Anarchy

by James Treadwell

  “Here. I’ll toss this to you.” Goose clambered around the crates to the bow again, coiled the bowline, and threw. “Easy. Whoa there.” The girl had yanked the bow in hard. “Got to spin it side-on. Walk along that way.” Goose leaned over the side with the paddle, fending off against the cracked rock below. “There we go.” She was going to paddle a little closer to the sand but Jennifer didn’t wait, didn’t even roll her sweatpants up, let alone stop to take her shoes off. She splashed in up to her knees and launched herself at the gunwale, spreading her elbows across it, thrashing the water as she tried to pull herself over. “Easy!” Goose reached over to haul her in by the waist. They ended up in an untidily intimate heap among the crates.

  “Okay.” She straightened herself out, leaned over with the paddle again, and pushed away. “That worked. Kinda.” A couple of shoves and a couple of backstrokes and the boat was moving away from danger, spinning slowly as it went. “Welcome aboard.”

  Jennifer sat down in the passenger seat, hunching morosely.

  Goose pulled in the bowline hand over hand, quietly pleased with herself. Though she was past the stage of knowing what to expect, her plan had gone about as well as she could have imagined. If she’d had any expectations, they certainly wouldn’t have included a Jennifer who was not only reasonably cooperative but reasonably communicative as well. There’d been plenty of stuff in the file testifying that she was basically a good kid, but that was before she’d become—

  The shaman girl. The phrase spoke itself in her memory in a horrible dry voice; the r in girl not sounded, in the English manner, turning the word cold and sinister.

  Goose sat in the bow, the safety of the windscreen between her and the girl, while she forced her feet back into her boots. The damp lining was horrible but still better than open air against her skin.

  “Jennifer?”

  The girl glanced up, plucking hair away from her cheek.

  “I just want to make something clear to you.” There was the weight on her tongue again. She tried to think her way around it. “There’s a lot of stuff I don’t understand, but I know it’s . . . different now. Okay? So anything you want to tell me, I’m not going to try and tell you you’re wrong, you’re crazy, whatever. We were wrong. Weren’t we. The rest of us.”

  Jennifer looked like she could have been modeling for a statue: Teenage Sullenness.

  “So.” Goose shrugged. “That was it, I guess.”

  She’d never have expected the girl to answer, but Jennifer surprised her.

  “This was a place people lived, once,” she said. “The biggest house was my people’s. The orca house. Over on the far side, where the long beach is. Where’s your house? Where do you belong? You don’t even know.”

  Goose looked at her. She couldn’t see a shaman girl. All she saw was another stroppy kid.

  “That’s what all this is about?” she said. “The old you-stole-our-land stuff ? Jeez.” She stowed the coiled bowline, more neatly than Jonas would have bothered to. “That’s kinda disappointing.”

  “It’s nobody’s land.” Jennifer clasped her hands over her breasts, a strange gesture, almost religious. “It never belonged to anyone. The Band talk that way ’cause they don’t know any better than you. My mom, she don’t belong here. Or anywhere. She don’t know how to live, don’t matter where she goes. Get drunk, watch TV, have babies.” She spat another word Goose didn’t know: it sounded like a curse. “Yeah, you were wrong. You and everyone else.” For a moment her voice made flat echoes ring from the wave-smoothed shoreline.

  “Were we,” Goose said, moving Jonas’s crates back out of the way. “Is that so. And you’re going to fix it?”

  Jennifer said, “It’s gonna fix itself.”

  Goose thought of the couple she’d met that foggy morning in Alice, running away down-island because they were afraid of living by themselves with no TV. She thought of the failed bank machine, no longer translating digits in an account into money for the wallet. She wondered what they’d find when they got back to Hardy.

  The wind was gusting up a bit. They were still sheltered from it, but Goose could hear it in the trees and see the grey sheet of the Passage beginning to wrinkle into dark lines. A rough crossing would be no fun in a boat this size.

  “Well,” she said, squeezing behind the passenger seat to take the helm again. “Let’s go back and see, shall we?” She pressed the switch to lower the outboard.

  There was no response.

  She pressed it again, clicking it back and forth. “Tabarnac,” she growled, jiggling the key in the ignition. The battery gauge caught her eye. Its needle showed zero charge. Less than zero: the needle was slumped against the edge of the dial as if it had broken. The fuel gauge was the same. It had been showing three-quarters of a tank maybe half an hour ago. Now it showed nothing.

  “Crap.” The boat was spinning unhurriedly, drifting closer to one of the small islands. She jabbed at light switches. None of them worked. The key clicked back and forth without provoking the smallest response from the motor or any of the electrics.

  “Great. That’s freaking great.” Goose thumped the dashboard in frustration. “Must be some kind of battery thing.” A broken connection was the best she could think of. She looked at the scattered boxes and spools and weed-streaked fenders covering most of the boat. “Where the hell’s the battery?” There’d have to be some kind of hatch in the hull, she guessed, probably in the stern. She tried the key a few more times. “Come on. Jeez, Jonas. Trust you.” On the coldest winter mornings back home it would sometimes take a while for the car to start. She remembered sitting in the back with Tess, watching their parents stomping around the hood in their snow jackets, getting angrier and angrier, first with the car, then with each other. But on those mornings you could at least hear the ignition trying to turn over. The boat wasn’t making any noise at all. It had gone dead as driftwood. “Tabarnac! ” She kicked it.

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” the girl next to her said, not smugly; she sounded tense.

  “Why don’t you shut up for a bit, okay?”

  “Something bad’s come with you.”

  “Here.” Goose picked up the paddle of the kayak and put it in Jennifer’s hands. “Here’s something useful you can do. Make sure we don’t run aground while I get this fixed.” She began kicking her way through the junk in the stern. The girl got to her feet, too slowly. There were shallows beneath them; they’d drifted out toward the channel between the rocks. The black bulk of a drowned log came into view nearby. “Don’t just stand there!” Goose grabbed the paddle, leaned over, and shoved them clear of it. “All right. Sit down. Let me.” The tide was ebbing, slowly enough as far as she could tell; still, she didn’t like the idea of losing depth in the channel. Better to get out into open water before seeing what she could do with the electrics, she thought, especially if the kid was just going to be a pain in the ass. She went forward and sat with her legs over the bow. From there she could just about paddle the boat, though it was as unwieldy as trying to row a bathtub. A faint current helped, the tide draining out of the bay. Her back ached as she bent, dug the blade in, pushed. She noticed how hungry she was, and how stiff. The steel blue of dawn had turned into the inevitable grey day. Shouldn’t have come here.

  “Oh,” Jennifer said, behind her. “I get it.”

  The stern was swinging the wrong way. Goose battled the paddle sideways. The water beneath would have been no more than waist deep if she’d been standing in it. “Shut up.”

  “That looks like hard work.”

  Goose didn’t have the breath to shout. She tried to ignore the girl. They were abreast of the outer island. A cliff-rooted pine jutted out overhead at a ridiculous angle, doomed to end up among the fallen wood, though its losing battle might go on for decades more.

  “You’re not going to make it the whole way.”

  “Shu
t your freaking mouth, you freaking witch,” Goose said, very quietly, between breaths. The rocky bottom fell away suddenly and the sea became a dark opacity. She clenched her teeth and gave a few more powerful strokes, propelling them away from the bare shoal to starboard, then sat up, putting the paddle aside, feeling her back. The boat yawed abruptly. She looked around. Jennifer had stood up and was trying to lift the kayak.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Leaving.”

  “No freaking way.” Goose swung her legs inboard. The kid wasn’t strong enough to get the kayak up. Goose got a hand on it before she could move it more than a couple of inches and shoved it back, hard.

  Jennifer turned on her. “You can mess around with the motor all you like. It’s not gonna help. I get it now, I get what’s happening. You people, you always wanna go faster, don’t you? Gotta have your cars and your boats and your planes. Gotta be able to get away, get somewhere else. You can’t do that around me. You know what happened? I called the killer whale to me.” She reached inside her sweatshirt and pulled out her necklace, the plain brown ring looped on a chain that had gone the dull speckled green of tarnished silver. “From the other side of the world. He didn’t get on some plane. He came the way a whale’s supposed to come. This is what he brought me.” She clutched the pendant in her fist. “This makes everything the way it’s supposed to be. No motor’s gonna speed this up. If you wanna take this anywhere you’re gonna have to do it yourself, the way a person’s supposed to. That’s how I came here. That’s the way you should have come too. You screwed up. Gonna be a long paddle home.” She pointed across to the distant southern landmass. “Or you can let me go my way, then you can go yours. Quick as you can, A to B. Hurry hurry hurry. Get it over with. And you’re wondering why you don’t belong anywhere.”

  Goose’s fingers were beginning to tingle. She’d always hated the ones who yelled back. They never made any sense either: they were drunk, usually, and crazed with their stupid pride, their desperation not to give in to the law even when she was hauling them into the station and filling out the charge sheet. They always had to have the last word. She breathed carefully, concentrating on keeping her temper.

  “I’ve got to take a couple of steps back here,” she said. “Did you just say you broke my boat? Jonas’s boat? You remember Jonas. Officer Paul. He drove you up that morning. He’s a pretty nice guy, but he’s not going to be happy with you if you messed his boat up. Is that what you just said?”

  The girl turned away. “You don’t get it,” she said. She braced her girl’s hands inside the cockpit of the kayak and started trying to lift it straight again.

  Goose leaned her full weight on it. “I found that kid. That boy.”

  Jennifer dropped her hands to her sides and went still.

  “What was his name. Horace something Chinese. Him and the mask out on Masterman Island, and your coat. I found him. What’d you do, leave him there on his own? He could have died. Is that what all your this-is-how-it’s-supposed-to-be bullshit’s about? Leaving a kid to die?”

  Jennifer looked for all the world like a tenth-grader being told off at the front of the class.

  “I know he was a killer whale too,” Goose said, without even stopping to wonder how she could be saying such a thing. “I know that. But when I got to him you know what I found? A kid who couldn’t speak and couldn’t move. That’s what he was on that island. I looked him up. He’s been missing from his home for three months. His mom made a bunch of appeals. You can see them on YouTube. A couple of times she tries to say his name and she can’t, she chokes up so bad she can’t breathe. The cop has to lift her up from the table and make her take a drink of water, and she spills it down her coat because she can’t open her mouth properly, she’s shaking so bad. You look at her face and you think she’s a hundred years old. That’s his mom. Is that what you mean by everything being where it belongs? Huh? Jennifer?”

  She’d tried to keep her temper but she’d ended up almost shouting. The girl wouldn’t look at her.

  “Sit down,” she said. “Stay out of the way. Oh, and forget the kayak. Actually.” Goose had left the paddle leaning upright in the cockpit; now she took hold of it, held it straight like a javelin, pointed up and out with her leading arm as she’d been taught, and flung it from the boat. She had strong shoulders and good technique. It went spinning and arcing a long way, landing with an ugly splash. Jennifer had made a small motion as if to stop her, but far too little and too late. “There. Now, why don’t you shut up for a bit while I check the battery. You went all that time without saying anything, you should be able to keep quiet for ten minutes.”

  The girl put her hood up, tucking in her chin, and sat down. Her fingers went to the necklace, spinning the pendant around its chain. Goose took a few moments to flex the anger out of her hands, and then kicked her way through Jonas’s crap to explore the stern.

  She found the hatch by lifting the seat across the back of the boat. The battery was in a watertight compartment beneath. Sheathed rubber cables connected it to the outboard and the fuse box. She saw no cracks in the rubber, no loose cabling, none of the scum or froth that would have suggested a leak. Everything was as shipshape as the anchor had been. Jonas let everyone think he was a slob, but she knew better. There was even an inspection certificate, neatly slid inside a plastic folder taped to the lid of the compartment. She unclipped the cables and wiped the connections, though they weren’t particularly dirty, reattached them, and tried the key and the switches again. Nothing.

  “You’re gonna have to go fetch that paddle,” Jennifer said.

  Goose sat down in the seat next to her, rubbing her cheeks. She was beginning to feel seriously uncomfortable. The chill wasn’t too bad for the time of year, but she felt the bad night catching up with her, and her stomach was pinching and growling. It had been a while since she’d gone this long without coffee too.

  “Say what you said again,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You know. About how you can only go as fast as you’re supposed to go, all that crap.”

  “You still think it’s crap? Can you see anything wrong with the boat?”

  “Okay, so say it again. The boat was running fine an hour ago. What happened?”

  Jennifer shook her head. “You’re not listening.”

  Which was true, when Goose thought about it. Wasn’t that the problem all along? Hadn’t she promised herself, that morning, as she watched the dawn begin, that she’d listen to the kid?

  She sat for a while, trying to remember what Jennifer had just told her, thinking about it.

  When she’d finished, she stretched slowly, rolled the lingering stiffness out of her neck, and stood up. Casually but carefully, she positioned herself behind the girl’s seat.

  “You going to fetch that paddle now?” the girl said, still hunched in her hood.

  “Nope.”

  Goose whisked her hands down over Jennifer’s shoulders, grabbed the necklace chain, and pulled it off. The girl had time for no more than an ineffectual spasm of her arms and a sharp and angry scream before Goose bunched chain and pendant in one hand and threw them out into the grey chop. They disappeared with barely more splash than a drop of rain.

  The first note of rage gathered in Jennifer’s throat like muted thunder. As she rose to her feet it became a howl. She turned on Goose with murderous eyes and roared wordlessly at her. The howl cut off suddenly, leaving them face-to-face, breathing hard. The girl’s face had turned as ferocious as the orca mask.

  “You’re gonna die alone,” she said, “and in pain.”

  Deep inside her, Goose felt a light go out, or a small door open onto a long dark passageway. She faced it down.

  “Okay,” she said, as calmly as she could. “Let’s try the outboard now.” She could tell from Jennifer’s look that she’d been right. No motor’s gonna speed th
is up; whatever the deal was with the kid’s necklace, that was the problem with the boat. She didn’t understand it, of course, but it wasn’t about understanding, it was about listening. She made to step around the girl, reaching for the dashboard.

  Either anger made Jennifer quick, or Goose had relaxed a fraction too much. The girl spun round, pulled the keys out of the ignition, and held them up over her head.

  Be calm now, Goose told herself. She’d done what she needed to. Time to defuse the situation. “Give me those, please.”

  Jennifer backed a step away. Her eyes were so dark, they were as good as black, like Jonas’s.

  “Okay,” Goose said. “Think about it. I’ve got to have the keys, right? One way or another. So, why don’t we do it the easy way.”

  Jennifer cocked her arm. Goose lunged at her. Jennifer thrust her free hand out, fingers spread, a gesture so heavy with fury it stopped Goose in her tracks.

  “You lay a finger on me and you’ll rot,” the girl said.

  Just a punk kid playing tough, Goose tried to think, as she’d thought a hundred times before, rounding up troublemakers on the night shift, but she couldn’t make herself go any farther. While she hesitated, Jennifer twisted her torso and threw the keys out into the sea.

  In quick succession, Goose thought

  —crap

  —then: she throws like a girl

  —then: crap again (as the little metal shrapnel dropped down to the water)

  —then: now we’re really screwed

  —and then: oh, Jonas. Trust Jonas.

  She grinned.

  The Vancouver Canucks emblem on Jonas’s key chain was made out of foam. Of course. Every fishing boat had a float on its key chain. You’d have to be a lot dumber than Jonas Paul not to have one. It bobbed around barely ten meters away. A small smooth-topped reef was just breaking out from small waves beyond it, emerging as the tide fell.

  “All right,” Goose said. “So I guess that makes us almost even.”