by John Straley
That night passed as one interminable moment. Each splash of a wave seemed as loud as a siren, and each time he moved, the clatter of even the smallest rock rang like an alarm bell under the wharf. Finally he threw a crust of bread as far away as he could to draw the rats off and he listened to them scramble and fight for it. He could not close his eyes; he stared into the echoing darkness and begged for the sun to come up.
When it did, he was half asleep. The rain was a soft drizzle, and under the wharf he found himself in a dripping cavern of shadow set back from the world. With the daylight, the lapping of the waves against the tarry pilings seemed less threatening than it had in the dark. Even this little bit of greasy light gave Slip some cause for hope.
His hope was beginning to dim by the time Andy stood above him on the sidewalk and whispered his name.
“Hey, son, where the hell are you?” he hissed.
Slip rolled out and pulled himself up on top of the wharf.
“Come on,” Andy said, and grabbed him by the elbow, rushing him around the corner and down the street half a block to a set of stairs that went down the far side of the laundry building to the beach.
“I won this from an old Norsky fisherman in a poker game about a month ago. He claimed it was plenty good and had caught him lots of fish.” Andy was pointing down at the water. Slip stared after him but couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. There were things down on the beach but nothing came into focus as an answer to his current problems.
“I put food and stuff in it. The old Norsky had all the gear. There’s a lantern, a little stove. There’s an axe and everything. He said he had some rum squirreled away in the kitchen kit. I even got your clothes and the toolbox out of the meeting hall.”
“How in the hell did you do that?” Slip was looking all around him.
“I paid a kid to get it. It wasn’t hard. The door was broken in. The bums had taken all the food but your stuff was fine. Just a few clothes, your suit, and a hank of rope. I had to buy the tools back from the kid. The little scamp wanted to keep them, but I figure you might need ’em for your voyage.” Andy had a chuckle in his voice.
“What the hell are you talking about, a voyage?” Slip looked into the eyes of his old running partner, not angry but genuinely confused.
Andy pointed down to the water. “The dory, boy. They ain’t going to be looking for you by water. They got the roads and the train stations all buttoned down.”
“Maybe they’re still looking for Avery. He could have just run off?” Slip said weakly, shivering in his wet clothes.
“He ain’t run off. You and I both know that, Slip. They found his body last night dumped out in the weeds by White Center. Now I hear they got another body in a trunk of a car out past Edmonds somewhere, and everybody’s just real excited.” Andy did not look at Slip as he spoke. Slip wiped his nose with his hand and looked straight up into the sky for a moment.
“Who was in the trunk of the car they found sunk in the water?” Slip asked softly, and Andy just looked at him without speaking.
“Tell me!” Slip barked.
“Aw,” Andy said, “it’s just …”
“For Christ’s sake, Andy, who was in the trunk of the car?”
“Some union boss. He was the guy that ran the docks up in Everett. It’s just …”
“Well, what?”
“I never said nothing about the car being sunk in the water.”
Slip threw up his hands “Ah, goddamnit, Andy. I got enough on my mind without you being suspicious minded.”
Andy seemed more nervous now, gesturing vaguely up the hill with his right hand. “Anyway, they got every flatfoot and Floodwater op on the West Coast in Seattle by now. I figure you just sneak north in this little boat and maybe get back onto the road system up above Everett somewhere and then slide on up into Canada for a spell.”
“A boat?” Slip asked. This plan was taking a long time coming into focus. “Andy, I don’t know a damn thing about boats.”
“Well, it’s about time to learn, son, ’cause I didn’t win no zeppelin from that Norsky fisherman.”
Slip looked at the dory, and walked over to it. It was built of narrow planks and looked about twenty feet long. There was his old roll of clothes. There were three long oars and a mast with a bundle of canvas lashed to the outer deck. There were three other canvas bags and one big metal box sitting in the bow.
“It’s got an engine?” Slip asked, his voice trailing off into the rain.
“Better than an engine, it’s got your two strong arms. Now let’s get going so’s I can go back to the shop just nice and normal so the guys watching it won’t get suspicious.”
The dory was hauled out on the cobbles below the laundry. Upstairs there were people coming and going from work. There were doors opening and closing. Lights were coming on, sweeping through the rain above their heads. Uptown he heard a trolley clanging its bell, and in the distance a truck chewed through its gears trying to pull a hill.
“Well, I thank you, Andy. I surely do. I’ll make it up to you, I swear.”
“Just get the hell out of here. We’ll talk about what you owe me later.”
“I’ll pay you back, Andy, I swear.”
Andy put his hand lightly on Slip’s shoulder and they bent over the boat to inspect the provisions. There was the metal box with the food and the little gas burner stove. There was a bundle with a creased canvas tent along with a small metal jug for stove fuel and a wooden keg for fresh water. There was even some fishing gear: a rod with a rusty-looking reel and some lures that Slip could make no sense of whatsoever. There was a tube with charts in it. Andy pulled one out and then another until he found the right one. He had ducked in under the cover of the wharf and was trying to show Slip how to read a chart by pointing out where they were and which direction north was when they heard someone quickly walking down the steps.
There were Ellie, and the little girl with the yellow bird in a cage.
What Slip noticed first was that Ellie’s hair was still as shiny as a pearl even when it was soaked through and plastered to her head. The second thing he noticed was that the little girl was dry because she was holding a very large black umbrella that seemed to encase both her and the bird.
The first thing he heard was Andy saying, “I’m sorry, Slip. I did what you asked of me. I told her where you were.”
Ellie walked toward the boat, wobbling on the sharp rocks in her slick leather shoes. “You want some company, don’t you?” she said. And she waved to Annabelle to start bringing down their luggage.
FIVE
Annabelle held on to the handle of her umbrella. Buddy squawked and sat humped on his perch. The wet wind blew and the silver bell in the cage tinkled. Ellie looked up at them and smiled. She was nervous and had been drinking out of the bottle in the paper bag. Her words had that odd tone as if she were saying something funny but nobody laughed.
Annabelle liked her aunt, but doubted that she was what people thought of as a proper parent. She knew that Ellie was acting out her role as a parent. It was as if Ellie was memorizing lines from a play that starred a very good parent, but she wasn’t going to get the part.
She wasn’t always like that, though. When she wasn’t speech-making about the revolution, Ellie would often sit on the floor of Annabelle’s room reading books aloud. Mostly she chose books about animals: beavers building their dams, or arctic terns flying the length of the globe. Sometimes she irritated the girl by turning the life histories of the animals into parables about the struggles of human beings, but not that often. Usually Ellie simply sat with her, reading and napping on the floor, tired, the girl thought, of being an adult.
Sometimes Annabelle thought that Ellie didn’t care that much about the revolution. Ellie just liked the company of working men and she liked to read books about airplanes.
Ellie wanted to be a pilot like Amelia Earhart. Annabelle once asked how wanting to be a pilot contributed to the workers’ struggle,
and Ellie said, “The way this revolution is progressing we’re all going to have to learn to fly.” Annabelle didn’t know if that meant Ellie was pessimistic or optimistic about the coming revolt.
To Annabelle, wanting to fly was the one truly admirable trait Ellie possessed. She seemed to have the temperament for it. Like a bird, she was quick and fussy. She didn’t like to settle in one place for too long. When she wasn’t exhorting the workers to seize control of the means of production, Ellie liked having fun, all kinds of fun, like walking to the library on rainy days and taking money from the Party fund to go to the movies when she felt like it. Most important, Ellie liked talking about her future and Annabelle was always part of the fantasy.
“I think we should fly to New York City. You can be the navigator and I’ll be the head pilot. We’ll circle the Stork Club a few times and then set down right in Central Park.”
“What can Buddy do?” Annabelle would mutter.
“Buddy can fly second seat. He’ll watch the gauges while I fly the plane.”
Annabelle and Ellie hadn’t had a lot of money since they had moved to Seattle from Aberdeen. The revolution wasn’t very profitable apparently. Sometimes Ellie worked late at night at jobs she didn’t tell the girl about. Sometimes she disappeared, and came back with a small bundle of cash. There was talk of making changes and moving on to other jobs and other towns. But there had always been that kind of talk, and the girl became as accustomed to it as if it were the moisture in the air.
The bell in Buddy’s cage continued to ring as Ellie piled her suitcases into the middle of the little boat and Annabelle found a seat in the very front. The little boat was loaded down so it squatted on the rocky beach like a duck. The two men pushed it across the tide flat until the stern was resting in the water. The sad-looking man got in and fumbled with the oars while Ellie pushed them farther into the water. Ellie took one last long drink from the paper bag then threw it under the pier, where the girl heard glass breaking. Ellie pushed the boat away from shore and climbed in.
It felt as if the whole thing was going to flip over. No one could keep their seat until the sad man with the beat-up face started to row. He sat with his back to the front and pulled on the oars, staring straight at Ellie.
The rain was falling harder now as the sun broke over the Cascades. The raindrops made little plopping sounds as they tried to jump back into the air. All the drops made little circles and the circles all cut into one another, and sometimes a fish jumped right up through it all and back into the green. A little white diving duck, which Annabelle did not recognize, poked its neck down and disappeared. She leaned back under her umbrella and closed her eyes.
The little dory sat low in the water. Ellie was pulling clothes out of her bags and throwing the suitcases into the water. She was laughing but no one else was. Annabelle had her feet up on her own suitcase and the man who was rowing had a bundle of clothes resting on his outstretched legs. When Annabelle tilted her umbrella she could see only the shoulders and back of the man ducking his head and pulling against the oars.
Annabelle looked to the south where dark clouds rolled over the water. There was a bluff of black clouds churning up the water in its path. It almost looked as if bits of broken glass were being sucked up out of the sea. Annabelle hunched deeper in her spot.
Ellie called over the man to Annabelle, “Did I ever tell you about the little sailboat I used to have out on the lake near the Idaho border?” The battered blonde was waving gaily as if she were in a parade. “My sister and I could sail that boat anywhere.”
The little girl hunkered down in her nest. “No,” she said softly, and added, “I think we’re going to get wet.” Then she closed her eyes tight and the wind stooped down on them like a falcon. She pulled her umbrella down and curled against the birdcage. As the wind tried to pull the umbrella out of her hands, the yellow bird began to sing.
SIX
George Hanson quit drinking about the same time Prohibition had been lifted. He didn’t see the point of it anymore. He had been a cop for ten years and most of that time he had been chasing after the small-time crooks and grifters who had come down to the waterfront following the illegal liquor trade. There had been hidden warehouses and late-night schooners pulling up to unlighted piers. There were speakeasies where everyone knew the password and no one ever expected to be raided. There was never much pressure to solve cases. But now everyone was drinking anywhere they wanted, and Hanson was back to more disagreeable crimes: men killing their wives and sometimes wives getting a first good lick in. Hanson had tried drinking after they lifted Prohibition but he found it too damn depressing.
Hanson had grown up knowing the world of the docks. There had been stevedores and wharf rats coming to their back door for meals ever since he could remember. He had helped his father stitch up men who were unrecognizable from their beatings. His first few years on the force he tried to stay away from the waterfront, but gradually he ended up near the beach, drawn by the smell and the call of the gulls, drawn by the bodies that had a way of washing up there. George had seen the corruption moving into the labor rackets, kickbacks and bribes that flowed up the chain of authority in a way that would have sickened the Finn. The docks were becoming another grift, and he didn’t mind putting the bite on some of these new union boys, but he still couldn’t stand to be around Floodwater operatives.
Floodwater Security was an old company from the Midwest. The first office opened up in Winona, Minnesota, when the town was broken open by spring floods and the local authorities couldn’t stop the looting. The first Floodwater ops were just a couple of thugs beating anyone they caught carrying goods down the street. After the First World War they started their own security firm and moved out to the West Coast. In San Francisco they worked the docks for the big shipping companies and hired more big boys who carried themselves like cops but never learned any other skills than sapping down looters in the mud.
Or so it seemed to George. He was thinking about this because his good leather shoes were sinking into a muddy bank somewhere the hell and gone out in White Center and a clodhopper of a shamus was preventing him from looking at a body some good citizen had bothered to find. Ben Avery had been the best of the Floodwater rat terriers on the docks and as such he was the worst of the thugs, but still, George thought, he deserved a few questions asked about his murder. He had hated Avery, but he harbored a special sliver of disgust for Avery’s boss.
“Boss said I’m ’sposed to keep people away from here,” the operative said from under the brim of his hat.
“I’m not people,” George said, and he held up his badge and shouldered past the dick. He stumbled down the slippery bank over root wads and rusted rigging cables toward the sodden pile that someone had decorously covered with a raincoat. There were men in civilian clothes walking up and down the river, each of them carrying a kerosene lamp. The effect made George think of a bunch of farm boys looking for goats in the dark.
George was looking around for the body in all of the confusion. In the murky light he saw some Floodwater boys carrying a stretcher up the slope. He started to yell to them when he heard heavy footsteps coming up behind him.
“I wouldn’t want to be the man who shot Ben Avery,” a voice said, and George turned to see Tom Delaney standing in his raincoat with the brim of his hat dripping water.
“You know it was a man?” George asked, still looking at the body. “Wasn’t Ben known to have a fairly complicated love life?”
“No dame is going to shoot Ben Avery with his own gun,” Delaney said. “It was one of those goddamn Reds. They killed the trade unionist up north and they did this to Ben.” Delaney walked around to the head of the corpse and squinted down into the dead eyes. “There’s a shit storm about to come down on those Bolshevik bastards,” he said.
There were two bodies in two days. One was this shit heel Ben Avery who was found in the grass out here in bumfuck White Center southwest of downtown. The other was the trade
unionist they found in the trunk of a Lincoln in a slough up north. George had already heard the story of the trade unionist. Yesterday afternoon a kid fishing from a bridge twenty miles north of Lake City saw the fat tires of a new Lincoln poking up out of the muddy water and he ran home to tell his mother. When the locals came and pulled the car out, the trunk broke open from the weight of the water and the bloated body of Dave Kept flopped out like a dead walrus.
Dave Kept was a trade union organizer who had been making quite a stir along the Washington waterways getting the dock workers to both stand up for themselves and keep their jobs. Kept was considered the lesser of two evils by management. Now he wasn’t worth considering at all.
Dave Kept’s murder was being handled out of Everett, which was the next town of any size north of Seattle. It had been made famous in George’s father’s day when the Everett cops shot up a couple of boatloads of Wobblies trying to land at the dock for a rally. Kept had given a speech in Everett the day before his body was found. The Everett cops believed he had been killed in their jurisdiction and was then driven south. George had heard about the case from the investigating officer, who had called down to George’s office wanting some background on Kept and the rest of the labor scene.
Delaney was probably right. The two murders were connected. But there was no way of knowing how. George believed that if Ben were still alive he would have told the Everett cops that his car had been stolen. Unless, of course, he was going to confess to murdering the union man, which seemed unlikely. No, there were only two dots right now. It wasn’t worth even trying to draw a line between them.
George took out a small notebook and a nub of a pencil. “I’m going to need a list of everybody who’s here on the scene and I’d like to get a look at their shoes just so I can make some sense of the tracks around here.” George looked over at the Floodwater op and waited, his pencil poised.