Arch Patton

by James Strauss

  “Not exactly a fair fight,” Marlys observed.

  I looked at her, in surprise, but then saw her ever-so-slight smile.

  “He’s bleeding all over the deck,” she noted.

  I checked Borman’s skull.

  “Oh damn,” I said, exasperated.

  The cabin door opened. Don filled the gap.

  I informed him, “He’s fallen, in his drunken stupor, and cut himself on the head. We need to get him down to the infirmary so Doc can sew him up.”

  Having finally stopped their playing and singing, the Germans hauled the First Mate out, looking at me strangely, more in question than anger. Don and I followed down to the infirmary where I knew that the doc was not going to sew anybody up. I would have to repair the damage I had done myself.

  “It’s not so bad,” Don said, quietly, behind the struggling Germans’ backs, “at least you got all that morphine down there. Maybe you can keep him out for the whole cruise.” He thought that was hilarious and laughed openly. “You karate chop him, or something? Like, you know, Bruce Lee?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You gotta stop beating people up,” he went on, “somebody’s going to get the idea you are not an anthropology lecturer after all.”

  The doc watched, as closely as he could with his ancient eyes, my operation on the Mate, and then my sedation of the man. Borman would wake the following morning with a bad headache and a bunch of poorly tied stitches in his skull. With any luck at all, he’d also have little memory of what had happened. And he would need somebody to take his stitches out. At least I hoped for those last two things.

  “Are we headed on into Provideniya?” I asked the doctor.

  He shook his head. “No, we’re going into Gambell Spit first. It’s on the tip of St. Lawrence Island. Best carvings in the world are done there. They harvest Baleen Whales. The Baleen bones are wonderful for carving. Our passengers will want to buy stuff. They’ll also want to see the dances. Fake dances for tourists, or so everyone says you said.”

  I washed up and dried my hands. Russia just kept on eluding me.

  “Not one item,” I snarled at the man. “Not one carving, reindeer skin, or anything else. You understand me?”

  I waited. He answered, his volume almost too low to hear.

  “Okay,” he said.

  I was relieved at his response.

  “And back on the island, you owe that guy’s wife six hundred bucks. You’re going to send it from Gambell, so make out a check.”

  The doctor tightened up as if I had stuck him with something, but he didn’t argue.

  After changing in my cabin and checking for the gold nuggets, which were still there, I pocketed my retrieved Leica en-route to the lower deck exit portal. I tossed the mate’s knife on top of the gold before leaving. The passengers were already ashore. I couldn’t find a life vest until Benito handed me one. We squared off in the narrow loading area.

  “Tonight,” she promised. “I will see you tonight, in my cabin, after you finish your cute little speech to the passengers. Not the bar slut’s cabin. But mine. We’ll discuss cruise business.”

  I stared at her thick bulk, blocking my departure.

  “I’ll be there,” I surrendered weakly, wishing I had the figurines from Marlys cabin once more wrapped in a towel and at my disposal. The First Mate seemed a minor threat compared to our cruise director, certainly less dangerous.

  Don showed up, huffing and puffing. He had a life jacket. I realized that the experienced pro kept his in his cabin. Henceforth, I would do the same. Benito gave way. Filipe circled, and then came gliding into the side of the ship. Once aboard, we sped toward a bleak shoreline, the waters flat because of our position in the island’s lee.

  “How’s Dutch?” I asked, over the roar of the outboard.

  “He’s recovering under feminine care,” he answered.

  I looked at him, my eyebrows raised.

  “Don’t worry,” he laughed, “She’s mine!”

  His assurance worried me more than he recognized.

  Gambell Spit is made of stones. The same horrid little stones we had encountered at Aguiak Island. This time, natives waited for us while sitting on four-wheeled ATVs. The vehicles had great fat tires, which permitted them to ride atop the stones. Nobody walked far in Gambell. ATVs were everywhere.

  Gambell also consisted almost entirely of metal shacks, which all the inhabitants lived in. The fishing, carving, and storage went on in them as well. Even the church was made of metal siding. Along one shore was a work up of old whalebone shelters. They had animal parts strewn all over them, left there to dry for later consumption, I figured. Or maybe to make it look like that, for tourists anyway. In my experience, native cultures revealed little to anyone not of their own tribe.

  Don climbed onto the back of one ATV and I did the same on a second ATV. Our native drivers kidded one another and then took off.

  The ride was wild. The vehicles careened over the rocks, following well-worn trails. Every once and awhile, the drivers jumped the machines out of the ruts and into the air. They found the exercise extremely gratifying. I found it considerably less so. As we plummeted down to the gathering of shacks and waiting clumps of passengers, the driver of my ATV veered off. He headed for what looked like the most fortified building on the spit. It was barely separated from the rest of the dwellings. We skidded to a stop in front of the place.

  A man stood outside its steel door. He was wearing a uniform. The door behind him was painted with the words “Gambell Sheriff.” The ATV roared off, the native on it behaving manically. I stood there and looked at the sheriff. He motioned me toward him with one extended index finger.

  I noticed, when I got closer, that his name tag said “Maxwell.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO:

  Riding the Trough

  Sheriff Maxwell and I sat on either side of his old, cast-off military desk. He had laughed heartily when I had inquired, nervously, about whether he was related to Agent Maxwell of the Department of Immigration.

  “You’re supposed to be the anthropologist and you can’t tell the difference between an Aleut and a Yupik?” he had scolded me.

  I knew Agent Maxwell was not of visible Eskimo heritage and I said so. The conversation had died there, with no real answer to my question, although I did not sense the kind of layered deep anger, which would have existed if the two men had been blood relatives. His next question moved us beyond small talk.

  “Where’s the doctor?” he asked.

  I just looked back at him, not answering. Benito was the cruise director, and this man would know that, so what was I doing being smuggled off to his office? I presumed that the doctor was still aboard the Lindy. Besides, my answer to his question could be easily disputed.

  “You have need of medical care?” I asked, innocently, expressing as much concern as I could generate sitting in a law enforcement officer’s cubicle on a throwaway Alaskan island.

  “Coffee?” the sheriff said, evading my question.

  I queried, going along with the strange communication exchange we were engaged in. He poured two cups of thick black “cop” coffee, which I knew to be bad without even tasting it. I sipped anyway. Normally, I took cream, or some of that fake yellow sweetener, but I did not want to break away from our stilted exchange. So many complexities had arisen during the expedition cruise that I needed to figure out which part of the mess I was now entangled in.

  We both sipped. I knew that he knew that the person who spoke first would place himself in the weaker position. Did he surmise that I knew that? I waited more than a full minute. He had called me in. I did not care what he had to say. He obviously needed something. I dawdled.

  “Where is the thieving bastard?” he finally ground out, unwillingly.

  I hoped my relief was not visible when I heard his words. I si
pped more of the terrible coffee. I was not done stonewalling. Sheriff Maxwell lowered his own cup to his desk and then leaned forward, much as Kessler had done during our meeting earlier. “He stole at least ten important carvings on his way through here a month ago. These are trusting people,” and he waved his arm to take in the community.

  I didn’t mention anything about a small native village of less than four hundred people having a full-time uniformed sheriff with his own facility. I flicked my eyes to where he motioned, then brought them back to stare into his. I nodded, and then uttered my first words.

  “Why am I here?” I asked. “There are Yupik on Little Diomede Island. They’re the majority of the population. Did you know that?” I inquired, poking like an anthropologist would: arrogantly.

  He replied, “We want him. He’s been thieving up and down these islands for most of the year. These are poor people. They have been violated and they need the money those carvings bring in.”

  At that, I put down my own cup, before attacking.

  “Each one of these ‘poor’ natives receives an income of nearly fifty thousand dollars a year from the government and the state oil revenues. They must have terrific expenses, I mean, to be so poor.”

  I picked my coffee back up, as did he. We smiled in unison. I knew the price for ten carvings and I figured that the native carvers were never going to see a dime, or the price would have been higher.

  “You know,” he said, once he realized that I fully understood, “usually the cruise director handles the affairs of the ship. How come it’s shifted to you?”

  It was a fair question, and an accurately uncomfortable one, so I dodged it.

  “Our cruise director has developed a bit of an attitude problem, so here I am,” I said.

  I pictured Benito sitting across from him, being hit up for thousands of dollars in outright extortion. The results would not have been pretty.

  “I need to get back to the ship for supplies,” I announced, standing up.

  “I have your word?” he said, holding out his hand.

  I perplexed over what he had heard that allowed him to trust me, before I answered.

  “You have,” I told him and took his hand.

  He then reached for a portable radio on the bookcase behind him.

  “One to the Zodiacs,” he said, then put it down.

  He motioned me to the door, through which I heard the banshee wail of one of the ATVs pulling up outside.

  I rode with Filipe out to the Lindy. Nobody bothered to ask what I was doing. The passengers and crew were running around Gambell proper, like large doubled ants aboard the nasty buzzing ATVs.

  I had uncharacteristically locked my cabin when I had gone ashore. I unlocked it and stepped inside, breaking a length of thread which had been run from my bunk to the small dresser. I leaped backwards when I felt the pressure, but it was too late. The thread tripped the “on” selector to a box CD player. A song began to play. I sat on the bunk to recover from the rush of adrenalin that had flashed into my system and to think.

  The song was a Johnny Cash tune about a man going around taking names. What was its significance? Was it Botany Bay who had left it for me? It had to be his humor. I hoped so, anyway. I also thought about the chain of “smoke signals” that ran up and down among the island tribes. They knew about the doctor. They knew something about me. They knew about the money. What else did they know and what kind of problems could I expect when I tried to come home from the mission?

  I clicked the CD player off after the song had played, curious about what else was on the disk, but not wanting to deal with it just then.

  Counted stacks of hundreds sat on my bunk. The Agency was so idiotic sometimes. Why new hundreds with consecutive numbers? What kind of pea-brains were running the analysis side of that place? I knew the answer. Children. Macho, attention-starved children. If the nation ever figured that out, but I had to let go of that kind of thinking, at least for the time being.

  Unexpectedly, I was running short of cash. There would be no saving the doctor again. I emptied out my little canvas bag, which I had forgotten to take ashore, and stuffed the bills inside. I thought about crinkling them up, but then reflected on the man I had faced in that office. He would see right through an obvious ploy, and only become more suspicious.

  I took the small bag down to the portal where Filipe waited. I motioned him over, grabbing one of the lines so he could approach me. I gave him the bag with instructions. When I turned to go back to my cabin, Commander Hathoot stood blocking my way.

  “Ah, the now-famous anthropologist. I would have thought to have been visited by you before now,” he said in his smooth Lebanese manner.

  I almost expected him to curl the end of his mustache, but he didn’t. What was it about everyone with any contact with the Bering Sea? Did they all require something from me, I wondered.

  “Marlys works for me. The entire lower crew works for me. Well, except for your staff, you have your own problems there. She is indentured. You understand that?”

  I gave nothing to him. I just continued to stand.

  The Lebanese continued, “She’s not going anywhere, no matter what she’s told you. She owes twenty thousand and she’s going to serve every bit of the three years she signed on for.”

  I could not help but smile upon hearing that. On top of everything else, I was aboard a slave ship. I wanted Hathoot to go away, which he did.

  I leaned against the nearby bulkhead. I now inferred what Marlys needed. I had that kind of money, but it was in Krugerrands and they were indispensable for the mission. I hated slavery and bondage. I had seen so much of it in Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, and even Venezuela, and had always found it abhorrent, practiced by humans who were not humans at all. They were primitives disguising themselves as civilized. Hathoot had revealed himself to be truly evil. Of all the crew on board the Lindy, he was now my lone sworn enemy.

  I returned to my cabin, locked the door and fell into my bunk. I went to sleep instantly, not thinking of anything, not dreaming.

  I awakened to the chain locker alarm, as usual. We were pulling out of Gambell Spit. We would be running toward Provideniya, finally, unless God had even more bizarre plans for me. I showered and prepared to go up to the lido, gave my short lecture on the amazing Yupik culture, and begin my mission plan, which would start with our evening Mouseketeer Pirates meeting. There was a knock on my door, hard and masculine. I wrapped a towel around me, and then undid the dead bolt. Dutch squeezed in.

  “You’re not busy?” he asked.

  I shook my head, having learned the arduous way that aboard the Lindy being naked and getting dressed were not considered “busy” activities. I went into the bathroom and shaved, for the second time that day, mostly in an attempt to wait the over-sized boy out.

  “You’re not mad at me?” he crooned, from his spot near my dresser.

  “Nope,” I answered, shaving some cream off my face.

  “I got some morphine to replace your other stuff, you know, that you had to use on that guy at St. Paul,” Dutch said, as if making an offering.

  “Great,” I responded, waiting for the boy to get to his point.

  “I’m in, you know, whatever it is you gotta do in Russia.”

  I grunted my assent.

  “Even if we have to kill somebody, I mean,” he went on.

  I stuck my head around the door jam and looked at him. He was dead serious. I was about to pass his comment off, then thought better of it. The cruise had so far proved to be the stuff of B-grade horror movies. There was no predicting where anything would go. And I was, at the moment, extremely angry with Hathoot.

  “I understand,” I said, seriously. “I’m counting on you.”

  I almost fell out of the bathroom as the ship careened to one side. I hung onto the doorknob with my shaving cream covered hands.r />
  “What the hell?” I gasped out.

  Dutch, bracing himself with both hands between my dresser and bunk, thought it was hilarious.

  “We’re in the trough. Usually we move south with the swells or north against them. The worst is riding in the trough between them, and that’s what we’re doing. It’s going to be a rough night.”

  Between troughs I tried to get my clothes on.

  “What’s on this?” Dutch said, more to himself than me. He clicked the CD player on, then pressed play. The song played and Johnny Cash’s lyrics came forth again.

  “… and he decides who is free and who is to blame.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE:

  Chukchi

  I dressed in my Lindy-provided blue sweater. There was no name on the front of the beautifully knit Canadian wool, just an embroidered representation of the ship over the left breast and the white stitched letters “STAFF” on the back. The sweaters were highly prized by the passengers, as they were not for sale on board. It was rumored that Don sold his at the end of every trip. I liked mine, and would keep it, if I could. I checked myself in the mirror. I touched my latest contusion, which had appeared just over my right eye. It had been late in blooming, after my tussle with the burly supervisor on St. Paul. The bruise made me look like an aging Dennis the Menace, but that could not be helped. Don entered my room.

  “What are you doing covering the doctor’s ass everywhere we go?” He sat on the bunk, with both arms crossed, obviously disturbed.

  The accurate flow of information all around me unsettled me once again. How could Don have known, unless my envelope was penetrated prior to its delivery to Gambell Spit? This spoke possible volumes about Filipe that I really didn’t want to consider. But then, he had also quoted the words to Don’s little CD player booby-trap. I decided to explain, even though I was not exactly sure why I was covering so completely for the old coot.