says something muffled that’s probably, ‘Thanks.’ His gaze has been on the ground during the sushi conversation. He looks up, towards downtown Juneau. ‘Right.’

  At the end of the car park is a row of buildings with the profile of a streetscape on a Wild West movie set—high second storeys, facades made of long timber boards—but two of the three shops are selling jewellery and the other bamboo apparel, sheets and towels. If old Alaska was ever there, it is not there now. My father is already looking past them, leading the way to South Franklin Street.

  ‘And good luck to you, too,’ Lauren says to me, touching my arm, the smirk back, just a flicker of it.

  Thomas Chandler is my father’s mission, not mine.

  ‘Be a good wingman,’ she told me earlier when it was just the two of us. And that’s my mission, wherever it leads over the next few hours.

  I take a step towards Hannah, whose arms reach up for a hug. It’s a refl
ex in her.

  ‘You too,’ I tell Sam, who goes with it out of practice.

  Hannah moves in for a hug from my father and he takes it, stiff as a fence. He is old enough and worn enough to be legitimately stiff now but he hugged the same way when he was supple. Any hug is a shock for him at first until he overrides that impulse. I know it is because it’s the same for me with everyone but my children, who have never worked out that I come from such unhugging stock.

  In the 1980s, my parents took us to a studio for a family portrait. From a distance, the picture my mother later chose to put on the wall had the appearance of a family portrait from the opening or closing credits of the TV show Family Ties. We were not a numerical match—from memory the Keatons had one more girl—but we had the look covered. Amiable proximity, hands on each other. My father had his hands on Jenny and Rowan’s shoulders but, if you look closer, you can tell that his grin is fixed on his face, and his hands start to look wrong, like someone operating levers or a magician sliding two cups around on a tablecloth. The photographer made him put his hands there. We were an 1890s family at heart, and would have done well at keeping still in our own spaces.

  We make our way along South Franklin Street which seems to be one store after another selling diamonds or tanzanite. Our cruise ship was the second to dock this morning, and on both sides the pavement is already taken up by clumps of comfortably built sixty-somethings mooching along in leisure suits with bumbags like my father’s and cameras around their necks. Meanwhile, inside the shops, the precious-stone merchants—thin men mostly, in dark pinstripe suits—polish their countertops or straighten their trays or stare at the opposite wall. The moochers are gazing up at the rooflines or along at the shopfronts, or manoeuvring each other into photos. Alaska, Alaska—here it is, here we are.

  A mobility scooter hums past us at low revs, its driver in a military cap denoting long-ago service. He has a white goatee, trimmed a little closer than Colonel Sanders, and sunglasses on a cord around his neck.

  Gift shops appear, advertising Russian dolls, soapstone carvings, ulu knives. At Klassique Jewelers the promotions are all cruise ship specials—whale-tail pendants, tanzanite earrings, a free hundred-carat uncut gemstone (one per family).