Highiliners

by William B. McCloskey Jr.

  They entered the harbor. It, too, was swept clean except for debris, where the day before had stretched the two protective arms of the breakwater and had bobbed the long boardwalk floats with their clustered fishing craft. One segment of the breakwater remained standing on the side toward the Navy Base road, a jagged line of stone clotted with the wreckage of hulls and masts. A whole square building floated free, and the humps of broken boats dotted other parts of the water. Beyond the harbor and the low islands, the mountain snows gleamed hazily in the pink early light.

  Gone was the entire dock with its cars and harbormaster’s hut, and the irregular line of stores and houses in back of it that had fronted the harbor had been replaced by a mudflat through which streams of water trickled. Some boats lay beached on their sides far into town.

  Joe Eberhardt began to laugh. “Oh, what a fuckin’ mess. Let’s find a can of beans that’s not waterlogged to celebrate our survival.”

  They threw out the anchor and waded ashore in mud up to their knees. Water in his boots had for so many hours been part of his condition that Hank merely poured out the excess and waued for the remainder to warm to his body temperature. They slogged up to where the buildings remained. Kraft’s Drygoods was only a foundation. Part of the building itself now rested a block farther uptown, where Tony’s Bar had stood, and Tony’s had been transported to rest straddling the road with a corner on the site of the vanished laundry. A wrecked fishing boat lay alongside. The big power scow that had sailed fully lighted past the Rondelay the night before now rested upright two blocks still farther up, between small caved-in stores and houses on one side and an undamaged schoolhouse on the other. Dazed people walked around, kicking at rubble and debris.

  “My God,” said Hank, “I wonder if Jones Henry still has a house?” He cupped his hands to scan across the harbor. The buildings against the hill appeared to be intact. To himself he admitted that part of his relief was for the safety of his dry clothing (dry shoes!) and camera. Next he wondered about Jody. He left Joe and walked up over the roads, homing toward the domes of the Russian church, to find the house where he had last seen her. All along the way he passed houses moved from their foundations, roofs caved by toppling chimneys, poles down amid tangles of wires, and cars piled against each other. People wandered everywhere, pulling at household wreckage. The corner of one house rested on a child’s bike and a smashed wardrobe with clothes tumbling from it. He joined two men and a woman to lever the house with a pole and pull free the clothing. They invited him across the street to another house for coffee. Stepping across the broken pickets of a white fence, they entered a mud-tracked living room where a dozen people sat around the floor and several children of all ages milled among them. Wood blazed in a fireplace, and a coffeepot steamed on a rack near the embers. The woman who had salvaged the clothes passed a jacket and a sweater to two men in shirtsleeves near the fire.

  “Thanks. What house do you live in, when I return this?”

  “With all your stuff lost? Just keep it.”

  Hank learned that most of them had spent the night on Pillar Mountain, but finally around two had grown so cold they decided to risk further earthquakes and tidal waves under a roof. With its fireplace and a chimney not tumbled, this was the only house in the neighborhood that could offer heat and cooking. A couple came in with a carton of half-thawed steaks. The freezer wouldn’t keep things without power, they announced, so everybody might as well dig in and be merry. Soon the smell of sizzling meat filled the room. Hank had not realized his hunger, after a night of candy bars and coffee, until he started eating. Someone had a battery radio, but they could find no station.

  “Up on the mountain last night,” said a man, “I heard somebody’s radio pick up Honolulu through the static. It really upset us, because we heard that Anchorage was wiped out. Then the fellow said Kodiak and everybody here was washed away, so we figured at least part of the rest was bullshit too.”

  Everybody laughed. One man guessed he was ready now to face the sight of his store downtown and see if anything was left. As he said, it was now eleven and way past time to open shop. Hank had peeled his boots and socks to dry by the fire, but the process had barely begun when he replaced them to move on. Their sogginess was at least warmer. He decided that Jody could be anywhere (and didn’t care about him that much) while dry socks waited for him back at Jones Henry’s. With the storekeeper he walked down into town, over a ridge that gave a view of the gutted narrows. Large debris still sloshed through on a sluggish track.

  Downtown, people were pulling mushes of litter from stores and bars. The storekeeper opened his door, and water and goods poured over his legs. Hank stayed to help pull some of the heaviest debris into the street, then moved on. At the beanery he found old Mike staring helplessly at the mess. Half his kitchen equipment had disappeared; the rest was a jumble. Somehow a telephone pole had washed through the door and lay blocking everything. This was all he owned besides his house, Mike declared over and over. How was he ever going to make any kind of living now? Hank persuaded him to go home and sleep, and promised he’d come back to help when he could.

  He reached Jones Henry’s house to find that a mudslide had tumbled the house from its foundation and that his knapsack and cam era were part of the general debris. He owned what he wore, plus a sleeping bag full of seawater and broken glass back on the Rondelay.

  Adele Henry, her smudged face wrapped in a bandanna and a pair of Jones’ boots slapping around her legs, threw out her hands when she saw him and declared, “Will you look at this? And I just painted all the goddam rooms.” Then she hugged him and cried. “Oh, I’m so tired. If I could sleep I think I could face it. He won’t help, Jones won’t help, he’s already back on his damned boat repairing leaks. It’s our living, I know that, but he didn’t even look twice at the house. Just said he was glad to see me alive and wanted me to know he was the same. Oh! The praying and agony all night as those terrible waves crashed, and I could see you boys splintered apart in that little boat... Her fingers dug into his shoulders. He patted her and mumbled whatever he could think that was soothing, not knowing what else to do. At length she released him and wiped her face. “Thank God we’re all alive.”

  He had meant to return to the Rondelay, but he stayed with her for the rest of the morning to move lamps and furniture from the living room, where the floor was smashed, to other rooms that had survived intact. The house now tilted downhill, as did all the floors. Other houses nearby were in the same fix. He looked down at the harbor, where broken boats and parts of buildings floated everywhere. The few boats intact looked small and vulnerable without the security of the breakwater. Over in town, sky reflected in the water that meandered through mudflats where stores had been. Whole buildings lay helter-skelter hundreds of feet from their foundations, with beached boats listing alongside. Where would you start cleaning, and how could it ever be the same?

  Hank had been scheduled to leave Kodiak for Baltimore the day after Easter, and by that time a partial plane service had resumed. But you don’t leave a friend in need, he told himself. He compromised by signing a waiting list to make a phone call home.

  Kodiak was indeed a town in need of willing backs, a muddy mess of a town. The wrecked part had to be destroyed to allow room for the remainder to function, while that which had survived needed to be set right again laboriously. For a day or two, nearly everybody was in a daze. The Navy Base, which had sustained its share of destruction, sent over guards to cordon off the business district. Only storeowners could enter.

  As people pulled themselves together and felt in themselves the strength to rebuild rather than to abandon, they identified priorities. The prime ones were to patch a wharf so that supply ships could unload, to clear and bum the mountains of debris, to restore the seafood plants so that a fishing income could again be generated, and to construct a new breakwater and floats to protect the surviving boats. With disaster status, the town began to receive heavy equipment through the
Navy Base and from the Army Corps of Engineers. Hank watched with relief as a crane hoisted Jones Henry’s house back onto its foundation. However, it remained for humans to do all the crowbar and shovel work. The downtown was a soggy jumble of broken furniture, boards, boat pieces, crab pots, clothing, and spoiled food, which bulldozers shoved into piles for burning. Every boat needed repairs. Jones, with the Rondelay at least running, helped clear the harbor. Among other jobs, they lassoed and towed to safe anchorage the entire loft of a cannery building, floating intact with the stored seines of at least thirty boats inside. When they brought it close to the wrecked cannery itself, Hank saw Swede Scorden, his mackinaw torn and his yellow cap greasy, directing repairs as he put his shoulder with the rest to a piece of machinery.

  The Rondelay also carried fishermen along the shores of the islands near the harbor to search for their missing boats. They found one boat safely transported to an island lake, another intact but two-thirds buried in mud, others broken into pieces.

  The town quickly assumed a collective vitality. It never seemed to sleep except in the earliest morning hours. A new school building had been designated as the refugee center. Many worked there as volunteers while still setting their own properties to rights. The center served the Kodiak homeless and the shaken native villagers brought in by fishing boats, and also functioned as a community resource pool, since electric stoves were inoperative and most food on grocery shelves had been spoiled. In the kitchen, disheveled teenagers in sneakers joked and shouted as they washed hundreds of dishes and hustled them back for immediate reuse.

  Downtown, signs appeared on storefronts with inscriptions like “Visit scenic Kodiak, and see the boats come in and the buildings go out.” Said one grocer to Hank with a wink as he shoveled the gumbo from the front of his place: “Don’t knock mud and Post Toasties unless you’ve tried it, son.” One silt-floored bar passed out free beer to the labor crews and advertised for a price such new mixtures as the All Shook-Up and the Miss Sue Naim’s Special. However, nipping appeared to have replaced boozing for the moment, even with Ivan, and no one occupied a barstool for long.

  When Hank finally reached his parents by phone, he was unprepared for their emotion. They had feared him dead. After their voices steadied, his father asked him to be careful, but said that they both respected his desire to help evacuate women and children before the town was abandoned, as they knew was happening from newspaper stories. “Hey, Dad,” shouted Hank with a sudden heady sense of pride. “My town’s alive!”

  Activity and humor did not signify an absence of misery, even despair. A modern community with houses tied to roads and electricity cannot casually revert to a life of caves and bearskins, even a community as accustomed to ruggedness as Kodiak. The sunny weather left. It began to snow and rain. Until power was slowly restored day by day in various sections, every house without a fireplace was dark, cold, and damp. Nor had the quakes stopped: new tremors shook the town daily, one of them strong enough to bounce objects from shelves and tables again. Hardly anyone, including Jones Henry, carried earthquake or flood insurance, so losses were total. There were the burials. People referred wryly to their nightmares. Hank occasionally saw men as well as women, giddy with fatigue, leaning for support against the tide-skinned wall of a building as they clenched fists or bit back tears. The wonder of it was that so few departed and that so many pulled themselves together day after day to face the work again.

  Two great shadows hung over town: the tides and the winds. People grew to ignore the residual earthquakes, but they watched the water with morbid attention. It remained high and rose from a new level on each normal flood tide. A strong blow might drive the water straight back into town. As for the boats, what would protect them from a heavy northeaster until a new breakwater and floats were completed? The tsunami had also washed clean the harbor bottom, so that anchors had only rock to grip. Uptown, some of the merchants deferred any replenishment of stocks until they saw the effects of two extreme high tides predicted for April.

  The first planes into town had brought a predictable wave of reporters and politicians. The federal disaster people followed soon after. By midweek, Kodiak had a population of strangers who wandered through the mud in new boots and store-fresh parkas without turning a hand, stopping busy people to ask questions and running into the paths of machinery to take pictures.

  With Steve and Ivan both aboard the Rondelay to help Jones, Hank took off to clear the beanery for Mike. The first job was to horse out the monstrous telephone pole. Mike had meanwhile taken inventory of his equipment. The waters had made some strange tradeoffs, and he found both his safe and his long counter washed through the window into the bar across the street, while he himself had objects around his stove that he had never seen before. As Hank sweated and inched the heavy safe back from across the street, he had to give way to a tractor hauling a fishing boat back to the water. The crew was busy steadying the boat on an inadequate wheelbed.

  “Hey, thought you’d be safe in school by now.” It was Jody, in the driver’s perch. She was as smudged and tattered as he and the rest were. Hank left the safe to walk alongside. She asked how Jones and the Rondelay had made out, and liked the fact that he was helping Mike put the beanery back together. “Where do you sleep?”

  “Jones Henry’s or the boat, whichever’s closest when I’m ready. How about you?”

  “Friends.”

  “You sure stay a mystery woman.”

  “It’s called independence.”

  A photographer and reporter came over as a team, taken by the sight of Jody on the tractor. While the photographer danced in front and to the side, the reporter brushed Hank away as he said in a businesslike voice, “Now, sis, to begin with I need your name and where you’re from, and then I want to interview you. Can’t you stop that thing?” Jody replied with a string of obscenities that shocked even Hank after all he had heard. Taking his cue, he told them to move off. Jody looked at him and started laughing, and the two of them could barely stop. Hank felt lighthearted for the first time in days.

  During the next days as Hank set the beanery to rights they crossed each other’s paths often. They even had a couple of beers to gether. Jody was as rough as the worst of her surroundings, but she smiled only when she meant it, and her eyes, even tired, sparked easily with humor. Hank relaxed and smiled back directly, enjoying every minute of her company in a way he had not done before.

  One night she walked him down in the rain and mud to the Rondelay, which with the other surviving boats rode at anchor in the absence of floats. Next day would mark a week since the tsunami. Heavy equipment had just arrived to start cutting rock from a mountain and move it in, but the two legs of the breakwater remained no more than a jagged line in the water. Hank shouted, and Steve brought the skiff to fetch him.

  “Hi, Jody,” said Steve. “You sure look tired and wet. Ivan and me, we made a good codfish chowder and there’s plenty left. Stove can dry your clothes. Got a spare bunk, too.” Without hesitation Jody climbed into the skiff.

  On board, Ivan fidgeted to clean the mess until Jody calmly told him to stop it and go to bed. Steve had already peeled and hung his wet clothes, pulled into dry long johns, and crawled into his bunk. While Hank watched, unbelieving, and Ivan became so flustered he grabbed the toiletpaper and disappeared outside, Jody undressed, hung her clothes around the stove, asked which was Hank’s sleeping bag, and then slipped down inside it, naked.

  “I... guess I’ll clear this bunk up here...”

  She looked at him with a tired, amused raise of an eyebrow and folded over the flap of his bag. He undressed quickly and eased in beside her. Whatever his fatigue, the touch of her skin woke him at once. Within the tight cloth their arms worked slowly around each other. After the cold and wet, he had never felt anything so comfortable as their bodies together, and their sex developed as spontaneously as breathing. When Ivan bumbled back into the cabin, they were easing into a contented sleep.

  Ha
nk was aware simultaneously of a scraping bump that made the entire boat shudder, and Steve’s exclamation as he snapped the light cord and scrambled into clothes. Ivan followed, muttering and cursing. Outside, the wind blew in a high-pitched wail. Hank wriggled from the sleeping bag and dressed. His clothes were only half dry.

  “Sounds like the worst kind of blow,” murmured Jody soberly.

  Steve rushed in dripping and knelt to start the engine. “Go put out all the fenders you can find, then help Ivan with the anchor. Hold tight to the rails.”

  On deck in the blackness, wind and icy spray roared around his head like jetfire in a furnace, cutting through his oilskins and striating his face painfully as he struggled to put over mats and tires. Ivan was releasing the anchor chain link by link to retain control against the wind force. Without warning the wind shifted. The chain groaned and tightened in the new direction, then gave a shudder as the anchor lost its grip on the bare-rock bottom and jumped.

  Steve appeared. “Wish Boss was here,” he yelled over the noise. “I got the engine warmed; we maybe ought to head to sea.” They turned to the spot where the town lay invisible in the dark. Somewhere a few hundred yards from the boat, Jones probably paced the beach, helpless to join them.

  A while later, in the first gray of morning, smoky spray swirled from wave to wave, covering the harbor with long fingers. Jagged exposed patches of the ruined breakwater loomed close astern. Two boats had already broached against its rocks and were being beaten by the wind-kicked water. The Rondelay s anchor jumped again, moving them closer. Steve’s mouth was tight and his eyes troubled in a way Hank had never seen before. “Maybe ought to pull anchor and steam out. But if the engine stopped, without the anchor, we’d blow straight to the rocks, wouldn’t we?” The question gave Hank sudden unease. Their glances kept wandering instinctively toward shore, where in the dim light figures moved everywhere. Steve chewed his lips. “What if we tied a line to the skiff, picked up Jones from the rocks?”