Coe Review

Dr. Renard had once done a favor for Mr. Voss, something like that. We
knew it was a mistake when he climbed aboard with lightweight tackle and a
freshwater rod, his dress shoes slipping on the dock. He wore jewelry, rings
and a necklace with some mystical SoCal symbol which dangled against his
neck when the boat rocked. It was a dolphin eating its tail, I think.
It was a bad day, with rough weather and dark, foamy seas. We were
glad when we docked at Baranof and knocked on Lloyd's splintered cabin
door.
It began to snow a little as we stood there on the porch, waiting for the
door to open. Little flecks of white gathered in Dr. Renard's hair—he was
standing right in front of me—and the whiteness made his head seem small
and sharp. When Dora opened the door, he stood for a minute smiling
at her, and then he bowed a little, and backed down the stairs toward the
ground.
I was embarrassed when Dr. Renard wiped his shoes on the grass before
coming in. (There was no mat.) I cut my eyes away when he knelt down
and took each of the little girls' hands in his own, turning them slightly as if
they were small prisms. He shook the hands of Lloyd's sons firmly, with a
half-serious look on his face. He treated them like city children.
He didn't seem at all like someone who had spent the last hour and a half
vomiting. He pulled coins out from behind his ears. He did a handstand in
front of Lloyd's old boots.
I wanted to pull him back out of the cabin then, tell him not to play-act
with these boys, for they were already small men. Each one had already held
a gun in his hands, had already skinned an animal. They had helped their
mother birth their siblings. They had held their Daddy's tools.
Yet when Dr. Renard came into the cabin, with his New Agey-ness,
with his civilized good will, he erased the truth of that. It was like none of
it had ever happened.
I do not think that it is all a matter of hindsight to remember the
wrongness of that day. There was something about it from the start that
made me feel like everything was changing, or about to change. Later, on
the boat as we went back, I threw up all of Dora's griddlecakes, and I never,
ever get sick on the sea.
Maybe it was my mistake. We had always acted a certain way when we
visited Lloyd and Dora. We talked to them, we ate their food, but we didn't
treat them with anything but distant respect. We didn't wipe our shoes
before we came in. That, we believed, would have been an insult to Dora,
who felt honor bound to scrub our bootprints off the wood floor after we
left. When the children offered us their chairs, we took them. It was what
they wanted. We didn't take a seat and lift one of the girls onto our laps, as
104 Gut Bay