The red coat

Literary Review, Fall, 2004 by Tony D'Souza

I came to this cabin on the outskirts of Girdwood. There had been an old sign on the highway for the place, and again in the town itself, and again on the dirt track that led out of town to it. When I say old, I mean faded, the paint on the wood reading "Travelers' Rest" worn and weathered, like posters for a long-ago party that someone had forgotten to take down. I picked up a can of beans at the gas station; they sold cigarettes loose from a tin can for a dime a piece and I bought a few of those, too. The guy behind the counter looked at me. He had a blue ball cap on and couldn't grow a beard yet either: we were about the same age. He looked out at my bicycle leaning against the gas pump and said, "How far you come on that thing?"

"From Fairbanks," I told him.

He whistled. He said, "Your folks just let you go?"

"Yeah."

He nodded. He said, "Is it true there's ash all over Anchorage from the volcano?"

"They got it all swept to the gutters. Blocked out the sun one whole day. But it's cleared up now like it never even happened."

The cabin was out in the trees; it was made of planks, not logs, and the planks were old and gray. The big front window above the porch was dark; there wasn't any vehicle parked on the gravel drive; a round splitting stump with lengths of birch stacked beside it was covered in green moss. I leaned my bicycle against the post of the porch like a packhorse with my gear strapped on it, wondered if I should bust out a window to get in if everything turned out to be as abandoned as it looked. But the house was up on stilts; if I had to, I could unroll my sleeping bag and camp under it.

Up on the porch, I knocked on the door. The mountains were purple in the evening, the tall trees like people in dark coats. It was already on ten o'clock; it was that part of summer when it never really got dark. Then the door creaked open. It was a girl in white pajamas, her face white like she was startled, kind of red, too, like she'd been sleeping. She looked me up and down. "What do you want?" she squinted and said.

"Traveler's rest," I said.

"Eight dollars."

"I'll cut wood for it."

"You'll have to cut a lot."

"I will."

She opened the door to let me see inside, and the inside was what the outside promised: dark, a fireplace with old ashes in it, a horse blanket over the back of the couch, shadows. There was a ladder leading up to a loft, dried spruce needles scattered here and there on the floor, and on the far wall beyond the kitchen, a couple of Athabaskan drawings of crows and wolves outlined against the night sky, the stars making the animals seem like more than they were. On a peg rack by the door hung a red wool coat. It had four wooden buttons running down its front, small bars of polished wood, marks on them so they looked like bone, like carved by hand. "Is that your coat?" I asked the girl.

She looked at me strangely. She said, "Maybe it is. Maybe it's not. What's it to you?"

"I'm just asking."

"Some traveler left it behind."

"Seems like a lot to leave behind."

"That's how it happened."

"I need a coat," I said.

"If they don't come back for it, it's mine."

"You don't already have a coat?"

"And if I do?"

I made a face and shrugged. "Seems kind of selfish to want a second coat when you've got one already." I reached out and touched the thick wool with my hand. It was even thicker wool under my fingers than it looked. "Nice coat," I said.

"Yes it is," she said and knocked my hand away. "Who're you to show up out of the blue and start touching everybody's coat?"

"Hey," I said and held up my hands. "I'm nobody. Sorry if I acted like I wasn't."

After a few seconds of me holding my hands up like that, she softened. "Forget it," she said and looked at her toes, "I'm nobody, too."

She was somebody, though. She was Ellen from Banff, Canada, and her mother cleaned a motel. Ellen wasn't really pretty. But she wasn't really ugly, either. She had a big bottom, that was all. I split wood with the ax she gave me, and she gathered the lengths and stoked a fire in the sweathouse behind the cabin. There was a long swamp back there, and the times it had flooded were recorded on the sweathouse planks in salty lines. The inside of the thing was as small as a sauna. I sat sweating in my underwear on the near bench, and then Ellen came in in a towel. She pulled the door shut on the blue evening, and the world was finally dark except for the angry eye of the fire. She took off the towel and showed her bottom to me. It was big, there were dimples in it, but her breasts were big, too. She spread her towel on the bench across from me and laid on it on her stomach with the light of the fire on her skin like flames. She was close enough to touch.

"You always go naked in here?" I said.

"Yeah," she said with her face turned to the wall.

"Mind if I do?"

"Go ahead."

I stood up and slipped my underwear down. Then I sat on the hot, gritty wood of the bench. Ellen turned her head and looked at me, not smiling or anything, she said, "You got a small one, huh?"

"What?"