Coss Bergman returns from military service to find his deadbeat mother has come into a huge amount of money somehow, and he determines to investigate.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
The taxicab rolled down the dirt road leading through the trailer park. The driver looked out through the windows, then into the backseat. “You see it, yet?”
The passenger, a youngish soldier in a beret, looked out his own window and shook his head. “No.”
He kept staring and the trailers kept passing by. Singlewides and doublewides, some relatively new and retaining their color, others weatherbeaten. It was early spring and the sunshine kept things from getting too bleak. That, and the kids running around on foot or riding their bikes.
“There!” The soldier pointed and the cab driver stopped. “Wait here.”
The soldier got out, stood before an empty space between two trailers, where an area of sunken red clay still held the form of his old childhood home.
“Looks like it ain’t here no more, man.”
The soldier nodded without turning back toward the driver, then returned his attention to the empty space. He adjusted his beret, pulling it nervously downward until it almost covered one eye. Then he tugged at the blue rope wrapped around the shoulder of his green Class A uniform’s arm.
A door slammed open on the trailer to the right of where the soldier’s trailer had once been.
“Well, holy shit fire.” A man stood there in a homemade tanktop, the cutoff sleeves sliced raggedly so strips of alpaca fabric dangled over his armpits. He was sunburnt and had some faded tattoos. His skin was weatherbeaten but his gray hair shone with an almost blondish glow, styled somewhere between a mullet and a pageboy.
He held a beer can in his right hand, but shifted it to his left, coming to the position of attention to fire off a crisp salute. “Reporting for duty, general!”
“Debbie’s trailer get repossessed?”
“Au contraire, my good man. She paid them to tow it to her new digs.” The man giggled again, paused to have a sip of beer.
“Where’d she go?”
“She won the lottery.”
“I call bullshit.”
The man shook his head, shrugged his sunburnt shoulders. “If you don’t like my answers then don’t ask me questions.”
“How much did she hit for, then?”
The man shook his head once more. “Four-hundred and fifty thousand.”
The soldier balled his fists, breathed, released.
“She didn’t want nobody to know, but it’s a small town and people talk. Even bank tellers. Especially them as they got boring-ass jobs and nothing to do but gossip.”
“Where is she now?”
The man lifted the hand not holding the beer can and pointed toward a stand of pines well-beyond the trailer park. “She’s got her a place up near Gosling Creek. Won’t do you no good to hit her up there, though. From what I heard, she’s about blown through it.” He shook his head. “They almost always do. They got a show about it on TV. Lotto’s cursed.” He drained the last of his beer and chucked the can toward a baby pool already half-filled with empties.
The soldier turned, headed back toward the cab.
“Hey, Coss!”
Coss Bergman stopped just before getting back in the cab. He figured Travis had nothing more of value to impart – not that he’d ever had much. But Coss still could not quite bring himself to ignore someone calling his name, and so he turned, facing the old park one last time.
“What?”
“Welcome back.”
“Thanks,” Coss said, before sliding once more into the cab.
The drive was quiet the whole way over to Gosling, Coss busy with his cellphone, the driver with his cigarette. Coss had a hunch – a bad one – about the exact figure his mom had supposedly won, and what it meant.
He started his search online at the Defense Analysis Casualty system, searching through the OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) database. He had searched it many times before, to see if any of his friends from basic training or Jump School had been killed in the war. It felt strange to be typing his own name now, though he had been sure many times while over there that he was about to die.
Nothing came up so he hit “delete” and went back to the main page, and from there to the Enduring Freedom page with the names of the fallen. He typed his own name, hit “enter,” and actually got a record. He stared at his name, “Cossack Bergman,” a very strange and singular name, and yet apparently not quite so strange or singular as he had thought. For here was another soldier with the same name who had been killed in Afghanistan, in a roadside bomb attack, in some place called Logar Province. The HOME OF RECORD field seemed only slightly less exotic and remote that the place where he had died. Berezovo, Alaska.
“Here we are,” the cabbie said, turning left and slowing down. “Gosling Creek.”
Coss sat up, stared out the window.
“You got an address?”
“Nah, but I’ll know the place when I see it.”
These were mostly ranch-style homes, brick with slate roofs and attached garages, large bay windows and only a tasteful smattering of lawn ornaments. It was a normal working-class suburb but a paradise compared to where he’d grown up.
The cab came to a yard overgrown with calf-high grass. The double-wide sat glutting the driveway, its sides spilling over the concrete onto the weed-choked lawn. Its windows were plastered with notices, probably informing the owner this neighborhood was not zoned for trailers.
“Stop here.”
The cab stopped.
Coss got out of the car, slammed the door a little harder than he meant to.
He walked up the walkway, tried the main door’s cold brass knob and it gave. He stepped inside, onto a plush carpet with the scent of stale smoke soaked deep into its weft.
The living room was dark except for the glow of the television playing a daytime soap.
“Debbie?”
Coss walked forward, through the living room, into the kitchen.
She sat before a wobbly table, its surface covered in a red checked cloth. She had a glass stem in her mouth, with a red rose decal pasted on its side. The stem was already black from being scorched on the outside, cloudy from what had been burnt inside. She held one of those high-powered torch lighters, a spout of blue flame making the little white pebble inside the pipe sizzle.
The only thing on the table aside from Debbie’s elbows and some paraphernalia was Roscoe.
The bulldog mix stood stock-still, in regal repose, watching Debbie smoke.
“The hell is going on?”
Debbie flinched and let go of the lighter so the spout of flame disappeared. She gulped her smoke, like a kid caught with a cigarette in the school bathroom.
“Coss.” She blinked and burped, expelling smoke. She tried to smile but her lips were stiff with blisters, lined with sores.
She pointed at his green Class As. “You look good in your uniform.” She used the fingers on the hand holding the lighter to scratch an itch on her head. “What… uh…” She scratched some more then pointed at his uniform’s shoulder. “What’s the blue braid thingy mean?”
“Infantry. What the hell is Roscoe doing sitting on the table?” Coss stepped forward and went over to his dog, placed his hand on the beast’s haunches. The reddish-brown brindle coat was slick, as if polished or glazed. Coss’s hand slid off it, rather than getting lost in the rough fur as it had back when the dog had been alive, mangy and old.
“You had him stuffed?”
“Yeah.” She smiled.
He shook his head. “And you spent the rest on this house and devil’s dandruff?”
“It’s…” She looked at the hand holding the pipe. “It’s base.”
“Like that’s better.”
“It is for me.” She held up her arms. “Do you see any scabs? I’m not tearing myself apart looking for bugs that ain’t there. Or pulling apart appliances. You saw the TV in there.” She pointed the pipe back toward the living room.
“I’m proud of you, Debbie.”
“Don’t talk to me like that!”
Her shouting made the blood run in his head, pound harder in his temples. He stopped, took a deep breath. Told himself that this would not be like the old days. She couldn’t drag him down with her anymore. If she wanted to live in the smoke of her own hell, that was on her. He was a grown man who had made his own life, and he could walk out of here anytime.
“And don’t call me ‘Debbie.’ I’m your mother.”
“Speaking of mothers…” He had to be careful here, as just thinking about it pushed the anger toward a blinder rage. “That four-hundred and fifty thousand policy you got from the Warriors Group Life Insurance…”
“I won the lotto.”
Coss shook his head, his resistance to her lies so built up over the years that he didn’t even hear them anymore. “The Army screws things up all the time. It’s got to be some sort of paperwork snafu. Some other guy with the same name as me got killed. Only, when they paid out the policy, through some kind of mix-up, they thought it was me. And paid my beneficiary.”
“I thought it was you when I got the letter. I thought you had died. You never called or sent any letters, so I could only guess.” Her eyes began to water, her lips to tremble and he could see it wasn’t an act. He wished it was, that she was lying and incapable of love. It didn’t make sense that love could not only endure but grow despite how time destroyed or at least eroded everything else. It was gross – this preserved perfection of their bond – like the stuffed dog, a faithful friend too stupid to know it was dead.
Debbie coughed, glanced at the pipe, then at Coss. “That’s so sweet that you would do that, though. Make me your beneficiary.”
“Somebody had to be.” He hadn’t put much thought into it, any of the life insurance stuff. He had no kids, no wife, no father, and Debbie – like it or not – was family; plus the old house number for their trailer was the only address he could remember at the time.
But why hadn’t the mother of the soldier in Alaska made some noises about not getting paid? Maybe she didn’t know her son had signed up for the WGLI policy. Something didn’t add up.
“All the money gone?” Coss asked.
“Most. I did save a little for rehab. But they’re gonna take the place. And the trailer.” The tears began to spill down the hollows on either side of her cheeks.
“You’re crying,” he said, speaking through gritted teeth. “What about her?”
“Who?”
“WHO? THE FUCKING GUY’S MOTHER! THE GUY WHO ACTUALLY DIED!”
Debbie flinched, cowered from his shouts as if they were actual blows.
Coss, feeling like a bully, turned, started walking for the door. He had to leave before it ended here in some ridiculous tragedy: her bruised, him being led out in cuffs, a stuffed Roscoe toppled from the table onto the peeling linoleum floor.
He retraced his steps through the living room, back out through the front door, returning to the day and sunlight, sanity.
By the time he reached the cab, most of the blood had drained from his face, the veins in his temples no longer pulsing.
The driver looked up from his racing form. “Where to, now?”
“The airport.”
The only Bergman in Berezovo had an address of 6 Cordova Lane. To reach her, Coss had to fly out to Seattle, and from there to Juneau, and from Juneau to Anchorage. He burnt an easy three thousand dollars off his bankroll just getting there, another thousand on hotels, and roughly five-hundred on eating like a king. He flew the final leg first-class, luxuriating in the leather seat, eating Biscoff cookies, drinking glass after glass of Chilean wine while staring out the window.
Coss watched as the lower forty-eight yielded to open water, revealing a blue-green mirror spanning the vastness between continents. Its glasslike perfection was interrupted only occasionally by a half-melted icefloe and then an island upholstered end to end with green firs. Closer to land lengths of red containment booms appeared bobbing in the water, then eventually boats, mostly fishing vessels but also a giant cruise ship resembling a floating city.
In that last commercial airport his legs were rubber and his head felt scooped of its brains and repacked with cotton, but still the trip wasn’t done. He had to find someone with their own boat, plane, or helicopter to carry him the last length. Berezovo, unsurprisingly, lacked an airport.
He found his huckleberry in the bar.
Coss recognized him as a pilot by his heavy bomber coat, with most of its brown leather covered in oval sew-on patches. His red aviator glasses further marked him as a flyboy, that and the way the eyes, even hidden behind red tint, pierced through whatever they beheld. He was seated on one of the barstools made from giant tree stumps, his next to the giant stuffed bear, snarling inside its Lucite enclosure.
Coss pulled out a few hundred dollars to get his attention, and the man, only sipping scotch until now, finally spoke.
“Once you’re there, you’ll have to wait at least a week for me to come back. Maybe a little longer if I don’t have anyone who needs to get there, and not many people do. So be prepared to be there for as long as a month.”
Coss told him that was fine.
“I got a seaplane, a 9-seater air taxi.”
Passage was expensive and apparently nonnegotiable, for each time Coss tried to talk him down, the man clammed up and merely chewed ice. When there was no ice left in his glass, the man finally explained. “In a place where gas is twice as expensive as on the mainland and groceries cost three to five times as much, you’re basically ballast. Plus Berezovo is dry.”
When that made no impression on Coss, he added, “‘Dry’ meaning they can’t have firewater. I could make more running rum than what I’m making moving human cargo. I just do this because I’m not trying to turn Berezovo into more of a tragedy than it already is. What can I say? I’ve got a big heart.”
The pilot refused to budge from his story or his price, and so Coss agreed to pay. At that point, the man shoved his empty highball glass across the bar toward the tender. Before leaving he took the topmost bill from the stack Coss had flashed at him, offering it as a hefty tip.
“Hey…”
“Big heart,” the man repeated, burped, then walked Coss to his car, and from there they drove out to the airfield where he kept his plane…
The view of Alaska – so stunning before, with its mountains and glaciers – grew flatter the closer they got to the village. The world eventually leveled out until it was all horizon toward the four compass points. Land and ocean were slammed pancake flat by gravity or tectonic action or the mere load of the domed sky bearing down. From up here, Coss could almost see what the flat earthers he’d met in the army were talking about. A little too far in any direction and they might go over the edge of the known world, pitching into the black starred void.
At last, they began to make their final approach.
Below them spread endless tundra, damp and blue-grey, with only the sparsest flecks of green thrown in to taunt the eye with the false promise of more color. There were no trees, and the only boats around the island were trawlers with rusty booms, splintery masts, and nets encrusted with dirty ice.
“You asked for it,” the pilot said, aiming the plane downward. “Well now you got it.”
The pilot left him at the shore and Coss got out with his A-bag, the duffel slung over his right shoulder.
Ahead of him and around him was the town, what there was of it. The houses were mostly corrugated steel, the kind of things that could be raised in one go or bolted together almost as quickly. There were some A-frames with steep pitched roofs, but very little wood and no trees in sight. The ground was hard gravel lain over even harder tundra made impenetrable by permafrost.
It felt like rain but so far none had fallen.
He walked forward, past two black-haired boys laughing as they tried to snag their little sister with a net. She must not have minded for she was laughing, too.
Coss continued onward, past a structure made from several shipping containers fused together so the boxes formed a multiroomed home. There was a satellite dish in the yard, along with a tin lawn ornament shaped like a daisy, most of its yellow paint worn away.
It was quiet except for distant voices, children laughing, the roar of a diesel engine, the wind. Then the howling of a dog. After a few more paces, Coss found the owner of the howl in a husky with eyes like pure blue ice. It watched him, neither friendly nor hostile, from behind a fence missing enough chain links for the dog to stick its wolfish face all the way through.
The sound of the motor grew louder until it was right behind him. The driver slowed his four-wheeler, waving as he came up alongside Coss.
“Need a ride, Cossack?” His accent was almost Canadian, or maybe Minnesotan, friendly and as likely to render creek as crick. He wore a camo Mossy Oak coat, a matching tattered woodland camo ballcap, blue jeans and heavy work boots.
Coss looked at him, stunned. “How did you know my name?”
The boy smiled. He had the same moony face and bright white teeth as the children Coss had passed earlier. “Your name? I don’t.”
“You called me Cossack.”
The boy smiled wider. “‘Gussak.’ It’s what we all call all the palefaces. You from Fish and Game?”
Coss shook his head.
“Land office?”
Coss shook his head again.
The smile didn’t drop but it slackened so that less ivory-white teeth were visible, the black eyes narrowing from moons to almonds. “Then why are you here?”
“I’m here to see Mrs. Bergman.”
The smile grew wide again. “Oh, the old weed lady!”
“You know her?”
“Everybody knows everybody.”
“Can you take me there?”
The young man tilted his head. “Long as you don’t mind riding bitch.”
Coss moved behind him, got on the four-wheeler, adjusting his A bag until its strap was over his shoulder. He patted the kid on the back and the rig started up again.
They passed a church, a strange crucifix staked out front formed by two giant oars interlocked and lashed with nautical-grade hemp. The cross stood in the shadow of a giant white arch of bone, the impression more pagan than Christian. The bone haloed the cross so it looked like the sea monster’s jaw was devouring the crucifix, using it as a toothpick after having made a meal of Jesus.
“Meg!” the kid manning the four-wheeler shouted. “Megalodon.”
“You’re shitting me,” Coss shouted back.
The laughter told Coss he was.
“Nah, I just saw a documentary about that on the TV. Bone belongs to a whale. Or it did. I killed it last summer.”
More grey-green scenery passed, small houses made of rusted tin slowly yielding to wind and rain. There was a basketball court, little more than a concrete pad, both hoops squat enough for a grown man to dunk without trying. Chains instead of netting dangled from the rims, their metal rusted like everything else. The desolation reminded Coss of the trailer park, or most of Iraq outside Coalition-controlled zones.
“Here you go.” The four-wheeler stopped. “It doesn’t take long to get anywhere around here.”
Cossack tapped him on his shoulder, said, “Thanks,” and got off the back with his bag.
The kid waved a hand rough as a well-worn catcher’s mitt. “So long, Gussak.”
Coss walked forward, toward the sound, a snick-snick-snick, coming from the side of the house, this one raised on stilts with a ship ladder for stairs.
He rounded the corner, onto a scene reeking of fish. Snowshoes lay braced against the side of the house, along with several empty propane tanks stacked next to a generator. Across the way was a picnic table, and someone working before it. The person wore a metal mesh mask and a chainmail glove over one hand.
On the ground next to the table was a boxful of fish, their green-grey scales shimmering and luminescent. They’d had their gills slitted so they had bled out, the ice water in which they floated pinkish from the mixture of their runoff blood and meltwater.
The masked person looked up from their work, set their filleting knife down, lifted the mask from their face.
She had a broad nose, and black eyes like everyone else Coss had so far seen in Berezovo. Deep pox scars were pitted in her cheeks and her jaw was strong. “You with the government?”
Coss smiled. His four years were over, though the recruiters had tried every incentive in the book to trick him into reupping.
She seemed to take his smile for a no, the government people apparently too humorless to smile.
“Do me a favor then.”
He walked forward, eager to do it, needing to.
“I can’t smoke while I’m like this.” She lifted the mail glove.
He nodded.
“Go over to that generator and get my dooby and my lighter.”
Coss turned back toward the house, went there. Quickly he found the joint, fusiform and thick as a cigar, and the lighter, a cheap purple Bic. He walked them back over to her.
She pursed her lips and waited for him to snug the joint in her mouth.
He hesitated, couldn’t help but feel strange about putting his hands so close to the face of someone he had just met.
“Come on,” she said, growing impatient, making the joint wag with her words.
Coss forced himself to seat the joint in her mouth. He sparked the lighter and she took a deep puff. She held the hit in her lungs, then let it out slowly, speaking through the cloud of smoke as he removed the joint from her lips. “It helps with the arthritis. I wouldn’t be able to do this without it.” She pointed her chainmail glove toward the table. “You’re welcome to share the peace pipe, Gussak.”
He hesitated again, then smiled. “Yeah, why not? I’m not in the Army anymore. Don’t have to worry about random UAs.”
She watched him closely, then, her black eyes tinged red with bloodshot. “You just get out?”
He nodded, took a hit. It scalded his lungs, but the fire also had a purifying effect.
“Why come to Berezovo? Your Carnival cruise ship hit an iceberg and this where you washed ashore?”
Coss took another tug, this one much deeper. “Cossack sent me.”
“My Cossack?”
Coss nodded.
She considered this, brow creasing. Then her forehead smoothened and she pursed her lips again, screwing up her face for another toke. He placed the joint in her mouth and she puffed. The cherry was smoldering hard, a gluey resin the color of tree sap wetting the paper not already soggy with spit.
“Once upon a time, he was the green thumb around here,” she said, exhaling another cloud. “I imagine he’d call me a hypocrite if he were here right now, though.” She shook her head. “Back then I didn’t understand. I found his plants and kicked him out of the house. He left Berezovo that same day, on a raft of all things. He could have died doing that, you know? I thought he was going to become a fisherman like his worthless father. Maybe move to Norway with him. But instead he up and joins the army.” She held up her mailed fist, displaying one finger. “That’s how many letters he sent me. And it wasn’t even a real letter, either. It was a postcard.” She looked beyond Coss, over to the side of the house. “You can put that out now. I’m good. I just needed a buzz. Don’t need to be stoned with no knife in my hand.”
Coss walked the joint over to the side of the house, stopped when he reached the generator, looked back. “There’s no ashtray.”
“Just grind it out on top of the generator. We don’t stand much on ceremony around here.”
He obeyed, snuffing the burning cherry, but gently so as not to leave a crooked roach.
“So what’s he been up to all this time?” she asked.
Coss walked back toward her, swallowed, his spit tasting like battery acid, making his stomach burn. “You wouldn’t believe it.”
“I believe many strange things.”
“Then maybe you will.” Coss gave a queasy laugh. “He hit his ETS. I mean, he finished serving his time. Army’s got acronyms like Van Kamp’s makes pork and beans.” He tried to lock eyes with her, but his eyes would not comply. “He decided to use his GI Bill on agricultural college. He’s gonna use his green thumb to grow weed legally. Over there.”
“Where?”
“Germany. Or…” Coss shook his head. “We were stationed there, when we got back from Afghanistan, but we always used to go to A-Dam. Amsterdam. And that’s where all the best growers are. He’s gonna learn the trade and get into it, derivatives and extracts too. For people like you, who need medical help.” He pointed at her hand, sheathed in chainmail but presumably gnarled and ricked with arthritis beneath. “He told me about Alaska and I got curious. He doesn’t know I’m here, though.”
She watched Coss, impassive, dark eyes unreadable. He forced himself to stare back, unsure how much longer he could do this. Thankfully, her eyes returned to the table, and the half-finished task of filleting, freeing him of her gaze.
He exhaled, not realizing until she broke eye contact that he had been holding his breath.
“I’m just glad he’s doing something with his life,” she said, “that he’s not worthless like his father.”
Coss wanted to tell her about his own worthless father, how the man had burdened him with this strange name. That he’d preferred his Harley to his family, even supposedly been patched into the Cossacks Motor Cycle Club, succeeding as an outlaw where he’d failed as a father. But if she knew Coss was a Cossack as well as a Gussak, she would grow suspicious. Two Cossacks was one too many for such a small village, even if one of them was just visiting and the other was long-gone.
“I just wish he’d drop me a line, even if it was just a postcard.”
“Yeah,” Coss said, trembling and hoping she couldn’t see it, or if she did, that she thought it was caused by the wind. “He’s busy, though.”
“I imagine. Does he have any children?”
“None on the books,” Cos said, laughing and almost believing himself, a little more comfortable now. But he could only keep this up for so long. The stomach acids wanted to come up, and the coppery smell of fish blood didn’t make puking less likely.
“Well…” He patted his pants pockets, as if searching for his car keys, readying to leave the party before he overstayed his welcome. His palms were slimed with sweat, probably slipperier than those sockeye or whatever was in the box.
“You want some?” She pointed her knife at the raw fillets on the table, the perfect pink flesh striated with bands of equally perfect and pearl white. “It won’t take me long to cook it. And I guarantee you it’ll be the best you ever tasted.”
“Can’t.” Coss jerked his thumb over his shoulder, pointing toward some nebulous obligation behind him, a lie he had yet to make up. “I’ve got to get busy getting my own life in order.”
“I understand,” she said. “Men have to roam.”
He nodded, mouth unable to produce words, tongue a frozen and dead slug.
Coss turned then, feeling as if he were presenting his rear to a man about to backshoot him.
“Thank you,” she said.
Coss flinched, gave a small nod without turning back, and walked away.
He didn’t know where he was going, except far from 6 Cordova Lane.
He let himself be pulled where his feet took him, kicking gravel until he found himself standing before the jawbone guarding the threshold of the church.
He stared through the arch, at the cross made from oars long-since removed from their locks.
All was silent, except for the wind. That and the howling of the husky, tapering into a whine that ended in a high-pitched squeal.
Coss shivered.
He didn’t think he could stand it all week, maybe all month, and he yearned for the louder sounds of his recent past. Roadside explosions, the crack of automatic rifle fire, soldiers making crude jokes.
Some sergeant shouting in his ear, telling him what to do next.
