Jones and Adele had gone to Good Friday services, and a note told him to help himself. He found juice and hard-boiled eggs. He strolled on their little porch as he ate, marveling at the way the boat’s motion remained to affect his equilibrium. The sun might have looked warm, but the air was cold. The noises of town now blended with the view: car horns and squeaks of machinery and dogs and shouts. Building by small frame building, the town was ugly, but as an entity, filling the apron of land between the narrows and the boat harbor and then stretching beyond the Russian church over the hills, he found it beautiful. A town so open to the sea and accessible to boats had to be beautiful.
In town he stopped at the beanery and some bars, asking about Jody, but no one knew except that she was “around.” He wandered down to the boats. On the Rondelay, Ivan paced and sweated and swore, his clenched pipe billowing smoke, while Steve nodded in the sun. “Shit,” Steve muttered through his teeth as Hank sat beside him, “Ivan wants to lay off the booze and asked me to make him do it. Now I’m the fuck stuck here for the day, and all kinds of little blisters waiting for me up town.”
“I’ll watch for a while, if you want to—”
Ivan jumped to the float and started toward town. Steve strode after him, rammed his fist into Ivan’s stomach, which calmed him, then shoved him back aboard. Ivan went gloomily into the cabin and lay in his bunk.
“You watch him?” Steve grinned as he sat in his place again.
“Booze wouldn’t be any worse for his gut than that, would it?”
“I’ll hate the day old Ivan goes hopheaded for good. I’m as glad to help postpone it.”
“You make it sound inevitable.”
“The way I’ve seen it with others who hit the booze like that, I figure it is.”
In the cabin, Ivan shouted a string of obscenities which dealt impartially with motherhood and the church. Hank could still hear him from the harbormaster’s shack on the way back to town. He wandered the two-block main drag—it seemed uglier in the sun than when rain softened the bare low edges of the buildings—and then walked uphill by the Russian church to look out over the darkening blue water and the snowy mountains turning pink. Past five by his watch, and sunset came around seven-thirty. He could identify Jones Henry’s house across the harbor, already covered in shadow by the hill behind it, and the Rondelay among the clusters of little masts within the breakwater. Steam rose from the crab canneries, both the one directly downhill to his left along the narrows and those beyond the boats and breakwater along the road to the Navy Base. The heavy odors of ammonia and cooking crab obliterated all others. Nothing mellow about Kodiak: a raw place with heavy stenches. Yet, “Damned if I want to go home,” he muttered. He started back down with hands in pockets.
“I can’t believe it!” said Jody’s voice, and there she was. They stood grinning at each other. Her eyes were lively, her mouth wide and full, just as he remembered. “You’ve shaved your beard.”
“It scratched when I played lacrosse.” The mention of his demanding sport brought no reaction. Could he touch her, or should he wait? Her reddish hair, which had been shorter last summer, was now tied in a loose ponytail. He commented that he liked it.
“Keeps it out of the soup.”
“You mean you’re back as a waitress?”
“No, I cook for the jailhouse when I’m not traveling on a boat. What brought you back?”
“Been out crabbing on the Rondelay”
“Jones Henry bust your ass?”
Not what he wanted her to say, but he interpreted the freedom of language as a go-ahead, and reached for her arm. She started down the hill, and his hand brushed off. “Hey,” he said, “that was a great party, the night before I left.” He took her arm firmly, and brought his face close enough to smell her hair. “Come on, Jody, let’s—”
“Hey, Chuck, a great party, but then you left the scene.”
“My name’s Hank.”
“Hank, yes. Well, Hank, I’m on my way to Solly’s to meet a guy who sticks around. Walk me down.”
He held out his hands. “Hell, Jody, all the times I’ve thought about you ...” As soon as he said it and saw the amusement in her face, he felt like a movie cowboy. They walked in silence until she asked if he wasn’t going to school or something and drew from him a series of halfhearted answers. At a small frame house on a hill overlooking the business district a woman called, and she went over to chat, with Hank in glum tow. She was so vivacious, so unconcerned!
Her friend had two small children playing inside, with the television going full blast.
From somewhere in a distance came a faint, whooshing roar. A moment later, the ground started unbelievably to shake beneath them.
“Help me get the kids,” cried the woman, and rushed inside. Hank and Jody followed, with Hank unsure what was happening. Like walking on a vibrator. A vase danced off a table and crashed. The floor itself was moving. Books flopped from a shelf. He grabbed a crying child and held her close. In the kitchen, cans rolled and jars smashed open, while from the bedroom a glass fishing ball bumped toward him in small leaps like a frog.
He started to run outside. “Stand in the doorframe,” commanded Jody.
They all squeezed together as the absurd motion grew worse. “Is this an earthquake?” he asked excitedly. Jody nodded. The woman soothed her children. Neither she nor Jody appeared frightened. The shaking subsided as quickly as it had begun. The television jingle continued at high volume, then stopped abruptly.
“See, Angie?” said the woman. “All over.”
“Bigger than most,” said Jody, and strolled outside. Hank followed as he joggled the child in his arms and reassured her gently. She quieted to watch him with big-eyed suspicion and to announce that he wasn’t her daddy.
Suddenly the ground started rolling—rolling. It felt like a deck at sea, and he needed sealegs to keep his balance. Overhead the sky became a wild jumble of telephone poles that bent and whipped with the abandon of saplings. A tree crashed and fell. They struggled back to the doorframe, the child screaming. The house boards groaned and cracked like a matchbox being crushed underfoot, and the windows began to shatter. Outside the ground twisted and heaved in clouds of dust, and a parked truck bounced as if on a trampoline. The road and brown lawns undulated like waves. If they had not all been wedged against each other they would have fallen.
“How long does it last?” he shouted.
“Never gone on this long,” said the woman.
“Real bitch of a quake,” said Jody appreciatively. “You ever think poles could bend that far without breaking?”
The child now clutched Hank’s neck and burrowed her face in his chest. He patted her head as he watched what was happening. The walls of the house swayed like a boat in seas, and broken objects danced along the floor. Outside, a car, its driver wide-eyed by the wheel, bounced upright but sideways down the road. It was so grotesque that the two women started laughing. He joined them dubiously. Parked cars, he now noticed, had mounted each other and were jiggling together in clumps. His own vision of it was blurred from the motion, unreal. Cracks appeared in the road. A pole fell, bringing with it a jumble of wires.
“When will this stop!” said the woman. “If only the foundation holds. Jim worked so hard to make it firm.”
“Where’s he now?” asked Hank.
“Civilian electrician at the Navy Base. Hope he’s got sense enough to take shelter.”
A geyser of water shot up from a fissure in the road.
“There goes the water main. Pray to God we don’t have a fire. This is going to be a mess to clean.”
The motion seemed to continue forever, then subsided and stopped. “Well, that’s got to be the end.”
“Best one I ever saw,” said Jody. “Let’s turn on your radio or TV and see where it centered.”
The woman picked her way through the mess and announced after flicking switches that the power was out. She and Jody started sweeping. Hank disengaged the child
and eased her down. “Shut up, Angie, it’s all over now, honey,” said the woman as she gave a swoop through jangled glass with her broom. “So much for the good stuff we bought in Seattle.” She picked up the phone to reach her husband; it was dead. “No phone, no electricity, only an hour and a half left of daylight. Oh! Better find all the flashlights. Let’s have some coffee, I always think better with coffee.” From the kitchen she said with a tight laugh, “It’s an electric stove. Thank God the kids are off formula. Does an oil burner run on electricity? Shut the door, keep the heat in; it’s supposed to go into the twenties tonight. I’d better find all my blankets.”
Hank righted the furniture and stared unbelieving at the rest. “Where should I help?”
Jody stopped. “Oh God, the boats. You’re on the Rondelay? Go down and help Jones.” She touched his arm. “Look, if you see water coming and you’re not on high ground, don’t race it, jump on the nearest boat. Understand?”
“Water?”
“Tidal wave, stupid.”
“They’re supposed to start a siren if they sight a tidal wave coming,” said the woman. “That road from the base travels low ground. I just hope Jim has sense enough to stay where he is. Look at those electric wires down outside. I guess it’s good the power’s off.”
“My friend’s on a big crab tender,” said Jody. “They were waiting to unload. I’m not sure where I ought to...”
As Hank left, Jody called after him to be careful. He picked his way down the road, around poles, wires, cars, and shooting water. People milled and talked, laughing nervously. At a church, a priest with arms bare under a cassock shift scurried businesslike to a nearby house with a broken statuette in his hand, and Hank remembered it was Good Friday. Downtown, two men ran with arms full of bottles from one of the bars with the bartender yelling “Looters!” after them. In the stores, goods lay tumbled from shelves. Hank glanced into the beanery. Old Mike stood mesmerized, steaks and crockery strewn in a wide pool of grease around him. Hank started in to help.
A siren began to whine.
Men ran toward the boat harbor, and Hank joined them.
The tide was high enough to bring almost horizontal the ramp that connected the pier to the floats. The floats themselves shivered under everybody’s tread. Geysers of water shot between the boards. Lightpoles had fallen across, and their electric wires were arcing. The Rondelay was tied inboard of two other boats. Jones and the others were working feverishly to exchange the moorings and maneuver out. Hank joined, grabbing lines. The siren continued in town above the shouts around them.
Steve thrust an axe at Hank and told him to stand by the bow and chop their line if the water came suddenly. “And keep your footing. Ain’t nobody can fish you out.”
“What are we trying to do?”
“Get beyond the breakwater in case a wave hits, ride her out in open sea.” The engine puttered out, and Jones rushed to examine it with Steve in tow.
Hank held the axe nervously, wondering if he would recognize a wave in time to chop. Engines were gunned and the floats clamored with people, including women and children. In town, smoke rose from several fires. Firemen were running a hose down to the water to attach to a pump. They stood on the harbormasters pier, where not long before he had noticed the tide receding under several feet of exposed pilings. Now the water was higher than he had ever seen it before, so close against the pier top that the fireman dropping the pump hose could wet his hands. A putrid odor drew Hank’s attention near the boat. Black bubbles the size of crab pots rose around them, and the rest of the surface was streaked with motion. When he glanced again at the pier, the water covered the edge and people were backing away. He looked for the breakwaters. Their long ridges of stone were covered or gone.
“This ain’t a wave like ever I’ve seen,” said Ivan hoarsely. “She’s supposed to suck out all the way, then bang in like hell. This here’s spooky, the way water’s coming in slow.”
Everybody had left the pier, and the water had risen to the hubcaps of the dozen trucks and cars. Hank recognized Jones’ pickup among them, and called down, “Want me to run move it?”
“You stay here.”
Boats all around were revving engines and moving out. Some floats, as they rose with the water, flooded and disappeared. With a crack the ramp connecting the pier and floats split, tumbled apart, and washed away. One boy had just been ready to cross the ramp. He ran back toward them when it broke, jumping over fallen lightpoles and wires, but the connecting boards on the other side pulled apart. Steve was just coming from the cabin, where the engine had started again, with Jones calling instructions for testing. Hank pointed to the boy, who stood wide-eyed alone on a piece of float with water around his ankles.
Steve ran to the wheel, calling for Jones to stand by. He pointed to their taut mooring lines and yelled to Hank, “Chop the fuckers!,” then gunned recklessly among unmanned boats to nose against the float where the boy stood. Hank and Ivan leaned over to pull him aboard. As they gripped his arms, the boat surged up and the float anchored below cracked apart.
The boy’s grip remained tight on Hank’s arm. “You’re okay now. Go in the cabin and lie down if you want.”
“And miss all this?” But his hand, when it left Hank’s arm, gripped a stanchion until the knuckles glowed white.
Boats milled crazily, those floating without crews blocking others trying to make it beyond the invisible breakwater. Some boats passed free over the line where the rock wall had stretched. Up on the now-deserted pier, the water had reached the car windows.
Jones at his wheel was calm and deliberate as he tried to make it to open water. After the others had tied fenders along the side—tires, crab buoys, anything they could find—they all joined him on the open bridge and watched together. “Funniest tidal wave I ever saw,” said Jones. “Just oozed in on us. How’d the earthquake feel on the boat, before I got here?”
“Bump bump bump, up and down like we were bouncing.”
“You’ve seen other tidal waves?” asked Hank.
“Never a killer wave, but I’ve seen the water come in before.” Jones maneuvered and ducked around the flotsam, making little progress. “Goddam, this is the time to get out!” They all watched the water height against the vehicles on the pier. “Long as those pilings don’t buckle, I own a truck that needs overhaul.” He contacted someone ashore by radio to send word that the boy, Jerry, was safe, and to ask how things were in town.
“Water s crept up a couple feet in Kraft’s Drygoods, and she puddled up into the main district. Stopped coming, though, I think she’s peaked.”
“Where was the earthquake?”
“Nobody knows. Anchorage radio’s dead.”
“Peaked, eh?” said Jones to the others. “That means she’s only got one other direction to go.” He gunned straight through a cluster of empty skiffs and logs. “We either make it over those sunken breakwaters now . . .” He changed direction to point the bow toward the short section of the submerged breakwater alongside the narrows, since the normal opening was clogged. Suddenly a force took hold of the boat and raced it along. As they watched, the buildings along the waterfront seemed to rise. The cars and the pier emerged, then the pilings, straight down to their barnacle-encrusted foundations.
“Goddam, the waters sucking out like a bathtub with a hole.”
Their view of the town disappeared as the rock breakwater rose from the water beside them. They had passed over it. The Rondelay’s engine started to miss, the propeller to whirr at a high pitch. Jones shut it down. A moment later the hull scraped, and the boat gradually listed to port so that they had to grip the mast and shrouds to stand on the slanting deck. The water of the harbor had drained, and they lay dead on the bottom surrounded by mud. The stench was immense. Fifty yards away, the long bare breakwater towered above them. At least they had crossed it and were outside the harbor. Its stone and concrete foundation at eye level was black with sea growth. The top rocks that normally stood out o
f water were covered with drowned rats, their bodies clinging in crevices. As gravity loosened the claws the fat corpses plopped into the mud.
Ivan became agitated. “We better climb on those rocks and run for it; that waters coming backl When I was a kid in the village, my grandfather, he always told how the water came back if the boats ever scraped mud, come in like a wall right over the boats.”
“Youd sink over your head in mud getting there,” said Jones. “She’s a sturdy little boat. We’ll weather her.” But under his breath he muttered, “Wouldn’t mind being further from that wall.”
Other boats lay equally helpless around them. Close by was the Linda J. Joe Eberhardt’s frowning face poked from the cabin and peered around. They could see halfway up the narrows. The three-hundred-foot-wide passage was as drained to the seafloor as their own area, with one small fishing boat heeled over in the center as if at the bottom of a canyon. A man on the boat held onto his mast and appeared to be calling up to the people on the cannery pier, where someone kept trying to throw a line far enough to reach him. The sun had long gone behind the mountains in back of town, and the land was darkening. A chilly breeze puffed around them, agitating the stench of the seamud.
In town, the siren started again.
“Anybody wants to pray,” said Jones quietly, “nobody’s going to laugh.” Ivan fell to his knees, crossing himself and muttering silently.
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