(February 1982)
Nobody deserves to die like this, Jim: face down, the red snow under your bleeding head frozen, thawed then frozen again, forming an icy pillow of your own blood; you, sunk into your own white nest formed from the heat that once made up your life. Underneath your thighs, yellow stains hardened your last release into something bright and solid. I saw it in the evidence pictures presented by the district attorney under the harsh lights of the Anchorage Municipal Courthouse hearing room. I smelled it on your body in the morgue. I heard on tape what Hans Hersch, the Finn trapper from Shaw Creek, saw when he found you.
The Finn’s tale was just another piece of the story I’d already heard from the lips of the murderer, told with his eyes wide and scared, but chilly blue, like a clear winter sky above Denali. First these eyes and lips asked me for cigarette money. And then they asked me about my love for him, and about whether I was still taking my clothes off at Moby Dick’s. I sat there on the other side of a thick glass window, a phone to my ear, a guard behind him, and said I quit dancing and I didn’t go into detail, and those eyes, those lips didn’t ask more because they were behind bars and charged with murder. Then those lips, lips I’d kissed, lips I’d loved, started moving faster, spilling confessions into the phone, looking at me through the glass distortion that divided us. Talking fast and unblinking as if to get it out before anyone else could tell the story, like I was some priestess or confessor. So I listened. I tried hard not to be a dancer, a stripper, slippery and cool, whirling, walking on the edge, just out of reach. I tried to be a friend; what he believed me to be.
But I am a dancer, a stripper. I’m the girl who takes her clothes off for strangers. What can a dancer do, Jim? I had no idea that when I delivered my lover, the murderer, home that night, he was planning to kill you. Wasn't I just a stupid stripper? Tell me I was just stupid, Jim. You did it often enough when you were alive.
I went home from this trial, this bright courtroom, listened to the testimony I wasn’t allowed to hear, but you stayed dead, Jim. I stayed alive, even well. Still, I have these dreams of you. And in those dreams, you grant me no clemency. Instead, you send me this nightmare of your icy, bloody face: steam rises from the heat of your blood, a final hot breath into the air; and then, I am under the melting ice, waiting for the thick, salty mess to fall on my head. It’s on me, it’s all on me.
"Put your finger here," you say and you grab my hand like you did when you were alive and you shove it into a healed bullet hole below your ribs. Then you slip off your shirt and show me the scars of knife wounds slashed across your shoulder and another jagged one across your back. And you laugh, looking at the shock in my face.
Your squinty hard look filled this courtroom when I took the stand a few days after the Finn. The prosecutor had set up an easel with Jim’s old Bonanza Elementary School picture in Oregon to remind the jury that we are here to find justice for James Welch. I recognized the look. Yours are the eyes that have filled my nightmares as the days shorten again and September’s termination dust settle on the Chugach Mountains. Yours are eyes that send a hot panic pushing up into my brain. In my dreams, you are a snarling and spitting demon. Jim you scratch at my hand, at my feet. You want me to dance, and I want to sleep as the gore spreads swirling red, yellow, frozen blood and piss. Why, Jim? What did I do?
But whenever I ask, the concrete on Fourth Avenue shakes and splits and cracks, and from its depths the smell of gas and mud and thawing dog crap hisses something that sounds like the last words you ever said to me alive: “Will you take me home?”
Nobody deserves to die like this, Jim: face down, the red snow under your bleeding head frozen, thawed then frozen again, forming an icy pillow of your own blood; you, sunk into your own white nest formed from the heat that once made up your life. Underneath your thighs, yellow stains hardened your last release into something bright and solid. I saw it in the evidence pictures presented by the district attorney under the harsh lights of the Anchorage Municipal Courthouse hearing room. I smelled it on your body in the morgue. I heard on tape what Hans Hersch, the Finn trapper from Shaw Creek, saw when he found you.
The Finn’s tale was just another piece of the story I’d already heard from the lips of the murderer, told with his eyes wide and scared, but chilly blue, like a clear winter sky above Denali. First these eyes and lips asked me for cigarette money. And then they asked me about my love for him, and about whether I was still taking my clothes off at Moby Dick’s. I sat there on the other side of a thick glass window, a phone to my ear, a guard behind him, and said I quit dancing and I didn’t go into detail, and those eyes, those lips didn’t ask more because they were behind bars and charged with murder. Then those lips, lips I’d kissed, lips I’d loved, started moving faster, spilling confessions into the phone, looking at me through the glass distortion that divided us. Talking fast and unblinking as if to get it out before anyone else could tell the story, like I was some priestess or confessor. So I listened. I tried hard not to be a dancer, a stripper, slippery and cool, whirling, walking on the edge, just out of reach. I tried to be a friend; what he believed me to be.
But I am a dancer, a stripper. I’m the girl who takes her clothes off for strangers. What can a dancer do, Jim? I had no idea that when I delivered my lover, the murderer, home that night, he was planning to kill you. Wasn't I just a stupid stripper? Tell me I was just stupid, Jim. You did it often enough when you were alive.
I went home from this trial, this bright courtroom, listened to the testimony I wasn’t allowed to hear, but you stayed dead, Jim. I stayed alive, even well. Still, I have these dreams of you. And in those dreams, you grant me no clemency. Instead, you send me this nightmare of your icy, bloody face: steam rises from the heat of your blood, a final hot breath into the air; and then, I am under the melting ice, waiting for the thick, salty mess to fall on my head. It’s on me, it’s all on me.
"Put your finger here," you say and you grab my hand like you did when you were alive and you shove it into a healed bullet hole below your ribs. Then you slip off your shirt and show me the scars of knife wounds slashed across your shoulder and another jagged one across your back. And you laugh, looking at the shock in my face.
Your squinty hard look filled this courtroom when I took the stand a few days after the Finn. The prosecutor had set up an easel with Jim’s old Bonanza Elementary School picture in Oregon to remind the jury that we are here to find justice for James Welch. I recognized the look. Yours are the eyes that have filled my nightmares as the days shorten again and September’s termination dust settle on the Chugach Mountains. Yours are eyes that send a hot panic pushing up into my brain. In my dreams, you are a snarling and spitting demon. Jim you scratch at my hand, at my feet. You want me to dance, and I want to sleep as the gore spreads swirling red, yellow, frozen blood and piss. Why, Jim? What did I do?
But whenever I ask, the concrete on Fourth Avenue shakes and splits and cracks, and from its depths the smell of gas and mud and thawing dog crap hisses something that sounds like the last words you ever said to me alive: “Will you take me home?”