by John Straley
“Yes.”
“I gave you your tin box back, right?”
“Yes, you did. Thank you.”
“There’s a lot of money in there.”
“Yes, there is.”
“You could probably pay that man in the airplane to fly you anywhere you want.”
“I suppose.”
“Slip?” she asked.
“Uh-huh,” he mumbled, growing sleepy now.
“Just where are we headed?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and his voice dropped away.
They both lay there without speaking. The yellow bird was cooing and pecking at himself in the girl’s glasses. People walked slowly past the cabin, and they could hear the clatter of the clean-up crew working in the plant.
“Then I guess we don’t really need an airplane,” she said sleepily.
“No, I suppose not.”
The pilot’s name was Willie Lee, and he had been taking a nip out of his pocket flask when Ellie started down the ramp. He had helped unload the groceries and next he had to fly south and pick up a party of geologists and take them on to Campbell River. When Ellie came down the dock he quickly wiped his mouth and put on a big smile. When he saw the pretty blonde approaching he was glad he had worn his leather windbreaker and military-style cap this morning. There were lots of dames who loved aircraft. It wasn’t all about Lindbergh anymore. The planes were bigger and more powerful, and there were more of them too. He could imagine a pretty girl stuck in some dump like this cannery. He could imagine what she must feel when she heard the plane landing. She could climb up beside him in the plane and she’d instantly be somewhere else. This plane could take to the sky. The same sky that covered Seattle and Los Angeles. Hell, it was the same sky that covered Paris, France, and there weren’t no tollbooths or stop signs anywhere.
This girl had a wild look in her eye. She also knew about the Vega. She knew the horsepower and the carburetion. She knew who had flown them and who had set distance records. This girl was different. She stood close and he knew she could smell the brandy on his breath. He almost reached into his pocket and offered her a slug, but he didn’t because she might be the kind to tell somebody about it and he didn’t need that kind of trouble. But there were several other kinds of trouble this girl brought to mind. She was friendly enough, and he let her crawl up inside. As she stepped in front of him, he put his hands around her waist and she didn’t flinch or look back. She sat in the pilot’s seat and named the instruments. She pulled gently back on the yoke and sat up straight so she could see the prop. He asked her if she had flown before and she said “not in a Vega.” She said she wanted to fly in a Vega almost more than anything.
He asked her, “Anything?” and tilted his cap back and gave her a look that left no doubt about what he was saying.
“Well,” she looked at him and her eyes seemed to be burning pure oxygen, “almost anything.”
He explained that he had to go and pick up a load of scientists and their gear. He said if he had room sometime when he came back, maybe she could ride along and keep him company. He could tell she was trying not to act too excited, but her eyes widened and she twisted around with her knees together like she had to go pee.
Then she said, “Well, maybe. That might be fun.” She kept her eyes on the plane, as if she were trying to burn the image of it into her mind. “When do you think you’ll be back?” she asked, as if it were not a matter of life and death.
“Can’t say for sure. But as spring picks up I’m sure I’ll be back out here soon enough.”
“In the next week?”
“Could well be,” he said. He undid the lines from the dock. “You’ll hear me when I do. I’ll buzz your cabin.” Then he pushed away from the dock, climbed in through the rear passenger door and up to the cockpit, pumped the throttle, then levered the switch to turn the prop over. Even though he didn’t need to, he stuck his head out of the side panel and shouted “Clear!” just before the big radial engine whined, rattled, then settled into a steady roar.
Ellie stood on the dock. Once the engine fired, the big plane shook itself like a wet dog. In the last weeks she had been scared and tired, she had been scheming and exhilarated, but for the first time she was angry. Her body shook as she squinted into the prop wash as the Vega began to move away from the dock. Why is it men get to do these things? she thought to herself. She had seen the gas drip from the air scoop on the bottom of the engine, so she was almost prepared for the ball of flame blasting between the floats when the exhaust manifold ignited the fumes of the spilled fuel. Willie gunned the engine so that the prop wash put the fire out. She knew that pilots called this “torching.” In fact she was sure that she knew more about that plane than the smarmy oaf with the big hands who got to fly it. She stood in the prop wash and watched it blare across the water, bounce a few times, then pull up into the air. She shaded her eyes with both hands as Willie banked the Vega high and tight, then circled back around to buzz the water just off the float. He waved to her through the window as he passed.
“Stupid bastard,” she said through smiling teeth, as she waved gaily, working her hips and her chest as she did. “Know nothing, stupid bastard.”
In the next few days Slip and Ellie had the machine shop cleaner than it had ever been. Nels was spending less time rooting around in the mess and swearing at Clyde, and Clyde had more time to sit and “put the think on” a project. Ellie had watched the men work and she started putting the tools on the tables and by the machines where they were most often used. She cleaned the lathes so the wheels would turn more easily, then rounded up all the metal rules and calipers so that no one would have to hunt through the drifts of screwdrivers and wrenches each time they needed to make a measurement. Slip built a row of shelves on the back wall and he piled up end pieces and things that looked as if they could someday be useful again. He sorted them solely by appearance and size, without knowing exactly what their function was. Ellie even dedicated a shelf for the problem projects: the jammed clutch assembly or the stubborn motor winding. She called it “The Healing Shelf” and labeled it such. Here were the parts that, when taken by themselves, often didn’t work. But when the larger piece of the mechanism was put back in order, the “broken” part would slip in and function as if it had been miraculously healed. Clyde smiled and whispered to Slip that he was thinking about “putting his pecker up on that shelf to see if it could do any good,” then he elbowed the logger in his sore ribs.
By the end of the second day Clyde was showing Ellie how to do simple jobs on the metal lathe and how to do the setup for some of the more delicate jobs, such as cutting the shiv plates from the haulers. Clyde would reach around her shoulders with both arms, talking softly about calibration and how slow and steady to adjust the cut. Ellie would lean back into his chest just enough to let him know she was paying attention.
Slip made countless trips to the dump, using a wheelbarrow to take the oily filings and the butt ends of shafts out the boardwalk to where the black bear sow still rummaged around the clearing. Slip sometimes took his break at the dump, sitting on a stump and watching the trees, hoping the bear would wander out. It usually had to be late in the afternoon or early in the morning, but often she would come.
He was sitting on a stump one day and picking metal slivers out of his fingers when a twig snapped to his right, and when he turned, the black bear sow was some fifteen feet from him. Her fiery tongue flicked inside a shiny tin that had once been full of lard. She had carried the tin up from the dump and was now lying under the fringe of trees working the can around with her front paws. Slip watched the bear and he thought again about making his own home. Maybe if they stayed here the bosses would let him build a house on a little piece of ground up the beach from the cannery. He would build it on a little flat up the hill. He could make adzes and drawknives to work the green timber. It would have massive posts and beams with finely chiseled joinery. They would all live there, with a big woodstove
and places to hang clothes and water piped right to the house. It wasn’t the Grand Coulee country but it was someplace far from their troubles.
A gun boomed just over his shoulder and the bear seemed to pop and settle to the moss as if she had been a balloon. Bright red blood eased into the moss. Slip dove down onto the ground and looked up to see the watchman shucking an empty shell from his shotgun.
“You better get back to work, young fella. This company don’t pay you to sit on your can and watch the wildlife.”
Slip stood up and walked past the watchman without saying a word.
By the beginning of their third day the cannery superintendent gave Slip and Johnny a job working on the pile-driving crew. Johnny got the job because he could run a boat and Slip got one because there wasn’t a need for a second cleanup boy in the machine shop now that Ellie had become some kind of princess of the metal workers. Slip and Johnny would make fifteen cents an hour. Ellie would stay in the shop as an apprentice and make twenty. Ellie was dry and warm all day long, and as the new guys on the pile-driving crew, Slip and Johnny got the worst of the jobs, which often had to do with working under the wharf, standing in a leaky skiff and trying to wedge a new piling into place.
After the second day, Johnny quit and stole some fuel from the cannery and took off in the Pacific Pride. He had heard from his wife that she wanted him back soon or he would have no home to come back to. Johnny still wanted to head north to see how the new town of Cold Storage, Alaska, was doing, so he pumped the stolen fuel and headed north. He ended up only saying good-bye to Annabelle when he brought by her bag of peppermints and two bags of bird food she had left on the boat.
Annabelle took care of the cabin and tried to make friends in the cannery. Ellie didn’t like the idea of Annabelle wandering around by herself. There was nothing else to do but let her read and explore the camp, as long as she was back before the evening meal. On Sundays she and Ellie borrowed fishing poles from a Filipino man and learned to jig for halibut. There was one fallen tree that had wedged between two others and cantilevered out over the bay. There, with enough weight and the fish heads on circle hooks, aunt and niece could get their line some hundred feet down and they would jig for fish.
The first day they caught nothing but a small flat fish that seemed to have become impaled on the hook by mistake. The second day Ellie got a fish so large that there was no way to land it on the steep shore. It came to the surface slowly and looked about as big as a car door. The fish swam languidly and they both shrieked. Then the fish flipped violently and was gone. Annabelle immediately put her baited hook down in the water. Ellie went into the woods and fashioned a club then found a flat spot to stand near the water’s edge.
An hour later Annabelle hauled up another fish, this one about the length of the girl herself. She teetered down the log and when the fish was resting between runs, she handed the pole off to Ellie, who slowly brought the sixty-pound halibut up to the shallows, tied off the thick line to a stump, and then clubbed the thrashing fish to death.
That night they cooked the fish in the Filipino kitchen. Two brothers played guitars on the porch of the Filipino bunkhouse while the crew of the little dory ate their fill sitting outside listening to the music. Ellie talked with Mr. Caroca, who was one of the three patriarchs of the Filipino workers. They talked about union business and working conditions. Ellie mostly asked questions, never pushing for conclusions or offering opinions. If Mr. Caroca offered a complaint against management Ellie took it in silence as if she were considering the truth of the man’s words.
Slip ate the halibut and rice and looked around at his new family. Ellie sometimes sat with the women, gossiping about the single men of the camp and who they were seeing, but tonight she was deep into a conversation with Mr. Caroca. Annabelle played jacks in a circle of girls. She would eat a bite of fish, then bounce the red ball and grab a jack, eat another bite, then bounce again. Ellie leaned on the rail of the porch, laughing and asking questions. Slip took another mouthful. The fresh fish was moist and sweet with spices. He leaned his head back against the house where the spring sun gathered and warmed the damp wood. Lucky, he thought to himself. Lucky.
“Why not go talk to the boss?” Ellie asked Mr. Caroca.
“No good will come of it,” the dark man offered. “We got jobs, better than most. No reason to risk that.”
“True, but they can’t run this plant without you.” Ellie set her plate down on the porch rail.
“They always get another Flip, that’s what they think.”
“Maybe, but we’re a long way from Manila.” Ellie watched Mr. Caroca’s face. He was suddenly disengaged from the conversation as if his face had turned to stone. Ellie followed his eyes out to the boardwalk in front of the house. Clyde stood there with a young Finn who worked on the slime line. Clyde was looking at Ellie sitting with the Filipino boss. He stood flat-footed and stared at her as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.
Ellie raised up her arm and called out to them, “Hey boys, we’re eating the halibut we caught. Wanna try some?”
Clyde turned and walked toward the white workers’ cabins without saying a word. The young Finn smiled and half-heartedly waved as if embarrassed, then he too walked away.
“Maybe not such a good idea, you being here,” Mr. Caroca said. He stood up with his plate.
“Any man who turns down a free meal of fresh-caught fish doesn’t have the sense that God gave a duck,” Ellie said, and she picked up her own plate to take it into the kitchen.
Two more days passed. A high-pressure system pushed in from the north and settled over the Canadian coast. Wind from the north whipped the waters of the channel into a washboard of short white waves, and the newly budding trees waved their limbs about as if they were waking up from a long sleep. Slip’s pile-driving crew spent the time shoring up the wharf and driving pilings for a new section of dock. Ellie worked in the machine shop and Clyde silently allowed her to sweep, organize, and take on the easiest and most tedious projects. Ellie whistled while she swept the metal filings and never once provoked a confrontation with the machinists.
The bookkeeper in the business office found a trunk of National Geographic magazines in a storage locker and gave them to Annabelle in place of some regular schooling. Annabelle was quite pleased and would bring treasures to the bookkeeper whenever she came across them. After the second day the bookkeeper had a fragile sea urchin nest and a raven’s skull on her desk.
Annabelle kept one ear cocked for the sound of the returning Lockheed Vega. Buddy spent most of his time either trying to look at himself in Annabelle’s glasses or preening and chuckling to himself on the center rafter of their cabin.
On a Thursday, Ellie was setting up a shiv plate in the lathe for Nels. The big Swede had showed her how to center the chucks and get the plate level. It was a slow process, with hundreds of slight adjustments. Ellie had a feeler gauge mounted to read whether the plate was running perfectly parallel with the chucks of the machine. Once she got it tight and even, Nels would run the lathe and take some twenty-thousandths of an inch off of the plate so that the lines running between them would be pinched down tight and not slip off the puller.
Clyde was working on forge-welding a broken sprocket. He stood under the forge hood and gripped the tongs with leather gloves. Then he brought the glowing pieces out of the coals and set them in a jig he had set up on the anvil. He was pounding the parts together as Ellie finished up the preparation on the shiv plate. The shop was clean and most of the tools hung in their proper places on the walls and benches. Nels had been in a good mood that morning and had offered to teach Ellie this new skill.
Nels stood next to Ellie and eyed the feeler gauge as he spun the mounted plate by hand. Ellie watched with satisfaction as the indicator needle barely flickered, showing that the plate was parallel to the chuck. The chuck of the big lathe weighed close to three hundred pounds and was driven by a ten-horsepower electric motor. The motor ha
d more than enough torque to start the plate spinning with a tug on the lever and a quick whir of the chucks.
“Now get the carriage back out of the way and we’ll cut this thing.” Nels made adjustments to the cutting tool and Ellie turned the wheel to move the carriage. Nels had his back to her as he said, “Now push the lever down and get her spinning.” Ellie reached back and pushed the lever, and as she did, she leaned against the machine and put her left hand on the inside edge of the carriage.
At first she felt nothing except a tug on the edge of her hand. Then there was the whining of the ten-horse motor as it bound up. She felt a numbness and a sense of urgency as Nels flew over the top of her to hit the cutoff switch. Then pain was shooting up her arm and Ellie felt a kind of stupid regret as she looked over to see her hand pinched between the chuck and the carriage table. Blood pooled out on the table like cutting oil, and Ellie leaned over and saw the little finger and ring finger of her left hand on the floor, nestled in a pile of metal shavings.
Of the rest she retained little memory. Nels had said, “Oh, good Christ.” Then he forced the big machine out of gear and the big chuck swung lazily in the opposite direction, and Ellie slumped to the floor. Clyde walked slowly around the edge of the big lathe with a broom in his hand. He stopped for a moment, walked slowly over to the workbench, and flipped over the main electrical breaker for the shop, thinking that they would be done for the day. Then he walked out the door to get the superintendent and the big greasy bohunk who was supposed to be the camp nurse, though no one trusted him with any of their ailments.
The superintendent fired Ellie on the spot. He told her he’d put whatever wages she had coming toward the cost of the airplane to come take her out of camp. The plane could take her up to Ketchikan or down to Campbell River. If there was anything left over, the super said he’d send the wages on, but of course they both knew he never would.
Ellie sat in the office with her hand wrapped in gauze. The bohunk had given her morphine, which made her feel warm, sleepy, and sick to her stomach. Once she started to throw up in the trashcan and the bookkeeper told her to wait outside on the dock. Clyde helped Ellie up and they walked slowly to the airplane dock.