Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel

by Heacox, Kim

  “I don’t have a simple solution, okay? Nobody does. Not even you.”

  Ruby was going to win this argument like she won everything else. Keb knew what she was thinking: Wake up, Gracie. You’re still standing in the middle of the meadow with your hands over your eyes. You’re fooling nobody but yourself. It’s the modern world.

  But Ruby said none of this, bless her heart.

  Gracie looked at him with a face full of apology.

  At times Keb felt he could better govern a kingdom than a family. “Our children will be beautiful,” Bessie had told Keb sixty years ago when they were expecting their first, Ruby. Yes, they were beautiful, and pigheaded and poor. The bills never stopped coming. Neither did the kids. Money was always tight. Work was toil, one odd job after another. What Keb loved most was his carving. It never earned him a cent, but it made him happy. So much risk and imagination, it set him free. That’s it, isn’t it? We are most free when we are most at risk. He gave it all away, the dozens of cedar masks and ornate paddles, the spoons, crests, and canoes. His family had a few happy years until the first son drowned, and Bessie died, and his two other boys had affairs with Jack Daniels. That left Ruby and Gracie divided in a new kind of poverty. “We are each other,” Keb would tell them. “Like it or not, we are each other.”

  He heard a commotion and turned to see the famous woman astronaut working her way through the crowd, the biggest celebrity to hit Jinkaat since TV star Walker Texas Ranger bought licorice in Nystad’s Mercantile and did some Kung Fu fighting with the local kids out in the street. Next to her was the big lawyer, bantering with Truman about Cokeville the French philosopher and other important things. Tall Paul Beals was in the mix too. Tall as a tree and taller still, the closer he got. Reaching down to shake the old man’s hand, he said, “Keb, it’s good to see you again. I’ve heard about your canoe and would love to see it.”

  Keb had no time to respond.

  Harald Halmerjan swept into the crowd and got busy telling Paul how Crystal Bay National Marine Reserve, with help from PacAlaska, could better serve all Alaskans. Others piped in. Did one of the voices belong to the famous woman astronaut? Did she know Kung Fu like Walker Texas Ranger? Keb turned his mind to his canoe. Was the float line still straight and true? The next thing he knew, Paul was introducing him to the woman astronaut who walked in space and maybe did Kung Fu, and Harald was blathering on to anybody who would listen or not, raising his voice louder and louder until the famous astronaut winced and walked away, taking Paul with her. Where was Gracie? And Little Mac? And James? Keb needed fresh air. He needed Little Mac’s fingers light on his forehead, brushing away his hair, playing sad songs on her guitar. Happy songs. Sappy songs. A glass of lemonade. The smell of cedar. The cut of the adz. Salty dreams, that’s what he needed. The sounds of the sea. But all Keb heard was Harald Halmerjan, the great H. H., talk, talk, talking.

  THE LAST TIME Harald came calling was on a cold, rainy October night a couple years back. Keb was pulling hot cornbread from the oven. While some people make their cornbread round, Keb made his square, and took no small satisfaction when it came out piping hot, lightly browned, ready for butter.

  Of course he offered some to Harald.

  Picture a man not fat but not thin, built-to-last, barrel-chested, balding. What little hair he had he combed over the crown of his condo-sized head in poor compensation for the cards Mother Nature dealt him. So much room up there, you could rent it. That was Harald, the former mayor of Jinkaat, a fine tenor with money in his pocket and gold in his teeth. Truman said he slept every night with a lawyer under his pillow. So what did Harald do that rainy October night? He grabbed a plate—no crime so far—and took a corner piece of Keb’s cornbread.

  Everybody liked the corners.

  As Keb saw it, a perfect geometry defines square cornbread, cut four-by-four into sixteen pieces, equal in size but not texture. The best pieces are the corners. Harald took one. Could you blame him? But he didn’t stop there. He went on to take three more, all corners, lathered in butter and stuffed down with hot venison stew and a bottle of cold Alaskan Amber, all while Keb watched in stunned silence.

  “That’s fine cornbread,” Harald clucked.

  Keb nodded.

  To make matters worse, Ruby sat there and said nothing. She had arrived with Harald, dripping wet from the rain. “You know, Keb,” Harald said (Keb remembered every word, his mind sharp in the presence of a cornbread crime), “you’re the oldest man in Jinkaat. You’re a knowledge-keeper.”

  “A what?”

  “A knowledge-keeper, Pops.” Ruby explained that a knowledge-keeper was an elder with great wisdom who never drew attention to himself, who kept his own wise counsel, avoided politics, had little interest in money, never stopped learning or teaching, knew a great deal about the land and sea, and had the respect of many people, young and old. He hardly ever spoke in public, but when he did (only for the most important causes) his words were unassailable. “It’s a conundrum, you see. By staying out of the spotlight—out of the fray, you might say—a knowledge-keeper maintains his purity of heart and mind and soul. By entering the spotlight he enriches others with his wisdom, but he also taints himself with their attention and admiration.”

  Conundrum? Keb was thinking, what’s a conundrum?

  “We want you to know that we appreciate you,” Harald said.

  “Me? Why?”

  “For everything you stand for, all the ways you enrich our lives.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  Ruby touched his hand. “We don’t want anything from you, Pops. We just want to thank you for all the support you give us.”

  “Support?”

  “Yes, you know, in all the ways we want to make life better for the Tlingits of Jinkaat and Icy Strait and Crystal Bay.”

  “Nobody lives in Crystal Bay.”

  “Not anymore, but they used to,” Harald said.

  “Long ago,” Keb said, “when people traveled by canoe and had summer fish camps and knew all the right places to get food. Oyyee . . . good times but hard times too.”

  “Not that long ago,” Ruby added.

  It was then that Keb remembered looking down at his hands, the fingers bent, the nails warped and split, the skin deep brown, almost black around the knuckles. Uncle Austin’s hands had looked the same when he was old. The October rain came down hard that night, but not a single drop got through the roof of the carving shed, Keb’s home. The floor was bone dry. It’s funny how we build things small, then big, then bigger. Everything was bigger these days, except open space. Uncle Austin used to say that the Tlingit never did build anything you’d find in the history books. Don’t look for a Machu Picchu or Great Pyramid in Alaska. The greatest gift we can leave this world is the forest and the sea the way we found it, separate and the same, the oldest home of all, older and more beautiful than all the things industrious people pride themselves in building.

  It was time to ask Ruby and Harald to leave. Keb dreaded it. It turned out he didn’t have to. Gracie came through the door with James and Little Mac. Gracie took one look at Ruby and said, “I know what you’re up to.”

  “He’s my father, too.”

  “Leave him alone, Ruby.” This was the old Gracie, back before her health turned bad, when she still had salt and vinegar in her. Keb had to hand it to Ruby. She didn’t argue. She and Harald got to their feet and moved to the door and put on their raincoats. There’d be hell to pay later.

  James and Little Mac watched with saucer eyes. He was a high school sophomore then, she a freshman. They didn’t hold hands, but their shadows did.

  “How’s practice?” Ruby asked James as she pulled on her boots.

  “Good.”

  “You going to play in the NBA someday?”

  “I’d like to.”

  She tousled his hair. “You will.” Without looking at Little Mac or her own sister, Ruby turned to Keb, “Thanks, Pops. I’ll check in on you next week. It’s nice
to see this place so warm and dry. I guess Günter and Josh did a good job on the roof. Call if you need anything, okay?” She went out the door with Harald.

  After a long silence, Gracie said to Keb, “She wants you to be a spokesman for PacAlaska. You know that, right?”

  The old man looked at his hands.

  “She’s using you, Pops. I can’t believe it. No, in fact—I can believe it. She’s shameless. She wants you to help her get into Crystal Bay, so PacAlaska can make a ton of money. Do you know she makes two hundred grand a year in salary and bonuses for being on the board? It’s obscene. Nobody needs that much money.”

  James said, “She bought me my last pair of basketball shoes, you know? Really good ones.”

  “I know, honey. She believes in you. I appreciate that.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “She bought me other nice stuff, too.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why treat her the way you do?”

  “James,” Little Mac said softly, touching his arm.

  He pulled away but didn’t take his eyes off his mother. “How come every time I tell Aunt Ruby I’m going to play for the NBA, she says I will. But when I tell you the same thing all you ever say is ‘Do your homework, do your homework.’ That’s all you ever say.”

  “James, I want you— ”

  “You want, want, want. Why can’t you be more like Aunt Ruby and think about what other people want? Why can’t you believe in me the way she believes in me?”

  “I’ve always believed in you.”

  “Not like Aunt Ruby.”

  “I want your dreams to be realistic; I want your dreams to come true. I don’t want you to be disappointed.”

  “Disappointed? Are you serious?”

  “Yes, I’m serious.”

  “You’re too late for that, Mom. Can’t you see? You’re way too late.”

  He grabbed Little Mac by the hand and stormed out the door.

  KEB WOULD NEVER forget how Gracie turned to the wall and trembled, how he felt nailed to the chair, thinking: we build a perfect picture of what we want our children to be. And when that picture falls and shatters, what do we do? His sister Dot once told him: we get on our hands and knees and put the pieces back together, and call it parenting.

  every sound drowned

  IS THIS WHERE I’m supposed to be?

  Anne poured herself a cup of coffee and drifted in the fog. August had blown in as if it were October: cold, wet, determined, dour. June seemed years away, May a distant memory. Come September, new snow would whiten the mountains and signal the end of summer. “Termination dust,” Alaskans called it. Anne would be back at reserve headquarters, in Bartlett Cove, shackled to a computer, buried in data. Strange, how she had looked forward to office time earlier in summer, when the air was too cold, the water too deep, the distances too far. But now, after living day and night aboard the Firn, things had changed. She had changed. She loved the iron clouds and watchful trees, the million daily miracles seen and unseen. She loved anchoring up in quiet coves, fixing simple meals, using her polar fleece jacket for a pillow, sleeping without dark dreams. A while back she had awoken and realized the entire previous day had come and gone without her once thinking of Nancy.

  Was it okay to forget?

  The sea offered a calm reflection, a portrait, a mirror. On some days she could live above her sorrow, other days below. And what of the fog? Am I off Point Adolphus? She could have used her GPS, or radar. But what fun would that be? She could have stayed in Hawaii too.

  She sipped her coffee and studied her map.

  Immediately south of Crystal Bay, Point Adolphus was the northernmost landfall on Chichagof Island, where strong tides collided in a vortex of upwelling. Nutrient-rich bottom waters circulated up to mix with sun-bright surface waters in a rich seafood buffet of kelp, herring, sandlance, capelin, salmon, and krill that attracted eagles, seals, sea lions, orcas, and humpback whales. Only one percent of one percent of the world’s ocean waters upwelled like this. Humpbacks could feast on huge numbers of krill and forage fish, mostly herring. “Great balls of herring,” Taylor called it.

  Okay, where are they?

  A deep quiet had settled down with the fog. Anne was tempted to write of a silence that stretched all the way to Asia. But it wasn’t so. A million birds were up early with a million things to say. Murrelets trilling and gulls chattering, silk-screened on a painted sea—mew gulls, Bonaparte’s gulls, glaucous-winged gulls, even black-legged kittiwakes seventy miles from their cliff nests near Margerie Glacier, at the north end of Crystal Bay. Anne heard another call: plaintive, lyrical, leaking through the fog in a way unfamiliar to her. A loon? She drifted east with an incoming tide. The chart showed no offshore rocks, a good thing, unless she found an uncharted one at great expense to her boat and career, if she had a career.

  Kate Johnson’s words kept coming back to her: “You’re a seasonal employee with no retirement or benefits.” Ranger Ron had told her a dozen stories about luckless mariners who’d fetched up hard on rocks, some of them charted, others not. Be safe. Travel in twos.

  Well, she’d take her chances. She liked being alone with her radio off, at least for a while, not lost but not found either, the business card from Director Kate and the satellite phone from Superintendent Paul deep in her pack with the stale crackers and smelly socks. Her patrol partner, Taylor, had found a sexy summertime boyfriend in Strawberry Flats, the small town next to Crystal Bay, and had asked Anne to patrol solo for a while. Find those whales, said Taylor. Make them sing. Bribe them if you have to. Taylor would join her on the next patrol, or the one after that. And safety? “Can’t have too much safety,” Taylor would say with sarcasm. “One day we’ll seal ourselves in our homes and bubble-wrap our kids.”

  Folded over her map, Anne traced the north shore of Chichagof Island from its western extreme where it opened into the Gulf of Alaska, past the little fishing village of Elfin Cove to Point Adolphus, and east to Port Thomas and the town of Jinkaat. The map’s creased and worn texture gave her comfort.

  She had always loved maps.

  She lowered the hydrophone, switched it on, and heard nothing but soft static. After half an hour she turned it off. A foghorn sounded at a distance, probably a cruise ship entering Crystal Bay, all those passengers wanting a sunny day. Even the wealthy can’t bribe the weather. This fog had attitude, a low-pressure tenacity that would keep planes down for days, strand hundreds of travelers, force locals to ask why they lived here, and show no interest in their answer. Not many people went out in fog like this.

  “HEY,” a gruff voice yelled from nowhere, “watch your drift there.”

  Anne jumped to her feet. Dead ahead a skiff emerged from the fog with two young men, fishing poles in their hands, floating as if in a dream. Their boat pulled hard on an anchor line and was about to get smacked by a larger boat—her boat, a white, gleaming Bertram. A federal government boat. She turned the ignition and the Firn rumbled to life. She put the twin engines in reverse and backed away, swinging her stern to starboard. She could see them now, shaking their heads and talking as she wheeled the Firn around and approached them from their downside-drift. She needed to apologize.

  “You got radar on that boat?” one man yelled as she drew near.

  “Yep.”

  “Then use it. You almost ran us down.”

  “Ran you down? I was adrift at one knot.”

  “More like three or four knots if you ask me.” He turned to the other guy. “What do you think?”

  “Five knots, I’d say.”

  “Maybe ten knots,” the first man said.

  Yeah, right. Forget the apology. Anne throttled forward to hold her bow in the current, beam-to-beam with these two yahoos in their skiff, their anchor line played out with lots of scope. She had a good view of them now. Men? No, boys pretending to be men, thinking they were funny. Untouched by the wet and cold, the bigger one wore a T-shirt and j
eans and a ball cap backwards over thick black hair. He had a darkness about his mouth and eyes. He wore a brace on one knee, and moved as if determined that his bum leg wouldn’t slow him down. The other guy was spider-thin but tough, made of sinew and scars. He wore a Lakers jersey and looked young and old at the same time. What caught her most about the boy with the bum leg were his offset eyes, one a little higher than the other. Searching eyes. Just goes to show, everybody is looking for something.

  “Pretty quiet out here,” she said, as they reeled in their fishing lines.

  “It was,” answered the boy with the bum leg.

  She could have asked what they were fishing for, and how it was going, but she didn’t. Fishermen liked their secrets. She knew this from a summer on the Oregon Coast where she’d worked in a marine research lab. Ask any troller, gillnetter, or seine skipper “How’s fishing?” and he’ll likely say, “It’s okay,” or, “Getting by,” or, “Could be better.” Even if it’s the best year he’s ever had, he’ll say, “Could be better.” Anne knew. Don’t ask. Find something else to talk about. “You a Lakers fan?” she said to the smaller guy.

  “Yep.”

  “Not the Supersonics?”

  “The Supersonics moved to Oklahoma.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “Five years ago or so.”

  “Maybe ten,” said Bum Leg. “Or twenty.”

  “The Oklahoma Supersonics,” Anne said contemplatively. “That doesn’t sound right.”

  “It’s the Oklahoma City Thunder,” said the smaller guy.

  “So, you a Thunder fan?”

  “Nope.”

  “Ah,” Anne nodded and wondered, are these guys Tlingit? “Are you guys from around here?”

  “I guess,” Bum Leg answered. He asked his friend, “We from around here?”

  “I guess.”

  He looked back at her. “I guess we’re from around here. How about you?” Anne was thinking of a response when he added, “You know you’ve got a line over the side?”

  Shit. The hydrophone cable. To avoid hitting the skiff Anne had steered a tight turn and forgotten the cable over the side. She put the Firn in neutral and left the controls. The minute she did, she began to drift. She hauled in the cable and coiled it on the deck. “It’s a hydrophone,” she said, as she powered forward and came back alongside.