hen I think of that winter, or if someone from those days reminds me of something that happened then, I see the snow blowing out of a clear blue January sky, and the snow corniced peaks of the Three Sisters rising incandescently over the spruce trees along Mission Road. There were rainy days, dark December afternoons with low fog blowing through the channel next to the road, when winter in Alaska seemed like a bad joke. But then would come a series of days when the world was new and full of clear sunlight on the trees and snowfields above town, the wind building, curling off the ridges. And even hungover, broke, and horny, I would remember that I was nineteen years old in Alaska, that the world was large and life was good.

I lived in a stateroom on the cabin deck of an old steamship that had been hauled ashore after the '64 earthquake, after all the other bars in Kodiak were rubbed out by the tsunami. The rent was $30 a week and when I turned on the light the cockroaches would scatter across the rotting carpet with a rustling like dry leaves on a sidewalk. At night I would wake in my bunk feeling them crawling up my legs under the covers, or brushing my ears with their antennae, and I never got used to that. There was a nightclub upstairs, and all winter the band played the same songs, and the sound would come down through the deck overhead and I could tell what time it was by what song they were playing. To this day I cannot hear "Smoke On the Water" without remembering instantly the particular smell of that stateroom at eleven o'clock at night, a smell of cigarettes and mold, sweat, and dirty socks. There was something else there too, though I didn't recognize then what it was, a kind of! distilled essence of used up chances, of shot wads, paid for orgasms, and nowhere else to go, the peculiar odor of the end of the line. I thought that was just the way cheap hotels smelled without knowing why, like the smell of dogs, or new cars. And for awhile that winter I even thought it was a romantic smell, because it was the smell from which the rest of my golden life would spring, and I knew that come April, I would be out fishing and I would never have to smell that thing again.

One night as I lay in my bunk reading, with the bass line of the music upstairs slowly vibrating the paint from the steel walls, an argument began between two men in the stairwell outside my door. There were drunken shouts all the time in that stairwell, arguments, laughter, screams, at all hours, and I kept turning the pages of my book. But then there was a sharp bang, and then two more bangs close together, very close to my door, and I knew it was a pistol out there, deciding something. The shouting stopped and it was very quiet for a moment and I wondered if I should get down on the floor in case the shooting started again. I waited. After a couple minutes I heard other people out there, and I turned off the light and opened the door a hair and peeped out. A man in a green army field jacket was lying on his side against the railing that went around the stairwell, facing away from me, and there were people kneeling beside him, and standing looking down at him. They rolled him over on his back and his eyes were open, and his arm rolled over his chest and fell on the floor next to him like a dead chicken's wing. I shut the door and kept the light off and lay very quietly on my bunk with my clothes on. The band kept playing upstairs.

The next morning I walked into town down Mission Road with the heatless sun on my back, my shadow ahead of me, pale blue in the tire tracks in the snow. The wind came over the trees on the other side of Potato Patch Lake and the Three Sisters rose beyond them, streamers of snow curling and falling delicately off the ridges. I remember that distinctly, the clear cold light and the empty sky, my shadows and the streamers of snow. I know now how memory drifts over memory, settling seamlessly into itself like snow from successive storms. And I realize how inevitable it was that the vision of that winter I wanted to keep, the light and the sky and the unobstructed brilliance of those mountains would instead be covered over and obscured forever with the smell of that room, and the sight of that man's arm flopping onto the floor.