by John Straley
“Clive McCahon!” Oscar sputtered. “Clive took the money. Three days ago. He said he was picking up some gear for you. He said I could call you if I wanted to, but you know … I thought, shit, it’s Clive, you know, he’s one of your boys. I mean, I know that. He was one of yours. He went to the joint and never gave anybody up. I thought it was all his stuff in the locker anyway. Shit, Jake! I had no idea he was going to rip you off. I had no fucking idea. You got to believe me. Really …” Oscar kept babbling.
Jake reached down and patted him on the cheek. “Clive McCahon? He’s in jail.” He lifted the gun to Oscar’s eyes.
“No, no! He’s out,” Oscar sputtered. “He just got out. You can check that. Really, check it.”
Jake stood up straight. He rubbed his chin with the front sight of the gun. “I believe you. I do, Oscar, but still you owe me. You’re going to have to give me something, Oscar. You hear me now?”
“Anything,” he puffed, struggling to sit up.
“Do you ride a bicycle?” asked Jake, tapping the pistol against his leg.
“No … no, I don’t.” He looked up with a twitchy kind of panic, a tone that hinted he was willing to start riding a bike right away.
“No bike, huh? Do you play basketball?”
“No …” Oscar tried to push his way back up on the couch. Jake lifted his foot and shoved down on his shoulder.
“What do you mean, you don’t ride a bike or play basketball? Do you jog or anything like that?”
“No, Jake. I don’t jog.” His voice shook.
“Then this is a piece of cake, buddy.” He lifted his gun slightly and fired one round into Oscar’s left knee.
CLIVE WAS ON his knees in the Seattle airport in front of the oversized baggage desk; he was trying to load Little Brother into an expensive, brand-new kennel. It appeared he might never set foot in it.
Clive had tried crawling into it himself. He thought if he showed the dog how easy it was, he might convince Little Brother to load up. The tactic wasn’t successful.
“Won’t you even consider getting into the crate?” Clive asked politely. The dog stood, his head bowed toward the slick linoleum floor, and said nothing, which frankly relieved Clive because he was afraid of what would come out if the dog did speak.
“Well, I guess we could travel by ship.” Clive backed out of the crate. “But I think they will still make you get in a box.”
Behind him, a security man, clearing the area for some VIP passing through, grabbed Little Brother’s studded leather collar. The growl grew as loud as gears grinding in a Sherman tank; the hair along the ridge of his back stood on end and every muscle was taut, as clearly defined as on a wet, brown bear charging up a river bank.
Every person waiting in line took a step back. The security guard put his hand on his gun. Clive put his hand on the guard’s elbow and spoke to him in a friendly, even tone to show he wasn’t kidding around.
“Don’t do that.”
“Yeah … Okay.” The guard looked shaken, waved to his partner to route the procession to the other side of the concourse. “But if this dog isn’t out of here when I get back in five minutes, we’ll have to call in the animal control people.”
“I think that would be a good plan,” Clive said. “Do they have a fire hose? Maybe we can spray him inside the kennel.”
Clive was about to say more when the echoing voice of a disembodied pleasant woman came through the air: “Clive McCahon, Clive McCahon, please meet your party at the Alaska Airlines Board Room.” Clive looked around and took out a hundred dollar bill and gave it to a Vietnamese man with whom he had struck up a conversation earlier.
“Make sure no one shoots my dog, okay?”
“No problem. He’s good here,” the man said with no evident concern, and Clive took off down the pre-security hallways of the Seattle airport. He introduced himself to the polite staff behind the Alaska Airlines desk, who showed him to the small board room where sat Jake Shoemaker and the eminently efficient Miss Peel.
Clive nodded to each of them. “Jake. Miss Peel.” Everyone in the room knew Jake had once actually had sex with Miss Peel, a fact that she immediately regretted and which he would never let her forget.
“Clive boy, sit the fuck down. You can’t steal money from me. What the hell are you thinking? You, you of anybody, know what I have to do to you.” Jake had a briefcase in front of him. He was fingering the latches. Miss Peel had not said a word.
“Miss Peel,” Clive said, turning to her, “you are looking well. Have you been swimming in the warm ocean regularly?”
“Clive.” She looked at the black expanse of desk between them. “I see jail has agreed with you.”
Miss Peel—whose first name was Ann, although he had seldom ever heard it used—was a truly glamorous human being. She looked to be of some indeterminate Hispanic descent. Her lustrous, raven black hair was down to her shoulders and clipped up in the front. Her dark eyes were wet and sparkled like wells. Looking at her made men a little crazy, which was why Jake took her to business meetings. But the fact that he never made advances on her led many men to think he might be gay. Clive thought that he might truly be a gentleman, or he was just frightened by that much beauty.
“Anyway, it’s good to see you,” Clive told her, then turned to Jake. “And you, you little fuck. A: it’s my money, it’s my paperwork, not yours. B: you are not going to shoot me in the Alaska Airlines Board Room because I know what kind of frequent flyer miles whore you are. I know. I know that you gave them your real ID card checking in here, so you can’t blast me and walk out. It’s stupid. Besides you know they have a camera that photographs each and every one of us when we walk in here and that means that most likely the Port of Seattle Police have probably started asking for the tapes already after hearing your discreet little page of my fucking name. Jesus. How did you ever get this far in crime anyway?”
Jake sat up straight. “Look, man, we talked before. Crime money is hard money. It’s stressful. All the fucking assholes—no offense—all the guns, who needs it? You know what I’m saying? Me, I’m taking crime money and putting it into non-stressful businesses. Everyone else is making money. Computers, what a load of bullshit. Dot-coms. Christ! Companies full of zitty kids who sleep till eleven in the morning and produce nothing you can understand and want a million dollars, and they fucking get it. I don’t get it. I’m going back into real estate. You can’t go wrong buying buildings, you know what I’m saying? Nothing less stressful than that.”
“Your stress level concerns me how?” Clive was still looking at Miss Peel, who would not look up at him.
Jake kept fidgeting with the latches on the case. Clive could see Jake’s stress now, and it concerned him. “There is this pain-in-the-ass DA. Federal guy. They can make your life miserable, you know what I’m saying? What you have—my money, how you got it … The gun stuff, the drugs … That could do me in. Twenty years, they are saying.”
Clive leaned toward him. “You got no gun stuff. You were strict about that. You never killed anyone. That one thing a couple of years ago, with the Filipino salesman in Yelm, that was a total accident and everybody knows it.”
“I know. I never sold to gangs, I never supplied gangs. I only ever sold to these rich dot-com yuppies. But these feds say they can track gangbanger guns to me.”
“That’s crap. That was your father’s bird hunting gun that was stolen out of the milk truck. I told them that, and it’s on one of the tapes. They can’t use that.”
“But if you go backward on me they can put me away.”
“Jesus, Jake.”
“Listen, kid, keep the money.”
“Shut the fuck up, Jake. Don’t you hear how you sound? It sounds like you are bribing me to lie. I’m keeping the money and the documents because they are mine. I’m keeping the documents and the money because I’m getting out of the business. I’m retiring. I’m going back to Alaska to get away from you and the life. I’m not taking the money to lie
for you. If asked, I’ll tell the truth that you were not into drugs and guns. You were only into drugs. The Feds love drugs and guns. Well, you were only into drugs. That’s it. Sure, you had a gun, but that’s, you know, Second Amendment shit.” Clive stood up and looked down at Miss Peel. “That’s a – m – e – n – d – m—”
“Oh my Lord.” She finally looked up at him. “Were you the spelling bee champion of McNeil Island I read so much about?”
“Ann, if you were to marry me, we would have enough leverage with the Feds to get a free home in American Samoa. What do you say?”
“Mmmm, tempting. Unrelenting heat, dysentery, and you. Let me think about it.”
“Do that,” Clive said. Jake, staring forlornly at his briefcase, didn’t say anything. Clive gave Miss Peel a little bow.
“See ya, kids. Got a plane to catch.”
As he walked out of the Board Room, Miss Peel put a tidy “X” at the end of the last line she had written. She shut her pad, straightened her skirt, and stood up without looking once at Jake.
WHEN CLIVE RETURNED to check in and pick up his dog, Little Brother was waiting inside the kennel, apparently having decided it was time to lie down with his new sock toys.
At Clive’s seat in first class, the flight attendant wanted to take his heavy parka, but Clive kept it on his lap. She brought him a gin and tonic in a heavy imitation crystal glass.
Clive looked out the window. Outside the plane, the city of Seattle was a tangle of wires and flat concrete. There were homes and sheds and stores and shopping malls all connected by an interlacing web of crushed rock and paving tar. It reminded him of a tangled blackberry patch full of blackbirds hunting through the vines for food.
There was minor damage on one of the cargo hatches, and they were going to have to wait a couple more minutes while it was repaired. Clive heard the captain chuckle; a mouse had somehow crawled up and chewed a tiny part of the rubber seal around a hatch. It would just take a second to get that fixed, and they would be on their way.
For a moment, Clive believed he could hear the merry laughter of mice and raised his glass in a solitary toast.
Soon the plane accelerated down the runway, pushed into the exhaust-scented air, and banked over the bay while the sun set in a red gaseous plume. On the purple sea, an oil tanker ploughed north. Far below him was a cardboard box with his name and his prisoner number written on one end; he was leaving his old clothes and his time in jail all behind.
The captain’s voice interrupted his thoughts. The plane was going to have to turn back to Seattle. It appeared there was a caution light indicating a problem with one of the cargo doors. There was no need to worry; he would have them back on the ground in Seattle in just a short while, and after a minor repair they would be up in the air in an hour or two.
Clive took another long drink of his gin and tonic. He pulled his bulky new parka tightly around his knees to warm his legs and lap.
MILES WALKED BACK down the boardwalk toward the clinic. Every time he passed Ellie’s Bar, he wondered about Mouse Miller. He had seen for himself that Mouse’s boat was in the harbor. He had even asked the harbormaster and a couple of other fishermen who lived on the boats whether anyone had seen him.
In the morning Ellie’s Bar seemed haunted, but now in the afternoon the old building was unrelievedly lifeless, a corpse with broken-toothed windows that didn’t sparkle. A light rain was falling but not enough for water to drip off the eaves; no boards pushed up with the wind, no rusty nails shrieked, no cats hissed. But to Miles, this was when the old bar was at its most frightening.
He hurried along the boardwalk, lifting his collar against the chill. There was no point getting bogged down in useless worry. He had things to do, and he wouldn’t be slowed down by ill-considered options.
The rain had stopped; the sun was cutting down through the clouds, and the woods to his left lit up as the clouds moved in the sky. Berry bushes held tiny pearls of rainwater that sparkled like diamonds. The alder trees were starting to show tiny green buds, and the salmonberry brambles had tight fists of well-spaced green leaves at their tips. A varied thrush whirred and chirred up under the dark canopy of the old spruce. A river otter scuttled under the boardwalk and set loose a small cascade of stones back down to the beach. Miles took it all in and was happy to be just where he was.
He got back to the clinic, wrote his notes, went upstairs to the apartment. He put on his sweatpants and flip-flops, gathered up clean work clothes and some shampoo, and headed for the bathhouse.
Like most of the structures in Cold Storage, it was an old plank building sagging on its timber frames. There was a small entryway and a second door leading to a dressing room where painted wooden walls were ringed with benches and hooks.
A set of clothes was scattered on the bench, and a pair of red rubber boots sat underneath. The smell of marijuana smoke overwhelmed the egginess of the bathhouse, and Miles knew exactly who was inside.
Mouse Miller’s one deckhand was Weasel, who had taken the name after signing on with Mouse and kept it long after he quit fishing on the tiny trolling boat. He liked being called Weasel much better than he liked being called Julius, which was his birth name. Weasel lived ashore now. He spent most of his time smoking marijuana and watching movies he had flown in from Juneau on scheduled food flights. He grew his pot hydroponically on his float house and always seemed to have a good crop.
His electrical power came from an old hydroelectric complex that the cold storage plant had put in years ago. As long as the rain kept falling, there was power. And as long as there was power, Weasel could keep running the massive lights hanging above the flat tubs of his growing operation. When they started putting a drain on the town power supply, he was told his rates would quadruple in keeping with a new “prorated” energy policy. He cut back on the lights.
Some people in town considered Weasel a genuine gangster. A logger named Tiger Johnson was convinced Weasel was one of the major dope operators on the entire West Coast. He had a theory about him that included black boats, helicopters, and midnight runs to private submarines off the coast. All of that sounded too rigorous for Weasel.
Besides, it had been made clear to him quite forcibly by Miles that if any of his pot showed up in the possession of any of the school kids, his float house would suffer from an accident involving either fire or flooding. Weasel took the message to heart.
Miles had poked around. It was pretty clear that Weasel sold his crop to a select clientele: familiar adults without kids and visiting fishermen coming in to sell their catch or ride out the bad weather on the coast. The rest of the marijuana Weasel saved for himself.
So while some people had tried to run him out of town and some had tried to turn him in to the drug authorities, Weasel didn’t scare off. The drug cops were not interested in coming all the way out to Cold Storage merely for a marijuana bust—or at least they hadn’t been before Trooper Brown and his hunt for Satanists. Miles wondered if Weasel’s lifestyle would be affected by the trooper’s new interest in Cold Storage.
In the bathhouse, Miles crossed the grey-green concrete floor of the main room, passed the old-fashioned claw-footed cast iron tubs against the wall, and headed toward the main pool. A solitary bare electric bulb twenty feet above him shone like a midwinter sun lost in fog.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Weasel, a skinny man with hair tied back in rubber bands, sat on the edge of the pool, feet dangling in the water. He smiled up through the steam. “You want some?” He held out a fat, soggy-looking joint to Miles. A sense of propriety made him offer even though he knew Miles didn’t smoke or drink.
“Naw, thanks, Weaz.” Miles thought about how Weasel could have written a Miss Manners, handbook for stoners. “Hey, Weaz,” he asked, “do you know where Mouse is? I haven’t seen him around.”
“I don’t know.” Weasel let out a long plume of smoke. “I wouldn’t worry or anything, Doc. He’s been getting stuff out of his boat. I’ve been checking
, and it looks like he’s been going in and out. I bet he’s shacked up down at the bar, you know?”
“I was just thinking that I hadn’t seen him around.” Miles studied the green and white lines left on the wall by the condensed steam sliding down.
“Well,” Weasel said, “if I see him I’ll tell him to come by and see you.”
“That would be great.” Miles draped his towel over the stair rail and eased into the hot water. He leaned his head against the concrete step, closed his eyes, and let the heat begin soaking into his bones.
“Missed you at the movies last night,” said Weasel on an exhalation of breath.
“I’ve seen The Bad Lieutenant, Weaz.” Miles kept his eyes closed. “I wasn’t in the mood for it again.”
“Naw, we watched Get Carter with Stallone. I don’t know. No one else was into watching Lieutenant. I had just gotten the Stallone tape and I figured, you know, what the hell?” Weasel took a long thoughtful drag on his joint, squinting and cocking his face away from the fire. He washed his armpits with a soapy rag.
“How was it?” Miles asked. “Get Carter, I mean. Any good?”
Weasel stepped back from the tub and dipped his head in a plastic bucket of fresh water. He threw his head back in one long wet rope of blond hair. “I liked the original better,” Weasel opined. “I mean, this was a fashion show. The guy never mussed his hair.”
Miles shook his head. He trusted Weasel’s appraisal on this. He might have an unhealthy interest in Harvey Keitel, but Weasel knew how to judge an action film.
“Hey,” Weasel changed the topic. “Did you meet Officer Friendly when he was in town?”
“Oh yeah.”
“I never even knew you had a brother, man. That’s cool.”
Miles stepped out of the tub, soaped and rinsed himself with fresh water. “Yeah, it is,” he asserted. “It’s pretty cool.”
Weasel had a limited number of subjects he liked to discuss in the bathhouse: movies, the history of the Industrial Workers of the World, the solo music of Robbie Robertson (after he left The Band), the industrial uses of hemp, and—most recently—the novels of Haruki Murakami. He discussed those stories as if they were holy texts.