Ghost Sea: A Novel (Dugger/Nello Series)

by Ferenc Máté

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Hopkins,” he said, and looked quickly over the ketch, clutching one of the cards I had old Mr. Chow, who ran the Chinese paper, print for me: Captain S. V. Dugger. The ketch Terrence Jordan. Denman Street Docks. Coastal transport. Anything. Anywhere. I know that last bit was pretty short on class, but when you owe as much as I did…. I went and stuck those cards in chandlers, hotel lobbies, beer parlors, social clubs, the seaman’s home on Pender, the steamship terminal on Main, the railway station, boardinghouses, whorehouses, and even the Salvation Army. You never know.

  I invited Hopkins to join me below for a cup of tea—I don’t offer rum early, in case they think me a drunk and take their business elsewhere—but he stood and eyed the ketch knowingly: her hull, her sheer, the masts, even tried to see under the water, checking, I guess, for growth.

  “Newly copper-sheeted,” I said. “Fastest on the coast.”

  At that he seemed to ease and I slipped back the companionway hatch and we went below. The embers still glowed in the galley stove, so I heaved in some scraps of wood while Hopkins looked around the cabin.

  “Wonderful,” he kept saying. “A wonderful little ship. Remarkably Oriental, all this joinery.” I let his comment go; it was a long story. He opened his coat, sat himself down on the starboard settee, and made himself at home, running his hand over a varnished sea rail. “Captain Dugger,” he said, “we would like to engage you and your ketch for a period of time.” And just as I felt the South Sea’s breezes blowing on my face, he pulled out a business card, and I read in disbelief, L. W. Hopkins, Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Retired. I stared dumbstruck. The law and I never mixed; not that I felt myself beyond the law, but rather that the law seemed always beyond me. Suddenly the South Sea’s breezes seemed farther than ever.

  “I don’t have room for horses.”

  Hopkins didn’t laugh. When he saw I wasn’t going to say any more, he said almost bashfully, “Captain Dugger, your name was something different off San Francisco that foggy afternoon.”

  I had a good mind to bolt then and there, but my legs wouldn’t move. I froze half risen, with my back arched like a cat. Thank God the kettle rocked. “The tea.” I struggled to the stove. It took all my wits to figure out what to pour into what. Took my time. “A bit of rum?” I offered, while pouring a long slug into mine. Through the portlight I saw the fog close in as if it meant to stay there for the rest of my life.

  We sat quietly sipping tea-laced rum, the fog sending tendrils down the hatchway. For the first time I looked closely at Hopkins; his eyes were furtive—he was the type that knows a lot more than he lets on. He ran his eyes over the cabin, making polite remarks—how much he liked the doors, the bookcase, the inlaid table—and all the while, on every pass, his eyes lingered for a second on the rough-carved cedar mask hanging on the bulkhead.

  “Fascinating piece,” he said, nodding at the mask.

  “Kwakiutl,” I offered.

  “Do you mind?” And he got up for a closer look.

  It was plain, simply carved, the white paint thin and splotchy from age, the features smooth, the brow high, the nose thin and upturned, cut short—a skull. The square white teeth were bared, gritted tight. There were no lips. Scruffy tufts of horsehair were stitched above the brow. The eyelids drooped half closed, one eye stared out in horror, the other bled a long, crimson tear.

  “A skull rattle,” I said. “Keeps you safe from cannibals.”

  Hopkins smiled. “Could come in handy in this town.”

  There was a thud against the hull. It was her, I knew the sound of her dinghy bumping.

  “I better check,” I said, and ran up. The fog was empty. A piece of driftwood rolled on the tide and banged the hull. I took a deep breath and went below.

  Hopkins was still looking at the mask. “Brilliant, don’t you think?” he said in honest appreciation.

  “Except it doesn’t work,” I said. And when he looked at me quizzically I added, “Not when you most need it.”

  He looked away; he knew when it was best to let things go.

  “From up the coast?” he queried.

  “Way up,” I said. “A couple hundred miles.”

  “You hear a lot of stories about up there: Desolation, wild islands, wild people. Unimaginable rites.”

  “Stories,” I said.

  “You know the place?”

  “Not well.”

  “But your first mate, Mr. Nello, was born there.”

  There wasn’t much old Hopkins didn’t know. I pulled in my limbs as if not to give anything more away.

  “End of the earth,” he went on. “Barely charted. Rocks and reefs, towering mountains with inlets like corkscrews, hundreds of miles of wild emptiness.”

  “And fog,” I said. “Even more than here.”

  “Kwakiutl,” he sighed.

  The rum didn’t do its work; in fact, I was getting jittery. But not Hopkins. He sat calmly and stared at me. He asked for a bit more rum, took a gulp, leaned forward, and said in a quiet, confiding tone, “Captain Dugger, you know what a potlatch is.”

  “Only so-so,” I said.

  “All summer long the Indians fish: salmon from the sea and streams, herring from the shallows. In the tidal flats they pick oysters, clams, sea urchins, mussels. They dry or smoke everything to preserve it for winter; even dry seaweed, berries, mint, everything in the summer, everything before the rains. Bakoos time, they call it. Then winter comes, and the rains come, and they pull back into the villages into their great cedar houses and it begins—Tsetseka, it means Magician. It all starts innocently enough, days of feasting, some mourning songs for those who died since spring, singing, joking, all very nice, very noble. But then day-by-day things turn ugly. They say that spirits come out of the sea, the woods, wild spirits; ‘Dog-Eaters.’ And worse.”

  His voice dropped. “There are rituals. Frenzied women are stuffed in cedar boxes and thrown on a bonfire. Alive. Others are hung from ropes by their skin. Everyone watches. Young men are dragged off into the woods for weeks and are left there alone; they come back wild animals—they attack their own people and…. They’re called Hamatsa. Cannibals. We’ve tried to put an end to all this.” I poured him some more rum.

  “How long would it take to get up there?” he asked.

  “With good winds, timing the currents in the passes, and not pushing your luck, maybe ten days.”

  “And back?”

  “Depends.”

  “On the winds?”

  “On whether they eat you or not.”

  Hopkins straightened up, annoyed. “This isn’t easy for anybody, you know,” he blurted. “I have great respect for these people, their traditions, their knowledge of their world. They’re generous, caring, they look after the sick, the old, each other, even strangers. They’re a noble people. But these potlatches, this savagery has to end.”

  He took a deep breath, calmed, and began again.

  “There was a law passed against these rituals over forty years ago. But to enforce it out there, my God! It’s the end of the earth! So they went on. Until last winter. An informant warned us in advance of the place, the time. A boat took in the Indian agent and police, ran aground twice, but went on and arrested the worst of them. Poor buggers. The fog thinned for an hour at midday so the boat got in…. Poor sods.”

  “I read about it,” I said. “You took everything they owned.”

  “Just the things used in the potlatch,” Hopkins objected. “Things used for the horrors; just the masks, things like that.”

  “Just the masks? They have no written language. Those masks are their history: deeds to property, records of marriages, stories of their creation, even their names. Christ! First you take their lands, now this. What the hell did you leave them?”

  Hopkins wasn’t prepared for that. He stared at me almost meanly but went on. “The Indian agent took the masks; that was within the law. Then he sold them to a private collector; that was not.”
<
br />   “What does this have to do with me?”

  “The potlatchers were tried and sent to jail,” Hopkins went on with a forced calm. “Thirty-two of them. Last week they feigned a riot and in the commotion two of them vanished.”

  “Maybe they got eaten.”

  “Captain Dugger!” he snapped. “They escaped, then killed a man! Left his head in a bowl.”

  I don’t remember what it was I had tried drunkenly to say, but whatever it was, it made Hopkins’s fist hit the table so hard the mugs jumped, and he roared, “Dammit, Dugger! I can ship you back to Frisco and have you hanged!”

  MY NERVES HAD had it; my ears were ringing and I made out only phrases drifting in the cabin. “An important artifacts collector…family of insurers…broke into his yacht…took back masks…killed a crew….” Hopkins talked on but it was all choked by the fog until a cold draft of it shot down the hatchway and my head cleared and his voice came back. “They stole a canoe and headed up coast. We’d like you to find them.”

  I must have looked pretty strange, because he asked, “Did you hear me?”

  “Can’t you go find them yourselves?”

  “Our hands are tied, Dugger. They took a hostage. The collector’s wife. He made us promise not to jeopardize her life.” Then he leaned close to me and said slowly, with as much accusation as I ever care to hear, “Katherine Hay; I believe you know her.”

  I think my breathing stopped. It must have, because I passed out. When I looked up, Hopkins was gone; only his card and a stuffed envelope rested on the table. I thought I heard his footsteps die off in the fog. I had a slug of rum. A long one. It did the job. I lay down on the berth, and in the codling warmth drifted off into painkilling sleep. And dreamt of Katherine Hay.

  4

  OBSESSION

  The Indians live in an atmosphere of the supernatural; not only are the forests tenanted by mythological animals, but the birds, the animals and the fish, all are capable of assuming supernatural form.

  —T. F. MCILWRAITH, Anthropologist (1922)

  Whenever I drink I drink the pain of your love, mistress. Whenever I get sleepy I dream of my love, my mistress. Whenever I lie on my back in the house, I lie on the pain on your love, mistress.

  For whenever I walk about I step on the pain of your love, mistress.

  —Kwakiutl love song, transcribed by Franz Boas

  I’m not some dreamer who believes a woman to be his sole salvation. Women have come and gone in my life, some leaving an emptiness, others just the door open behind them, and I lived through them all and mostly kept my footing. But for some inexplicable reason—and I had been around, I was past thirty then—the first time I saw Katherine Hay on a street, in a crowd with the July sun on her auburn hair, eyes aglow, her steps so full of life, I was shaken. I ran after her and almost under a tram; what I would say when I caught her never crossed my mind.

  She stopped on a corner, waiting out the traffic, and I landed beside her, out of breath. She glanced up surprised and I stared into her eyes, before forcing my gaze away, whistling weakly at a cab down the street. A shrill whistle ripped the air behind me. I turned. She stood there, smiling, fingers at her lips—I was a goner.

  I sound like a schoolboy smitten at first sight, but when in this sorry world a face still passionate, still bursting with life appeared, believe me, it kindled something close to hunger, like a desperation. If a shooting star hurtled toward you from the heavens, would you turn away? Would you not throw open your arms—reason, fear, and tomorrow be damned? I didn’t see her for a while after that. Looked for her, asked for her. For who? A frail woman, dressed too well for my empty pockets, with auburn hair and a deafening whistle. I found her practically at the ends of the earth.

  I was hauling a coil of anchor rope, pouring sweat in the August sun, resting at every chance along the waterfront. At the Great Northern docks they were loading lumber bound for Mexico onto steamers. In an outside berth lay the last of the four-masted schooners pointing her proud bowsprit at the land; but she was old. Her crew toiled with care among her shrouds, decking the enormous weights gingerly. Her ends sagged, her sheer had lost its sweep; across her once-white planking, each fastener eked tears of rust, and with her patched hull and wavy bulwarks, she looked too infirm ever to leave port again.

  At Hastings Mills the great saws screamed. Perched on a thousand pilings, shrouded by smoke and steam, were sheds, rickety cranes, and tar-seamed water towers; skids, horse carts, and gas trucks; dry-docked scows and dry-rotted boathouses, and a heap of steam-donkeys condemned to rust in the mud. And in that infernal din, weary, noise-silenced men loaded, sorted, tugged, and hauled, awaiting the salvation of the beer parlor. I was at the stinking cannery, where turbaned Sikhs on scows stood knee-deep in dead fish, when I saw her.

  A blindingly varnished launch swung into view below me. She was sitting on the coamings in a plain white dress, hair glowing—she was the only one outside that day without a hat—sitting next to somber-suited men studying a map. She gazed detached at the smooth wake of the launch, then looked beyond toward the open sea.

  I ASKED ABOUT her around town: the docks, beer parlors; asked Mr. Chow in Chinatown, who was kept current on everything, asked at the ship terminal where all the steamers disembarked, and the Hotel Vancouver where I knew the concierge because I took him and his mistress on a cruise once overnight. Nothing. Little by little I pushed her from my mind.

  I busied myself with a load of gears and spare parts for steam-donkeys up the coast, when early one evening a rowing skiff, perfect as a violin, pulled up alongside the ketch and hailed. It was a deckhand all in white, asking politely if I would consider a small job for the captain of a motor yacht. The man pointed to a gleaming eighty-footer anchored near the woods up the bay. The owner had bought a sailing dinghy for his wife, and there was no one aboard who knew how to rig it. Would I be interested? Those days I would have eaten a boulder for a dime.

  The yacht—up close—was even more perfect than its skiff. The captain, a kind-faced man with life-worn eyes, greeted me as we climbed the ladder. He complimented me on the ketch, and how well she maneuvered in light airs in tight quarters; he had seen me these past weeks.

  The dinghy was on the aft deck, its rigging coiled, blocks, cleats, and turnbuckles scattered about. I laid everything out close to the final placement, stepped the mast to find the angles for the shrouds—they hadn’t even mounted chain plates—and was just checking the leads for angles, when I saw her.

  I had backed down the side deck to sight the rake for the mast, and looked through the windows into the main salon, where the long, gleaming table, with its silver and crystal, reflected the red glow from the sky. She sat at one end of the table, listening to a man at the other end with his back to me. I shuddered. Felt hot or cold, I can’t remember which. The decks were unlit, the sun just gone, so she could not have seen me on the dark side in the dusk. The cabin boy brushed by us, lighting gimbaled lanterns on the cabinside as he went.

  With the deck now lit, my movement caught her eye. She looked up. She continued to speak to her companion but her gaze rested on me, and I swear I saw her blush. Her eyes stayed riveted on me, with the urgent look of a fellow conspirator.

  “Cotton,” I said hoarsely to the captain. “Cotton line for sheets. This hemp will be too rough on her hands.” I couldn’t think of another excuse to stay. They said they would return for me tomorrow.

  In the morning, I felt as if I’d been drinking all night. I scrubbed, shaved, dressed, slicked, as if going to a ball. Didn’t realize just how nervous I was until I took a last glance in the mirror.

  I rowed humming “Sloop John B.” to calm myself. The dinghy gear I had requested awaited me. I went to work, not daring to look up even when I heard footsteps. It was always just the crew. Then, when I had almost finished, her shoes stepped into my sight. I looked up. She stood smiling, her light dress fluttering against her in the breeze. She thanked me for my help, and said how eager she was
to get out in the boat. I managed to say, “Just don’t forget to turn back at the narrows. It’s a tough little boat, but China, I don’t know.” She laughed. Such an open heart-felt laughter, with her head thrown slightly back, that the whole crew laughed with her. Infectious. And her eyes. Great dark pools. Unguarded, dancing, sparkling with life. I had to look away. Another woman came and they boarded the shining skiff and the kid rowed them ashore. “Thank you again,” she called. And waved. I kept rigging. They were walking along the shore when the air was rent with her whistle. Then her laughter.

  Rowing back to the ketch, I felt nothing in particular, nothing that I noted, not until I pulled alongside, cleated the painter, and clambered back on board.

  Everything had changed. The brightness of the light, the richness of colors, the grain in the wood deck, the reflection in the polished brass—the world. The evening was awash with a transparent pink glow, and everything—the texture of ropes, shapes of blocks, the curve of the sheer—all seemed to have assumed a mystical intensity.

  The ketch—my first love, until now—seemed suddenly to stand apart from me. I went below. The flecks of sunlight bouncing off the water, rippling in slow waves between the deck beams overhead, seemed a magical event. And the silent shadows deep in the forepeak, seemed to reach onward, endlessly forever. I needed air. I rowed ashore. A creek flowed from the forest into green pools on the rocks. The water splashed, gurgled, foamed a brilliant white, exuberant, full of life. And the mossy rocks around it—even they seemed to breathe. It was as if a veil had been lifted—behind which I had cowered all my life.

  In Chinatown that evening, instead of hurrying past people as was my habit, I felt myself slow and let them sweep me onward. Like sailing through a pass, where the current grabs you and the rudder no longer steers because it no longer bites; you’re just being swept away. But it wasn’t frightening; it was almost reassuring that some great wild force now had me, and hurtled me along. And in the open-fronted shops of Chinatown even the badly plucked duck carcasses, hanging by their necks, looked beautiful.