by John Straley
“Did you find Mom? I think she’s in here,” Miles said evenly, without sarcasm.
But Trooper Brown was in some sort of preverbal state of rage or perhaps shock. He had never before been tongue-lashed by an old lady in a wheelchair. Annabelle was probably lucky he hadn’t pepper-sprayed her.
“D … D … D …” the trooper tried to say.
“Don’t leave town?” Miles offered. “Don’t worry, we’ll be here. We’ll keep an eye out for Mouse. Have a safe flight.” Miles waved, turned, and walked into the community center.
Bob Gleason was standing by the door, eager to greet Miles. “By God! You missed it, Miles. She unloaded both barrels on him. I’m telling you, I’ve worked in logging camps some thirty years and I’ve never heard the likes.” He grinned.
Miles looked over to where Annabelle sat by herself, tears rolling down her cheeks. He walked over and handed her a paper napkin. “Got something on your chin.” He didn’t look at her, didn’t draw attention to anything in particular.
“You’re a doll,” the old woman said. She took the paper napkin and held his hand for a moment, took several deep breaths as if shaking off some great exertion or bad dream. “That wasn’t really a cop, was it?” she asked.
“State trooper. I guess he found you, huh?”
“Oh my God, Miles.” Annabelle smiled up at the younger of her two sons. “You know what your father would have called someone like that?”
“Well, there are several names I think he might have used.” He smiled back, remembering.
“He would have used some choice King’s English on him,” sniffed Annabelle.
“Yes, I suppose he would have.” Miles laughed.
“My God,” she huffed. “You remember Uncle George?”
“Dimly,” Miles said. “I was just tiny when he died.”
“Well, he was a good man, and he had been a cop. I told you about how he didn’t arrest Slip and Ellie, haven’t I?”
“Yes, you have, Mom.” Her son smiled and stroked her thin arm.
“If that flibbertigibet of a cop thinks I’m going to drop a dime on Clive before he’s even done anything wrong, then … well, then … I just don’t know.”
Miles smiled at her. His mother had always peppered her speech with crime jargon she had gotten mostly from Travis McGee novels. But he noticed she used more of it after Clive had gone to jail. Miles thought it was her way of showing loyalty to her wildest son.
She sat smoking her cigarette, remarkably tranquil for a woman who had apparently used some choice King’s English on an officer of the law.
“You really think Clive will be here soon?” She stared out into the swirls of smoke surrounding her head.
“I don’t know, Ma.”
She looked around the room at the dishes of uneaten food sitting right where people had left them before fleeing: meat loaf and cooked cabbage, potato salad, and gelatin. She smiled.
“Say, Miles?” Annabelle looked up at her son. “Can you do something for me?” She snubbed out her cigarette and slid her glasses up her nose.
“Sure, Ma.” They both knew he worried about her. “What did you have in mind?”
“Could you boil me an egg?”
Bob Gleason broke into applause.
AFTER THE DUST settled, diners started creeping back into the community hall; they hadn’t forgotten their free dinners. Miles sat by himself in a corner, listening to people talk, eating some of his own meat loaf and mashed turnips. Bob and a friend from Juneau were doing the dishes, laughing, joking, calling out to people in the hall. When they were done, Miles made himself an extra sandwich and wrapped it up. He waited until he heard the trooper’s floatplane take off, stuffed the sandwich into his wool coat, and walked down to the floating dock where his skiff was tied.
It had been years since Miles had caught a king salmon. He had spent hours in his boat dragging a line through the water. He used the right gear, fished at the right depth, trolled at the right speed, and still he had been denied. He had a subsistence permit and had dipnetted enough sockeye salmon to smoke up for the winter. He had brought in coho salmon and chums when they were running. But there was nothing quite like catching a king salmon. The electric tug and the zing of line spooling off into the deep green. It had been so long since he had had that feeling. He longed for it like an old man longing for youth.
Tonight as he scanned the sky and checked the wind fluttering through the pennants in the rigging of the few boats left in the harbor, he was—despite all odds—flush with optimism.
He walked down the boardwalk, noticing the soft spots in the planking. Rot was creeping up from the water through the pilings and in around the edges of the entire town. He could smell mildew, sooty diesel stoves venting out of broken stacks, a whiff of fish slime, and the egginess of the thermal water trapped in the old, concrete bathing tub.
It was early spring; he would have enough daylight for fishing. The herring had been spawning late on the outer coast, and he had heard people were catching king salmon out at the mouth of the bay. He was determined to bring one home.
Miles had an aluminum skiff with a temperamental outboard motor. He had fought the engine, sworn at it, even threatened it with violence. Only in the last three months had Miles’s relationship with the cranky piece of equipment changed; he now tried to think of it as a kind of teacher, one with the temperament of a wild animal. If you wanted something from an outboard such as this, you had to display the virtues of understanding and patience. If you rushed up to it and started jerking on the starter cord, the soul of the machine would immediately fly out into the cold air and what would be left on the stern was an inert pile of metal. You could pull on that cord until your knuckles bled. You could change plugs and clean the fuel filters. It would not matter. The engine was no longer of this earth. It was as if the outboard were watching him from the trees as he pulled and swore and pulled and swore until steam rose from his sweater and sweat stung his eyes.
Miles arranged everything in the skiff carefully; the trooper had put him in a bad mood. He took a deep breath and slowly let it out before speaking softly and gently to all the equipment.
“Well, old girl, I’ve heard there are fish out there. What do you say to going out there with me?” He patted the machine, checked the mixture of the fuel. Whenever he could, he’d add some of the fresh gas stored in a sealed jug under the hatch. He pumped the bulb on the fuel line and pulled the choke halfway out. He pulled three times until the engine sputtered.
Closing off the choke, he opened the throttle halfway, then paused to say a few words he had settled on months ago and never changed. In a perfectly serious voice, free of irony, he spoke: “I want to thank you for all the hard work you’ve done in your life. I promise I’ll treat you well today.”
The sun hung behind thin and ragged clouds. Across the bay, Miles saw a raven watching him, sitting all by itself, shrugging and ruffling its feathers in the wind. Lonely, Miles thought. Lonely for the irascible soul of the outboard engine.
The light at the head of the bay was silver grey now above the dark green sea. Beyond the few islands to the west lay only the Gulf and distant Kamchatka in Asia. To the east, mountains rose up two thousand feet on both sides of the inlet and eased back against the more fractured and eroded slopes of the outer coast. Here the sky widened, and the wind freshened. Here the swells were larger, and the breeze carried the smell of waves broken apart on the shore. As he ran up and over the smooth swells coming in off the coast, Miles passed through occasional warm pools of air; they carried the scent of cedar trees from the outer islands.
Just ahead, gulls circled a tight ring of water, and Miles began to slow the motor. He saw dark squalls rolling in toward the coast from the north, but to the south, clouds floated almost white, threaded with blue. The gulls were diving on some tiny silver fish. Herring, Miles guessed, although he couldn’t see them clearly enough to tell for sure.
He quickly rigged his salmon pole and lo
wered the throttle on the skiff’s engine as far as it would go. He picked up a green hoochie, a small plastic squid surrounding a hook that danced behind the twisting motion of a silver flasher. Miles watched the progress of the dark squalls to the north; he didn’t want to be caught in the rain. He let the flasher drag out perhaps thirty-five feet behind him, snapped his line onto a downrigger with a small cannonball attached to a wire cable pulled by a hand crank, and adjusted his reel’s drag, keeping his thumb on the spool of monofilament line. He lowered the cannonball to sixty feet beneath the boat, played out the line from his reel; the tip of his pole bent over from the weight of the rigging.
Miles put his rod into the pole holder and navigated a course through the circle of feeding birds. If a fish didn’t bite, he would move, change depths, change gear. For now, though, he let out a long breath, eased back against the plastic seat bolted onto the hard wooden bench built into the skiff.
Miles loved this kind of slow fishing. Since returning to Cold Storage, he had rediscovered his respect for the uneventful life.
Miles had served in the first Gulf War. All it had left him with was an almost unquenchable thirst and a sliver of metal in his shoulder. There had been a photograph of him in a national news magazine, the one to which the trooper had referred. The image of Miles helping another bleeding man into a helicopter had spun its way around the world. The image meant nothing to him now. He could not, nor did he want to, recognize himself in the photo.
Miles’s father had been a good fisherman who had disappeared off the coast in a storm while Miles was a small boy. But he didn’t dwell on grief. He had been satisfied with where he was. Even as a fatherless boy, Miles had loved the little cabin on the water and the thousands of acres of ancient forest just up the hill. In this he was like his old Uncle Slip, who had loved every unchanging stone and tree of the place. Though Slippery Wilson was good with tools and hard work, he was uninterested in catching fish, and Miles was beginning to think he might have inherited some of the old man’s bad luck.
Somewhere near his skiff, a loud exhalation of breath woke Miles from his thoughts. Miles fussed with the drag on his reel. First he tightened it, and then he loosened it back up. He unscrewed the top of his water jug and drank about half of it down.
He heard the loud breath again and scanned the waves. The western sky glowed with a pink haze above the wavering line of the horizon; the view of the outer coast was blocked by islands, their humps glowing with silver and tipped with red as the sun washed over the curve of the ocean.
Underneath his boat, a cloud of silver fish roiled in the green. He could hear them boiling up on the surface. He reached over and turned off the motor. The sea was thick with herring pushing their quicksilver bodies into the air and slapping them down on the surface. The air smelled cold, oily. Down below, he could see large slices of silver shoot under his hull.
Miles, twitching with energy, lifted his pole from the holder. The drag was rolling, and he tightened it down slowly. A large salmon leaped into the air a hundred feet from the boat, a rail of pure lightning coming up out of the darkness of the water. Miles pulled back hard, felt a sudden and heavy jerk; his fish was gone.
The water was quiet. The cloud of silver had moved on. But he heard the breath again, and he held tightly to the side of his skiff, half expecting to be nudged by an orca whale chasing the school of fish.
He looked in all directions, even peering into the sky, until he caught sight of a sea lion some twenty feet behind him, its head steady above the water, seemingly impervious to the motion of the waves. Its eyes glowed milky brown with sympathy and from its mouth drooped a king salmon, graceful as flowing mercury.
“Goddamn it!” Miles shouted.
The sea lion looked at him for a long moment, shook itself, huffed a short breath, then dove under the waves.
“You son of a bitch!” Miles yelled out over the cowling of the outboard to the ripple of water left on the surface. “Bring me back that fish.”
But the sea lion was gone, and Miles was left with the food in his freezer. Muttering about bad luck, he tied off the loose end of his line, lay his pole down on the floor of the boat, and jerked on the starter cord. No response. He pulled again. Silence.
He shouldn’t have been swearing. Miles knew that. And now he knew he might as well get used to the idea of sitting out in the bay for a long time. He would sit and take some deep breaths, try to get his mind right so he could coax the soul of the cranky machine back into the boat.
CHAPTER THREE
LESTER FRANK WAS the only Tlingit Indian living full-time in Cold Storage. There were traditional native villages elsewhere in the area: Hoonah, Sitka, Juneau, Angoon; even Pelican had native communities. Cold Storage had Lester Frank, a contemporary artist who lived next door to the clinic. Miles had asked him once why he had moved to Cold Storage, and Lester had given his characteristic answer: “I study white people.”
Lester carved wood and silver. He painted in acrylic and even sculpted in stone. He said he was writing a book about white people called Circling the Wagons, but no one had ever seen even a scrap of a manuscript.
Lester’s house was one large, square room with a smoky wood stove sunk down three steps in the center. His bed was high up in one corner, a kitchen was in another corner, and everything else was desk, bookshelves, and studio space. As Miles walked up the boardwalk from the dock, Lester stuck his head out the shoreside window and yelled down, “Oy, Doc! Where’s all the fish?”
“In the sea where they belong.” His voice was barely loud enough to carry.
“I got tacos. Plenty of them and good tomatoes, too. You come up and eat.” He shut his window without waiting for a reply.
Miles went into the clinic and checked the bulletin board for messages. He looked at the answering machine to see if anyone had called. The relay towers up on the ridges were always being blown over and phone service was sketchy; there would be weeks in the winter without any telephone contact at all. Tonight there was a fine, strong dial tone but no messages.
The sky was almost dark, and the air thick with moisture as Miles walked up the stairs to his apartment. He hung his wool coat in front of the oil heater, reached into his refrigerator to grab a bottle of sparkling apple cider, and went back next door for dinner. He could barely see Lester standing at the far end of the room, laying a warm flour tortilla on a plate.
“Just in time. I got venison. I got cheese.”
“I’m not too hungry. I ate at the center before I went fishing.”
“You never eat your own cooking. I know that. Eat a taco, for Pete’s sake.”
Miles took the plate and ate the taco. Arguing with Lester was like arguing with the weather.
“I saw you, you know. I saw you in your skiff before you went fishing.” Lester walked down three steps to a seat in front of his cast iron stove.
“You saw me doing what?” Miles tried to flatten his voice.
“I saw you praying to that piece of junk engine.” Lester shook his head, held up an empty glass.
Miles walked down and poured sparkling cider into the cup. “It’s not a prayer exactly.”
“It’s some goofy new age prayer.” Lester snorted into the mouth of his glass. “I’m telling you, man, you are going to be a whole chapter in my book about white people: the man who makes devotions to recreational equipment.” Lester smiled.
“It’s not recreational equipment,” Miles mumbled from his seat on a round of wood next to the woodbox. “It’s a thinking thing.”
Lester rolled his eyes, slapped his friend on the shoulder. “A thinking thing? I don’t know about that. That engine was owned by an Indian. It just doesn’t care for white people is all.”
“Why not? What did white people ever do to that engine?”
“How should I know?” Lester said. “Do I look white?”
They sat silently while the fire inside the cast iron box popped, sucked air through the draft. Lester was comfortable
without words spoken every second, which suited Miles; he sat and ate his venison taco.
They finished and started eating cookies that Lester had had flown in from Juneau. He probably could have afforded the most expensive cookies on the market, but he preferred cheap, off-brand things bought in bulk. At first they appeared to be brand cookies you could recognize, but once you bit into them you were reminded that you were in bush Alaska and a long way from the centers of culture where people probably ate a better class of cookie.
Miles washed the dry crumbs down with juice. Lester took a bite and stared at the grate on the front of the stove. The fire rumbled, and a gust of wind pushed against the sides of the old frame house.
“So, you going to the movies tonight?” Lester asked.
“What’re they showing?” Miles held little hope of surprise.
“The Bad Lieutenant.”
“Ah, Christ, isn’t that the third time?” He picked up a stick of wood to feed the fire.
“I think it might be the fifth time in, like, six months. It’s Weasel. He loves it. I think it makes him happy or something.” Lester opened the door to the stove, and Miles threw a piece of wood on the fire. “I think Weasel wishes he were Harvey Keitel,” Lester added, shutting the door. “Harvey Keitel lets ugly white men think they’re still sexy.”
The Cold Storage Film Society was made up entirely of men. After a truly horrendous argument about Reservoir Dogs, the women had splintered off into their own film group and had “Movie Tuesdays” instead. Now an insurrection was starting up again in the men’s group.
“Naw, I’m not going,” Miles said. “Are you going?”
“I might.”
The two men sat for several minutes, listened to the fire hiss and suck at the grating; the new stick of wood was damp. A gust of wind slapped against the house, and Miles looked toward the dark windows to see the reflection of a tiny light above Lester’s workbench.