by John Straley
“You must be the famous Mouse Miller everyone’s been talking about,” said Clive. He patted the old fisherman’s shoulder and eased him back down.
A gust of wind rattled through the bar and sent a flurry of dry alder leaves swirling behind the bar. One landed on Mouse Miller’s dead open eye just as the storm from the outer coast announced its arrival.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BONNIE HAD BOOKED an Alaskan cruise on board the SS Universe as a last attempt to bring order to her life. It was beating down on her, like a hard rain, just how mistaken she had been.
She was standing on the port side of the lower stern deck dressed as Little Bo Peep and carrying the empty swimming pool’s lifesaving hook as her shepherdess crook. The ship was on the first sailing of the season, southbound from Valdez. By nine o’clock, the seas were darkening to a bruised color, but the steep slopes of the Fairweather Range still shone with a brilliant, rose-colored light. On the deck above, the band from Oberlin College was playing “You’ve Got to Ring Them Bells,” and a tiny boy from Belgium, dressed as some kind of fuzzy space monster, was boxing with two Japanese girls dressed like lambs.
Bonnie had seen whales spouting near the ship that afternoon, rubbery grey forms with slick backs slowly lifting their tails up in the wake of the ship, then disappearing into the whitewashed foam. She thought she could hear one of them make a long groaning sigh, almost impossibly low and mournful.
She looked down at herself, at the blue Bo Peep dress billowing out away from the rail in the brisk wind. “How stupid is this?” she asked the sea, hissing below her.
Bonnie’s mother had insisted that she take the Alaskan cruise, had sent the ticket for her twenty-seventh birthday. It wasn’t lost on her that her mother hoped she’d meet a man, and she had met men, almost all of them over fifty and traveling with their second or third wife. All the forced gaiety of the cruise made her feel sad: the dances where retired people swayed to big band tunes, the lectures where retired professors and engineers dominated the question-and-answer sessions, trying, Bonnie supposed, to regain some of the authority they’d left behind in their old jobs.
But why was she sad at this particular moment? She didn’t know. She’d just started to cry while sitting on the bench before the costume parade, sitting by herself, waiting alongside three people in black garbage bags who were planning to dance to Marvin Gaye’s “Heard It Through the Grapevine” like the California Raisins. She hated herself for being sad and judgmental. After all, she was dressed as Little Bo Peep, and no one had made her wear a costume. But still, she hated herself and these people she didn’t know.
She took a bottle of vodka out of the front pocket of her pinafore, took a long drink. She looked down into the grey water curling around the stern of the ship; no fish cut the surface, no life rose up from the darkness. She felt something lift inside her chest. Her right foot began to rise up to the lateral rail support, but as she felt her weight come down on the raised foot, she knew she wasn’t going to climb over the rail. She couldn’t kill herself because she knew her problems didn’t have the gravity of a suicide. Her vague sadness now wouldn’t compare to her mother’s grief later when she heard from the Coast Guard that the search for her daughter’s body had been suspended. Even though there wasn’t a clear reason to go on living, there wasn’t a clear enough reason to take her own life.
The sun sank over the starboard side; the Fairweathers darkened and stepped back into the grey-greenness of southeastern Alaska. Bonnie looked out to sea. The band barreled into a medley of songs from Cabaret; a balding man with a cardboard shark fin taped onto his head peered over the railing above her, scanned the horizon, took a sip from his glass, and stepped back inside the deck lounge; and Bonnie imagined her life proceeding at its own implacable pace throughout the rest of the evening, the rest of the voyage, on and on through a long cycle of years. She’d live her life, learn to pull up her socks, accept whatever fate brought her.
She started to turn toward the stairway but something caught her eye; about fifty yards from the ship, a long ridge cut the water from beneath the surface. Another whale, she thought, but no blow appeared, and the ridge was straight, not nearly as pliable as the backs of whales. She looked again and made out the straight line of a piece of wood, a drift log perhaps. But then a pale arm reached up out of the water.
Bonnie screamed. She threw the useless shepherdess crook overboard toward the figure fading behind the ship; she threw an emergency life ring hanging from a nearby wall. And as two of the California Raisins came out on the upper stern deck, she jumped from one foot to another and screamed, “Man overboard!” and various unintelligible syllables in a high-pitched voice.
The emergency beacon lit up as soon as the life ring hit the water. The Raisins saw the small blinking light lost in the darkening Gulf of Alaska and heard the loud blast of the ship’s whistle. They cupped their gloved hands over their ears and looked at each other in dull surprise as the engines of the Universe started to slow.
BILLY WAS NOT making great progress down the coast. The prevailing winds had been against him the entire week.
“I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dalai Lama, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sangha,” he repeated to himself as he paddled.
His boat rode low in the sea. Billy was not a big man so his torso above the spray skirt didn’t make up a lot of sail area. Even so, the weight of the wind pushing against his chest felt like a hand holding him back.
The clouds were spun from iron filings, silver to grey to black. They smeared across the pale grey, sunless sky. The wind shrieked across the top of the waves, drew claw marks across the water.
Billy rode up the waves, topped the broken whitecaps as if sledding down a fast river. His spray skirt filled with water at his lap, but no water came into his boat.
“I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dalai Lama, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sangha.”
Billy had to make a decision. He could try to find a safe place to land, but then he risked getting caught in the big surf the storm was throwing up against the rocky bluffs to the west; a ten-fathom shelf caused ocean swells to steepen dramatically on this part of the coastline. He could try to paddle out past the shelf where the swells would flatten out, but then he’d have to battle the wind to stay upright until he could find a headland to hide behind or a broad passage he could take back to inside waters.
He stopped paddling. He rode the waves up and down; steadied himself with his paddle and kept his bow pointed into the wind. If the wind built much more, the waves would start cresting hard enough to roll him down the face of the swells. He’d rolled his boat before, first in a swimming pool in Sitka and then a couple of times in a lake for practice, but he didn’t know how long he could maintain his strength in cold water. He didn’t think he could fight the storm all night long.
He thought he was going to die. He thought about his parents back in California, about the early mornings when he was a baby and his baby feet left faint impressions on the lawn and how his footprints were never there just a few moments after. He pushed his paddle into the waves and felt himself growing weaker, felt himself fading away just like those footprints. He felt sad. Then angry. Then he heard easy laughter, the low rumble of the storm, and … “No fighting,” he said to himself. He turned his boat with the wind and spread his shoulders to catch the storm.
The wind blew straight onto the steep coastline; the sea pounded against slick rocks, sending the broken teeth of the waves thirty feet into the air; white foam churned up, and Billy tasted saltwater in his mouth as his slender kayak plunged through the tumult.
He floated giddily above his fear. He shifted his weight almost imperceptibly; the boat cut into a wave and sledded down the slope.
He pulled the boat toward a narrow channel of green foam-mottled water and felt the sudden boost of a shore wave building beneath him; he cut back. He slid down a broken wave, and j
ust before the white water tumbled over his shoulders, he and his boat were tossed out into an eddy of water behind a bluff.
It was like walking into a quiet room off a busy street—suddenly calm. The green sea rose and fell with the swells, but no water broke through the mouth of the small bight. Billy’s hand shook; he reached under the spray skirt for a bandanna to wipe the seawater from his eyes. High above him in a cranny in the bluff, a peregrine falcon split the wind with its call. Three hundred feet up the rock wall, Billy saw trees surging back and forth in the wind.
There was no flat beach from which he could crawl out of his boat, and so he floated on water relentlessly rising and falling against the steep walls of the island. He ate flakes of fish that he’d caught and cooked the previous night; he lay them out on top of his spray skirt and ate them with two pieces of soggy pilot bread and half a piece of chocolate. He washed it all down with the last of his fresh water. And his boat dipped into the trough of a wave.
The wave didn’t break, but the force of it slid up the side of the bluff, rebounded; rocks appeared and water eddied in circles. The tide was rising. The small ledge protecting the tiny bight was about to become awash and time was running out for Billy. In a few minutes, the waves would break through and his little seedpod of a boat would be ripped wide open. If he had to ride out a night at sea, he’d have to stay well clear of the rocks.
Billy hadn’t thought of trying to get on the Universe, although he’d seen it moving down from the north; its lights had served as a frame of reference in the descending darkness. But it was lit up like a birthday cake in the tenebrous night, and its resplendence seemed remarkably close, and so Billy paddled. He pulled his boat up over the swells until the booming and sucking shoreline was behind him, and the wind died.
The lights came nearer. Billy saw the railings, the lights from the portholes, the lone figure of a woman in a long dress standing on the back deck of the ship and holding some strange kind of fishing pole. He felt like he was on a collision course with the Universe.
He didn’t want to be caught in the wake, in churned waters that would snarl the already confused sea. But his hands shook and his spray skirt was undone; his legs were wet and he shivered. The adrenaline that had rushed through his body and carried him through the surf was leaving, and he felt light-headed, weak, and cold. The flakes of fish, the bread, the chocolate had been burned up half an hour ago, and now his teeth chattered.
“No fighting,” he said out loud and reached for another chocolate bar. His paddle dropped. He reached for it reflexively, and a wave crested. He felt his boat give way and he tried to recover, but another wave slapped him in the face, then pulled him into the sea.
His gear drifted out of the boat. Sealed food bags, half-filled with air, floated like jellyfish; his yellow bag of documents drifted downwind, and he tried to swim after them but the water was too frigid, his strength was too feeble, and he felt the weight of his body pull him beneath the surface. He turned, raised his arm high into the air, and brought it down on the overturned hull of his floundering boat.
The lights of the ship spilled out over the water. Billy heard the engines churn, felt the wake of the bow wash over him, and threw out his arms to grip onto something in a world turning black.
THE Universe HAD come to a stop, and Bonnie stood on the deck pointing and shouting. A boat crew began lowering a lifeboat from station number eight, and before they could stop her, she jumped down into it. The crew wanted to lift the boat back up, but the sailor in charge motioned to lower away and another crewman put a life jacket on Bonnie. She allowed him to attach the straps but continued to point out into the darkness where just moments before she had seen the human arm rise up out of the water.
The lifeboat floundered in the water until they were able to start the motor and pull away from the ship. The waves rocked the little boat from side to side, but even so Bonnie stood on top of the middle seat pointing. Three crewmen held onto her legs, asking her politely to step down and be careful.
The lifeboat motored out into the darkness and as soon as it did, a spotlight on the deck of the Universe flashed a burning hole into the night. Bonnie could see a kayak overturned in the water, and the boatman steered toward it. But a half-dozen yards upwind, Bonnie could see someone floating just under the surface of the water. As soon as she saw it, she dove into the water and swam.
The water was so cold she felt as if she would pass out. The cold coursed through her body almost immediately, as if it were a drug being pumped into her veins. She flailed her arms, trying to swim, but the bulky life jacket kept her from moving well, so she unhooked the jacket and swam free. The sounds of the men on the boat were a slurry of voices. She found herself fighting back against a kind of sleepiness that was overtaking her. She started slapping the water with her arms, aware of breathing each new breath and pulling herself toward the man sinking in the water.
The spotlight followed her progress through the waves. The shaft of light turned the black water green and when she stopped swimming, she opened her eyes and saw a man with pale white skin suspended just underwater. With his arms out at his sides, he drifted there as if the light were holding him up. A few bubbles came from his mouth, and he looked up at her as if he had been waiting for her. What she remembered most clearly before she dove down to grab hold of his jacket was that he was smiling like a saint.
THEY BOTH WOKE up in the infirmary on the boat. They were covered in warm blankets that felt as if they had just come from the dryer. Hot pads sat on their chests and bellies, the extension cords running out from under the blankets.
The ship’s doctor leaned over Billy and asked him if he knew where he was.
“I’m in the Universe,” Billy said with a smile on his face.
“Exactly,” the doctor said, and patted the shivering man’s shoulder.
ALL OF BILLY’S gear scattered in the darkness that had closed in around the wake of the ship. Once the lifeboat crew had gotten both of the people out of the water, their only thought had been to get them back on board the SS Universe. Billy’s tent, sleeping bag, the paddle, and the boat itself lay to the stern on top of the water. The bags of food had been wrapped too tightly to maintain buoyancy and drifted down and settled some six hundred feet below the surface where only the long-lived short raker rockfish swam among the bare stones.
But the yellow package with the money for the Dalai Lama, Billy’s passport, the photograph of his friends, and his unread copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead floated on the surface of the great black sea, mindless and undisturbed.
CHAPTER NINE
THERE WAS BARELY a memorial service for Mouse Miller. Some of his friends brought the leftovers from Annabelle’s service down to the deserted bar. Mrs. Cera brought some fresh black cod and some potato salad, but she did not stay. She hugged Miles and Clive, thanked Clive for finding Mouse, and left. Her eyes were rimmed red, and Miles thought that he had never seen the strong woman look so sad. He walked her to the boardwalk and touched her on the elbow as she turned silently toward home.
Weasel had a forty-five pound white king salmon that he brought straight up from the docks and laid on the bar with the shaved ice still stuffed into its belly. Within an hour, someone had set up the half-barrel grills in the yard, and the coals were almost ready for cooking. Someone had put a photograph of Mouse over the bar.
Fishermen balanced themselves on the uneven floor and passed around a bottle of schnapps. In a corner, a deckhand from Juneau played cribbage with Jerry Hughes. Miles and Clive walked in, and since it was only ten in the morning, both of them asked for a cup of coffee. Weasel poured some from his insulated jug, and the three of them toasted the portrait above the bar.
“Here’s to strong hearts,” Miles said, and drank his coffee.
“Was that it?” asked Weasel. “His heart gave out?”
Miles nodded. Mouse’s body had been shipped to Anchorage the same morning Clive had found him, and they had gotten the re
port two days later. Mouse had died of a heart attack. “He ate badly, drank two fifths of whisky a day, and had a history of heart disease in his family. He was what they call in the trade ‘at risk.’ ”
“Aw,” said Weasel. “That’s not it.” He took a long pull on a bottle of beer. “He loved Ellie’s barmaid, Kelly. She had black hair and a huge”—he held his hand out in front of his chest—“vocabulary, she really did. She was a master of the crosswords,” and he laughed. “It near killed him when she died. You know how he liked the crosswords.” He belched and wiped his mouth with his forearm.
“Did this Kelly with the huge vocabulary ever love Mouse in return?” Clive asked over the lip of his coffee mug.
“Not really. I mean she liked him and all. But you know, she basically ran the bar and Mouse liked to drink. It was more or less a professional relationship.”
“To unrequited love,” said Clive. He raised his cup, and the three of them drank. “The glue that holds us all together.” They banged their drinks on the bar.
“What’s up with this place?” Clive asked Miles. “Who owns it now?”
“Aw, it’s a mess, like most every piece of property in this town. Mom didn’t want it so she sold it to a guy who got divorced and his ex-wife’s daughter sold it on a contract to some guy from Juneau who said he was going to open up a hotel, but of course he quit making his payments after the bank disapproved his loan for the hotel, and she’s never gone through the process to call in the note.”
“You think I can find the guy’s name in the city office?”
“I suppose so.” Miles stood up from the bar. He intended to go back to work. “Why do you want it?”