by John Straley
George walked back to his house from the church. It had rained the night before but the morning had cleared off into a bright emerald of a day. There were a few cherry trees in bloom along the street and their blossoms were like a frothy pink candy. Cars had been parked overnight under the trees and the rain had pasted them with a layering of cherry blossoms. In the morning, when the cars were driven away, they left bare black patches in the brushstrokes of wet petals. George stopped a moment and looked at the black patches.
George wandered up around several blocks, not wanting to go home by himself. He walked past the empty lot where no kids were playing ball but a couple of cats were chasing around the edges hunting birds that darted in the berry bushes. His boss had told him to “take the time he needed.” How much time was that?
Andy was sweeping up the trimmings of his last customer when George walked in. It was a one-chair shop with only three soft chairs against the wall for men to lounge in while they waited. There was a cast-iron stove in the corner with a bin of coal next to it. A pot of water sat on top of the stove. An old man with a bowler hat fished in his coin purse to pay Andy his twenty-five cents as Andy swept up. Andy took the quarter and helped the old man into his overcoat and then the man wobbled out the door.
It was just a hunch that brought George to the shop. He knew the logger had been with Ellie Hobbes and he knew that he had been looking rough. A rough-looking logger running with a blonde would want a shave.
“You’re just in time,” Andy said to George, as he popped a towel across the cracked leather barber’s chair. “Looking for a shave or a trim? I got time for both if you want,” he smiled.
“I’m looking for a logger who was running with a blonde gal. A Red probably, but he might not have that part figured out. Might have been through here in the last week,” George said, taking off his overcoat. “But you know, a shave might be just the thing.” And he sat down in the barber’s chair.
“Listen, I told you guys everything I know. I don’t know no more.” Andy attached the cape around George’s neck.
“You didn’t tell me anything, mister.”
“I told that other detective at least three times. I’m serious, I don’t know nothing more.” Andy was stropping his straight-edge on the leather strap hanging from the arm of the chair.
“Floodwater?” George asked, as he reached into his pocket.
“They didn’t really say but I didn’t figure them for real cops.” Andy dippered hot water from the stove into a wash pan and put a towel into the steaming water. He had two pairs of tongs to lift the hot towel and to wring it out. Then he gently wrapped the towel around George’s face. George let out a sigh, for even though he didn’t really need a shave, the warm bay-scented towel eased some of the strain that had been building up behind his eyes.
George lay motionless for a moment, letting the heat sink in past his eye sockets and cheek bones. Then he held up his brass badge in his right hand. “I’m a police detective, not a private eye,” he said through the layers of hot fabric.
“Yeah, so that means you’ll put me in jail if I don’t talk to you,” Andy said as he stirred his shaving brush inside the cup, “and they’ll just kill me.”
“I’m not going to put you in jail. I just need to know about this guy.”
“What happens if I don’t tell you?”
“Then I figure you know something pretty useful. You may know where he is right now. Or you might have helped him get out of town in a small boat.”
Andy stopped soaping the shaving brush. He didn’t move for several seconds. George could hear the tin pot on top of the stove rattling just slightly in the rising heat. He heard Andy shifting his weight back and forth on his feet.
“And … if I do talk to you?” Andy said finally.
George sat up a bit and took the towel off his face. “I guess that depends on what you have to say,” George said, staring at Andy. He was thinking too long about what to do and now his hands were starting to shake, which was a bad sign for a man who made his trade with a straight razor.
“You haven’t told anybody else about the boat, have you?” George ventured.
“Listen, mister, I don’t know a damn thing about a boat.” Andy was back to soaping the brush, but nervously now, faster than necessary.
“You better hope I find your buddy before the Floodwater boys do.”
Andy said nothing.
George leaned back. “I can still use a shave.”
Andy began lathering his face and then he gingerly pushed the tip of the police detective’s nose away from his lip and began gently scraping downward.
“His name’s Jack Wilson,” Andy said, “but he goes by Slip.”
“Where’s he gone?” George kept his voice soft, to match Andy’s.
“They’ll kill him sure?” Andy asked.
“Uh-hmm,” George offered.
Andy leaned back, stirring his brush once more in the soapy mug. “They almost killed him last night up north of Ballard. They may have, for all I know. I just know they made off in a boat that was small enough to put up on the beach.”
Andy started in on the cheek. “Damn fool should have stayed well away from that broad.”
“Just tell me where he’s headed. I’ll give him a fair shake. I promise.”
“He’s headed north. That’s all I know.” Andy daubed soap on the detective’s face, then took up the razor.
“Does he have any kin? Is he going to go to someone for help?” George leaned forward and stayed Andy’s hand with the razor in it.
“Naw. He’s got nobody as far as I know. Folks are dead. Poor dumb bastard. He’s in quite a fix, ain’t he?”
George didn’t answer. He just stared up into the shop light while Andy kept shaving and telling him everything he knew: How Slip showed up looking for the girl. How he was in some kind of jam with Avery. How Andy gave him the boat the old Norwegian fisherman had lost to him in a card game. He told him about the woman and the kid showing up with a yellow bird and getting into the dory just as Slip was about to push off.
George sat back and relaxed into the shave. The barber wanted to talk. His voice was rhythmic and steady. The words came out of his mouth as if they were blown forward by a dark pressure in his chest. Whatever trouble this logger had gotten into had scared the barber just by being close to it.
“Did Slip tell you if he killed the shamus?”
“No, he didn’t tell me. I swear, he never said.” Andy had finished the last section under George’s ear and he prepared another warm towel.
“But what do you think?” George asked.
“I dunno,” Andy said. “I think he’s in deep. Even if he didn’t kill him, he couldn’t just walk away clean. I think he was tangled up somehow with that woman and her little girl.”
“That would slow a fellow down all right,” George said. He got up from the chair and gave Andy a dollar, then put on his coat and walked out the door.
Johnny Desmond was headed north to get away from his wife’s relatives. Her brother and his wife had moved in that winter after they were put out of their house, and Johnny couldn’t bear to have them underfoot. He had made just enough money for gas by rebuilding an engine for a friend’s boat last winter. He had a line up on this box wood to sell to this Canadian cannery. So on the day he came home from the last day of putting the engine in and he found his brother-in-law eating the last of the roast while sitting in Johnny’s chair by the fireplace, Johnny went down to the Pacific Pride and started getting ready to go to Alaska.
Puget Sound was a broad thoroughfare stretched out ahead of them. A cormorant stood on a drift log with its wings held out away from its body to dry. A merganser paddled along on top of the water, and far ahead a tugboat was pulling a barge full of stone.
“Are we going out in the ocean, Captain Johnny?” Annabelle asked, without taking her eyes off the course ahead.
“We’ll just poke our nose out a bit. But mostly we stay to the Inside Pa
ssage. Its islands and inlets protect a boat all the way north. If you go far enough, you have to cross some big water to get to the Queen Charlottes and then there’s Dixon Entrance. But it’s mostly sheltered waters.”
“So there’s nothing …” and the girl bit her lip for a moment, “there’s nothing bad that can happen to this boat.”
“Well …” Johnny thought for just a moment, letting his imagination count all the potential hazards, then said, “You mean like a typhoon or a hurricane or something?”
“I guess.”
“We’ll always be able to get into a good safe place to ride out a storm.”
“That’s nice,” Annabelle said, and smiled out at the water ahead.
“There are the tides. Big currents along the Inside Passage. Some places it’s so narrow there will be whirlpools that can reach up and suck a big boat right underwater.”
“What do you do about that?” Her smile was thinning out.
“You just have to make sure you go through the narrow passages at slack tide, just when it’s changing. I’ve got a good current book that tells you when to go through those places.”
“That’s good.” Annabelle was smiling again.
“The Inside Passage is like a big river,” Johnny said. “And it flows both ways. It’s taking us north for another few hours. We’ll be at San Juan Narrows when it’s slack, then it will be flowing back toward the south.”
“It’s a big both ways river,” the girl said happily.
“That’s right,” Johnny said. The waves pushed against the bow and Annabelle steered around a swirling bunch of kelp. A gull stood on a small piece of wood as if he were waiting for a bus.
“So what do you folks do when you’re not bobbing around in a boat?”
The girl slid her glasses up her nose and squinted toward the horizon. “My aunt Ellie is a Red.”
“A Red? You mean like a radical?” Johnny asked, looking down at the girl.
“Well, actually, Ellie is a Communist. She believes that the workers should control the means of production. I guess, really she’s an anarcho-syndicalist, but that’s way too complicated to explain. Most people just call her a Red.”
“Oh,” Johnny said.
The girl wrinkled her nose and looked up at the skipper. “But what she really wants to do is fly an airplane like Amelia Earhart.”
“I suppose that makes good sense,” Johnny Desmond said, and he gently eased next to the girl and took the wheel.
TEN
The captain didn’t want George Hanson back at work. An unhappy man was not good for morale. Death belonged out on the streets. When it happened to someone on the force, it began to stink up the station.
Morale was low enough. There had been three murders in a week. The Seattle papers were concentrating on the trade unionist David Kept. There had been some splashy articles hinting at corruption on the docks. One of these articles ran a grainy photo of Kept getting into a car in front of an official-looking building. The photo had succeeded in implying that Kept had been in some trouble with the law, although there was nothing in the article, or in reality, to support that.
Floodwater had been able to shut down any inquiries about the death of Ben Avery and the man killed in the vigilante action in the hobo jungle. But the captain knew that George Hanson would lead the papers to both of those stories. Which was another good reason to get him out of town.
“You’ve got to go to Alaska and look for these people in the boat. Don’t thank me. Just get out of here. Take some time; go fishing while you’re up there.” The captain slapped down a single sheet of paper on George’s desk and stood over him without smiling.
“I don’t fish,” George said.
“Well learn, or take up dog-mushing, but I want you on the boat to Alaska tomorrow.”
“What if I …?” George started to say.
The captain interrupted George, thumping the desk with the tip of his index finger. “Your sister lives up there somewhere, doesn’t she?”
“I haven’t seen her for some years now,” George said, squinting up from his desk.
“Well, you’re about to see her again. Real soon.”
“But …” George said, but the captain had walked away.
George began packing up his files. He took everything with him: the picture of his wife and son, and all of the reports he had compiled on the Kept and Avery murders. He took his badge. But he left his gun locked up in the drawer. He wasn’t planning to shoot anyone, and the gun was too small to kill a polar bear.
The next day George stood at the dock. In the last twenty-four hours he had looked at the maps and charts. He had even read the newspapers about the dust bowlers headed north to build their new farms in Alaska. He tried out his warmest wool pants that he had used to go deer hunting one time with his in-laws. He even thought of buying a life jacket but then he figured the steamship line would provide him with one. He had sat on his bed the night before and looked at his bag piled up with clothes, with the silence of the house pressing down on him, and he knew he had to go somewhere and it might as well be Alaska.
But now that he stood on the dock looking up at the steel bluff of the Admiral Rodman’s hull, his suitcase and leather grip sitting at his feet, it was dawning on him that there was no way he could ever be ready for such a trip. Alaska was just too strange and too far.
But he was going to go. He would telegraph his sister later, maybe in one of the towns along the way.
The Admiral Rodman carried cargo and passengers from Seattle up the Inside Passage to Skagway and returned home with cargo from the north country. From the dock, George watched a crane loading a stripped-down commercial truck into the hold. Then there were netloads of cement bags, slings of kiln-dried lumber. There were crates and pallets of flour, men yelling while the winch engine strained at the loads. There were the sounds of passengers rattling up the gangway. There was a light rain falling from dark clouds. All the activity seemed to lift him up the gangplank and onto the ship.
George had never left Washington State in his life. He had only ventured east of the Cascade Mountains to satisfy Emily’s filial loyalty. To him the sheltered world of the Sound, with its blackberries and rhododendrons, moist ground and dripping cedar trees, was his reality. The world and everything to the north was hard and distant. Alaska was virtually empty on his imaginative map. There were gold mines and fishermen, brown bears that could fill a room in his small house, and now there were two adults and one kid who could tell him about the murder of at least two men.
George settled into the closet-sized stateroom, which became very warm after the ship got under way. George took off his overcoat and jacket and hung them up on pegs behind the door. He lay down on top of his blankets and stared at the painted pipes and ducts that crisscrossed the ceiling. All during the packing for the trip, George had to suppress his urge to ask Emily, Three pairs of pants or two? Would she like two adjoining rooms so Benny could have a room of his own? The questions would push through his foggy brain and almost bubble up out of his throat before they dissolved when he opened his mouth to speak. He reached out to her now in ways that he never recognized before. He didn’t feel so much lonely or sad, but sleepy, as if he were just dozing through this part of his life. Soon enough he would wake up in the house on the crest of the hill, and the air coming through the open window would be full of a boy’s shenanigans and the smell of a pie Emily had made from their good friend’s berries.
The hull shimmied as the engines gained speed, and the inside of the ship clattered with the activity of people stowing their gear. His stateroom must have been near the galley because he could hear the echoing of pots being moved about. Soon the air began to smell like turnips and coffee.
George closed his eyes but he did not dream. He thought of Ben Avery and how he died. He thought of three people leaving Seattle in a small boat. He had asked around, and apparently it was not uncommon for fishermen to row small dories to the fishing grounds in A
laska. They were mostly Norwegians or Finns and they would meet up in early spring when the worst of the winter storms were over but the prevailing winds were still from the south. They would group up in fleets of twenty or thirty boats and would row their small dories up the eight-hundred miles or so of Inside Passage. Sometimes they would set their sails and get a few days of sailing in, but mostly it was hand-pulling some twelve to fifteen hours a day. They would certainly be in shape to hand-line for salmon or cod in Alaskan waters after their six-week trip.
But these fishermen were tough. Their hands were as dark and as hard as polished oak. They could sleep under a tarp in the rain as well as most people could sleep in a featherbed. The logger, this Jack Wilson, might be tough, but probably not tough enough to haul all the three of them eight-hundred miles. He would come into port with bleeding hands and probably at least one less passenger than he started out with. The Admiral Rodman made stops at every little port of call on the Inside Passage. The stops were only long enough to unload and load passengers and cargo, but there would be enough time for George to ask around about a bedraggled-looking bunch coming in off the water, with an injured man, a fast-looking woman who flashed her legs, a bookish little girl, and a yellow bird in a round wire cage. Even five minutes on the docks would be enough time to find out about a group like that. They would stick out like the Second Coming in any of the villages up the coast.
Deep within the interior of the Admiral Rodman and well below the waterline, three men were being shown to a storage locker by a nervous oiler who knew he was risking his job.