by Heacox, Kim
“Are they coming in sets? Typically the waves come in sets, and if you can time your turn, that would be good . . . go when the waves are at their lowest. And when you do turn, have the throttle full open to make it as fast as possible.”
“I know. I’ll do that.”
“How’s your fuel?”
“Good.”
“Have you got a kicker?”
“Yes, but I don’t know if I could get it started or even hold into the weather if I did.”
“Anne, listen . . . you’re not far from a small group of islands called the Sisters, due east of you. You could gain their lee after you make the turn.”
“Okay. Stay with me on this channel. I won’t be able to talk to you while I make the turn. Everything’s getting worse.”
“I’m here. I’m with you.”
She dropped the radio mic and tried to focus, tried to be smart, tried not to panic. Everything was gray except for the nightmare before her, the shrieking wind and pounding seas and a shadow in black pointing a long accusing finger and shaking its head. Stupid white woman.
standing in his own surprise
OLD KEB HAD met a philosopher or two in his life, but none like the black Cajun chef, Angola, a big man, half-African conga, half-Canadian bacon, all Louisiana soul kitchen. How authentic he seemed with his callused hands and clear eyes, his every move balanced against the pitch and roll of whatever life might throw at him.
“Me, a philosopher?” Angola laughed, as the Etude rested on her anchor in Graves Harbor, in the middle of the night, with everyone else asleep. “I don’t think so. I’m better at defining problems than at solving them. Maybe that doesn’t make me a philosopher. I don’t know. How about you?”
“My Uncle Austin was a philosopher. He read books.”
“You know what appeals to me about philosophy? Nobody wins.”
“Half of philosophy is about death, I think. Does it seem that way to you?”
“It might someday, when I get as old as you.”
“You don’t want to get as old as me. You’ll hurt everywhere and eat pills and bury everybody you love, and get lonely, and get the willies.”
“The willies? You mean the heebie-jeebies?”
“No, the willies are worse than the heebie-jeebies.”
“Not in Louisiana, where I come from. Nothing’s worse than the heebie-jeebies.”
“How about the wangdoodles?”
“The wangdoodles? What are they?”
“They’re bad, but they’re not as bad as the willies.”
“You’re telling me that the wangdoodles aren’t as bad as the willies, and the heebie-jeebies aren’t as bad as the wangdoodles?”
“Oyyee . . .” Keb was getting confused.
“Man, you people up here got everything upside down, that’s all I’m saying. I’ve seen death, too, old man. It makes being alive look pretty good, that’s all I’m saying. How’s the cornbread?”
“Good.”
“Not too spicy?”
“A little. What’s in it?”
“Jalapeños, Tabasco. Cajun love spices.”
Cajun love spices? Keb had downed a quart of water. He needed to pee. He needed to take his pills. One for his heart, one for his blood. Others for his thyroid, liver, stomach, bladder, colon, semi-colon, appendix, semi-appendix, muscles, nerves, joints, you name it. Some weren’t pills at all, they were capsules the size of small bullets. He took those with yogurt. The cornbread wasn’t round. It wasn’t square either. Angola made it rectangular, the size of Montana, with four perfect corners cooked to the color of Navajo sandstone. He served up another plate for Old Keb, and a cup of yogurt, key lime pie flavor.
Angola was talking to himself in cryptic Cajun phrases as he made croissants, a baker’s tall white hat sitting on his balding head, his elegant long fingers twisting the dough.
“You’re from Louisiana then?” Keb asked him.
“That’s right.”
“Descended from slaves.”
“Yep.”
“How’s that make you feel?”
“I don’t feel like I used to feel. Most of my nerves went dead after Katrina.”
“Katrina, a woman?”
“No man, the big-ass storm.”
Just then Monique breezed into the galley wearing a man’s large button-up shirt and nothing else. Without a word, she opened the fridge, pulled out half a gallon of milk and drank from the carton. Keb watched a bead of milk roll down her chin and neck and under her shirt. Everything about her was forbidden: the hard, self-satisfied smile, the hips and spine, the stab of shoulder blade and perfect vixen lines. Looking at her, Keb felt a distant stirring and remembered women as beautiful as her when he was young and strong. Stronger than he’d ever be again. More than a hundred times he had had his entire life ahead of him. Did he realize it then? Even once? Monique finished, wiped her mouth, and said something to Angola in French. Voltaire jumped onto the table and swished his tail past Keb’s nose.
“Chat folle.” Angola swiped and missed, but sent the cat flying. Monique picked it up with a scowl and disappeared down the passageway toward Rene’s cabin.
Keb finished his pills. He watched Angola put croissants on a cookie sheet, slip them into the oven, and brew up a fresh pot of coffee, what he called “Gaspay couffay,” a special blend from Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula. Jacques and Pierre would be up soon, eager to push back south after the storm, back to George Island to collect more rocks. Keb was eager to get back too, back to the canoe. Was it still on its buoy, out of sight in the sea cave under the cliff? Kid Hugh might have to do his big dive after all, a Mexican Margarita Acapulco Loco Dive. For a strange moment—one more unsettling than any before—Keb thought about dying, the notion that he’d die soon, probably in the canoe, but where in the canoe? Not where in the canoe itself, but where at sea in the canoe? Trying to decide was no easy thing. Maybe he’d die of indecision.
What was it now that Angola was saying? Keb had no idea, but he had to agree with him. “You’ve lived through dark times, then?” Angola asked him.
Keb nodded. Dark times, yes, when one more hour was all he could see of the future. Angola jabbered in French, as if speaking in tongues, then flipped into English and said, “That’s why I found Buddhism. You ever wonder why people who want to share their religion with you almost never want you to share your religion with them?”
Keb shook his head. He didn’t know. Maybe all he believed in, in that regard, was what he told Angola. “My friend Father Mikal says that anything can be made holy, if it’s deeply worshiped.”
“You have to be careful with that,” Angola said. “If people believe something enough, that doesn’t make it fact. If they shout it loud enough, that doesn’t make it true.” The coffee pot began to perk. “It’s crazy stuff, the whole story of who we are and where we came from, how we got here. It’s all locked up in one big hiding place, a vault, you know, a steel safe with all the answers inside, and a combination. But get this: the combination is locked up inside the safe, too. It’s been going on for ten thousand years, that’s all I’m saying. It started a long time ago. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Keb was thinking how everything was a long time ago.
Angola handed him a croissant dripping with butter. Keb took a bite and heard himself say thank you. He barely got the words out. Such a rag and bone man he’d become. It was time to get back into the canoe and get this dying thing over with before it was too late. Too late to die. It was time to go beyond the cold and indecision, go until nature does it for you, sand in the wind, a wind made of sand, the earth made of air, each of us a cloud, a seed, an angel. Lie down now, in your final garments, made without pockets, and never get up. No more possessions or obsessions. Why is it that death for each of us comes either too early or too late? Keb ate the buttered croissant and ran his tongue over his lips. “You ever had nagoonberry pie?” he asked Angola.
“Nope.” The Cajun was making soup over the oven,
dicing an onion.
“Ever make kelp salsa?”
“Nope.”
“How about beer batter halibut?”
“Nope.” Angola laughed. “How about bang butter? You ever had bang butter?”
Bang butter? Great Raven. Did it explode in your mouth? Shoot off your lips?
“Marijuana, my friend. Bang butter has marijuana in it. It makes one hell of a brownie. You should try it sometime.”
“The Tlingit people had slaves, taken during wars.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Keb, my friend, you can tell me anything.”
Jacques came into the galley, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Or was it Pierre? He wore only boxer shorts and asked for coffee, in French. Angola handed him a large cup. Near as Keb could tell, Jacques and Angola were talking about the storm, wondering if it had exhausted itself enough to weigh anchor.
Like every other morning, Jacques had with him a news clipping he’d printed off the Internet in the pilothouse. The clipping came from Le Monde. Little Mac had told Old Keb it was French for “The World.” Good thing these guys were more interested in the world than they were in Alaska, where local news might tell them their guests were elusive, runaway canoeists.
Jacques and Pierre came from a Paris university, though Angola said Pierre had married the daughter of a billionaire industrialist. Hence the yacht. They spent hours each day and night folded over rocks and maps. One night in the lab, they told Keb, James, and Little Mac about extrusive and intrusive igneous rocks, minerals and glaciers, fault lines and tectonics. They passed around garnet granites that had formed sixty thousand feet under the surface of the earth, millions of years ago. Keb tried to wrap his head around it. He asked about Crystal Bay. “Did it have that name because of the rocks there? Rocks with crystals?”
“Ice has crystals, too,” Pierre said, speaking through Little Mac. “Crystal Bay takes its name from the great glacier that carved it and shaped it. A glacier is made of ice, right? Well, glacial ice is a kind of rock. It has crystals.”
“How can ice be a rock?” James asked.
Little Mac listened to Pierre; she had to get this right. She spoke to Keb and James, “He said ice has many of the same properties of a rock.”
“But it’s not a rock,” James insisted.
“James, listen. Rocks are made of crystals, or at least some rocks are, okay? Glacial ice is also made of crystals. It begins with snow that changes under pressure and becomes dense and forms crystals.”
“And that makes it a rock?”
“Yes, in a way.”
James asked, “How can ice carve rock?”
Pierre spoke rapidly and Little Mac listened, her face furrowed in concentration. After a moment she said, “Ice is too soft to carve rock. But what the ice does, what the glacier does, I mean, is it picks up rocks as it moves along and embeds them in its flank, okay? Now the glacier has a sharp tool, doesn’t it? It has the rocks embedded in it. As it moves along, it grinds those embedded rocks against the bedrock, and slowly reshapes the land, over a zillion years. It pulverizes rock against rock. That’s how glaciers sculpt, see?” Little Mac’s eyes were shining. “Pierre says it’s like an axe. The ice isn’t the blade of the axe; it’s the handle. The rocks it carries embedded in the glacier, that’s the blade, a million little blades cutting into the bedrock, grinding it down as the glacier moves. That’s how your bay was born, Keb. That’s how ice shaped Crystal Bay.”
Keb understood. He looked at James and could see he understood, too. This was good stuff, Keb thought, another kind of learning, one he could enjoy. Maybe it was too early to die.
BY MIDMORNING, CAPTAIN Rene had eased the Etude out of Graves Harbor and into the Gulf of Alaska, southbound. A large swell lifted her but otherwise let her run true. Keb visited the pilothouse, though Rene called it the “wheelhouse,” which seemed odd to Old Keb, since it had no wheel. No compass either. Only a vast bank of computer screens with colorful numbers, graphs, and maps. Rene seemed to steer by little buttons, levers, and dials, nothing more. Push this, go here. Push that, go there. But who really ran things on the yacht? Near as Old Keb could tell, Jacques and Pierre told Rene where to go, but Rene chose the running speeds, times, and anchorages, and doubled as a mechanic while Monique stood by in tight pants and gave him what he needed: hammer, socket, Excedrin, kiss, screwdriver, screw. The yacht must have cost a hundred bazillion dollars. Kid Hugh said more like twenty million. He’d seen similar big-shot boats during the summer he’d spent in Sitka. That’s what he called them, “big-shot boats.” Granite countertops; Jacuzzi baths; teak tables, counters and trim; showers with twin heads; pool table; piano; and four sofas so deep and soft they swallowed you whole. Eight sleeping cabins in all, three aft, five forward. The Etude was a floating five-star hotel. The whole place gave Keb the creeps. He sat up on deck where he could watch the round earth roll. Kid Hugh liked it up there too, and Steve, curled against Keb’s leg. James and Little Mac had their own cabin and made good use of it.
By early afternoon the Etude had rounded Cape Spencer before a pale, rinsed-out sun. A gray sky threw its dour expression into the sea and the sea threw it back. Half a dozen trollers worked Cross Sound, bringing in the last big salmon run of summer. George Island was still there. And the canoe? As they pulled into Granite Cove, Kid Hugh glassed the sea cave at the base of the cliff but offered no confirmation to Old Keb. They had to be careful; give no hint of their plans, only a casual desire to get off the Etude and back on the island.
Jacques and Pierre must have assumed that Old Keb and his party, once back on the island, had no way off. They offered to run them into the little town of Elfin Cove. James countered—too harshly, Keb thought—that they’d be fine left on the island where friends would come and get them in a day or two. That’s how it is in Alaska. Friends come and get you. This prompted a big discussion between the two Frenchmen who wanted to make another trip ashore to collect rocks.
Angola announced lunchtime.
They ate on deck as a troller pulled into the cove and dropped anchor a couple hundred yards away. James and Kid Hugh exchanged furtive glances, plotting with their eyes. The net was tightening. How to get off the Etude, get their canoe, and get away? The cliff appeared daunting from this angle, an Acapulco Loco Dive and more. How drunk would a guy have to be before it looked like a good idea? Maybe Kid Hugh could use the Etude’s skiff to retrieve the canoe, under cover of darkness, while James got the tents and totes that were still on the island, back in the woods.
Rene made no offers, so James asked that they be taken to shore.
“Later,” Rene said.
Green-eyed Monique had her own reasons for getting back to George Island. According to Angola, she and Rene had fishing friends flying up from Sitka in a floatplane. “They should arrive anytime,” Angola said to Old Keb, as he gathered up the empty plates and made his way down to the galley.
Without a word, Rene moved to the davit, swung it to port, and lowered the skiff. Monique boarded it from the aft swim step, and with one pull started the outboard. Jacques and Pierre got in, and she ran them to shore. Further ignoring his guests, Rene went into the wheelhouse and got on the marine VHF radio.
Keb didn’t like it. He struggled to his feet and followed Angola down to the galley. The black man was washing dishes when Keb stood beside him, grabbed a plate, and began to rinse. Uncle Austin used to say that at the moment of self-absorption, when nothing seems more important than your own affairs, that’s when you go help somebody else. Remove yourself from the middle. “That’s okay,” Angola said to Keb. “I don’t need any help.”
“But I do.”
Angola stared at him.
“You said I could tell you anything.”
“Absolutely.”
For the next ten minutes Keb set his tongue loose about his childhood with Uncle Austin, his dreams to get back to Crystal Bay, his time to die, a
complicated story. He talked about the canoe, and James and Little Mac and their journey too, his shed burned to the ground, and his daughter Gracie, sick with something bad, and his other daughter Ruby, sick in her own way, poisoned by power. He spoke about Great Raven while Angola listened, his face pure and uncomplicated.
Keb was telling more about the canoe when James, Kid Hugh, and Little Mac entered the galley. The look on James’s face was one Keb had never seen. Standing in his own surprise, James said, “Gramps, what are you doing?”
to save a life is no easy thing
THEN THEY HEARD the plane.
The sun wobbled a degree as Keb went topside and stood on deck with the others, his hand a visor at his forehead. Monique came ripping by in the skiff, heading out to where the plane touched down at the entrance to the cove. She waved vigorously. Whatever this rendezvous was about, Keb and his companions were in the middle of it, trapped. Jacques and Pierre might stay on the island for hours, rockhounding.
Angola was still in the galley.
From the wheelhouse, Rene worked the engines to gently swing the yacht on its anchor for the approaching plane. Monique returned, tied off the skiff, and jumped aboard the Etude. From the stern she operated a hand crank that extended the swim step three times its normal width. As the plane approached, the pilot killed the engine, worked the float rudders, turned to starboard, and glided up to the float. Out he jumped and in one swift motion whipped a line around a cleat.
The plane was a beauty, a white and blue Cessna 207 with a turbo-charged engine.
“I don’t like this,” Kid Hugh said. He pointed out that the extended swim step allowed the plane to tie off without the wing hitting the yacht. Monique motioned the passengers out to hugs and greetings of warm exultation. Five visitors in all, four men and a woman, the woman so deeply tanned she looked sautéed. Monique greeted her in French, as if she were a sorority sister. Aside from a glance or two, the five newcomers ignored Keb and his companions. Rene and Monique didn’t bother with introductions. The four men were two older guys and two younger, all American. The older ones had the dress and posture of golf course regulars who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Keb had seen their kind before. The younger two had the cut and swagger of construction workers who built big homes, caught big fish, and walked through life as damaged goods, courtesy of their parents. They pulled out photos of yesterday’s sportfishing escapade to show Rene and Monique. “Meatheads,” Kid Hugh muttered, the rage restrained in his throat. Guys who fished the sea as if every day were derby day. He said it didn’t require much imagination to complete the photos: sportsmen with horse-toothed grins, big bellies over their belts as they held the salmon, those wondrous fish shaped by the sea, caught by these bozos who’d probably paid a guide and talked boastfully. If left to their own devices as hunter-gatherers, they would be dead in a week. What always struck Keb about a photo of a fat man holding a fish was the beauty and intelligence of the fish.