The Big Both Ways

by John Straley

  Ellie reached into her pants pocket and gave the madam a quarter. “That’s what I got right now,” she said.

  “It’s a start,” Yvette said. “I’ve got a doctor who will come and take a look at your hand. I’m assuming you don’t want to go to the hospital.”

  Ellie nodded in agreement.

  “I don’t blame you. I got a doctor who is pretty much sober. He looks after all my girls. I’ll add whatever his bill will be to your bill here. What you can’t pay, you work off, you understand?” She stared hard at Ellie.

  Ellie nodded.

  “Good,” said Yvette.

  “I’ll clean up shit,” Ellie said, fighting back the urge to throw up again. “But I’m not fucking anybody for thin wages.” She was slurring her words and going in and out of consciousness, and this was the only reason Yvette even listened to her foolishness.

  “I suppose we’ll just see about that,” Yvette said, with one hand on her hip. “Let’s get you upstairs and out of sight. You’re worse for business than that pig John just lugged out of here.”

  Blood dripped from her bandages as they pulled her down the hall. The blood looked black under the bare lightbulbs spaced down the hall. The lights throbbed with intensity as if they were keeping time with the motion of rusty springs behind the doors.

  Yvette opened a door where there was just enough room for a bed and a nightstand. After Ellie flopped on top of the coverlet, the madam turned to a skinny girl who stood in the hall with her arms folded over her housecoat. “She’s going to die. So don’t get used to having her around, honey.” The skinny girl shrugged and walked back down the hall.

  Doctor Williams had a drunkard’s nose, which looked like a tender testicle. He wore a rumpled black suit and his breath smelled of cigars. When he first walked in, he stumbled over the end of the bed and pain flared through Ellie’s hand. He stood at the side of her bed jingling the change in his right pocket. Ellie thought he was going to say something dismissive or make a pronouncement, but without preamble he started to work on her hand.

  First he washed his hands and used an alcohol rub on them. Then he cleaned Ellie’s hand tenderly. She was in and out now, feverish and sweating. Her face was as pale as the threadbare sheet she lay on. The doctor asked for another light, and one of the little whores fetched a lamp from the parlor and set it on the nightstand. When the doctor used what appeared to be gardening shears to trim the ragged bone and flesh around the wound, Ellie cried out, with pitiful sobs she had been holding back ever since the machine had clamped down on her hand. The doctor folded a piece of cloth and placed it over her nose and dripped two drops of ether on it. Then he handed the bottle to the girl, who stood by Ellie’s head and continued dripping ether onto the cloth.

  Doc Williams did not engage in conversation while he worked. He murmured to himself, “Poor hand. Goddamn shame. Poor broken hand.” Once he asked for a glass of water and Yvette brought him some cool water from the tap. He thanked her and took a long drink. Then he smiled at her and said, “Thirsty work,” and turned his attention back to Ellie.

  The left hand was swollen and blue-black, turning a sickly yellow up the arm. The doctor pulled and sutured the skin around the trimmed stubs. He cleaned after every step and cleaned again. He asked for a bucket of ice to be brought up, and John, a big black man, came in a few minutes with a champagne bucket filled with shaved ice from the fish house. The doctor then wrapped Ellie’s hand with gauze, and then he cut a piece of a rubber sheet, which he laid on top of the ice. He made sure to get the ether back from the little whore, who slunk out of the room like a house cat, leaving only John standing by the bed like the shadow of a church tower.

  “She won’t need this,” he said to the big black man holding up the ether. “Let her lay the hand on top of the ice for tonight. It might help with the swelling. And give her one of these.” He poured a tablet out onto his palm. “I will come tomorrow with more tablets. She may cry out or have strange dreams. She’s feverish. But don’t get too excited. If she doesn’t come around by morning or if she starts getting more pale and taking real shallow breaths, send around for me. I’ll come.”

  “Yes,” John said.

  “She’s pretty beat up. But it looks like she’s been beat up before.” He rolled down his shirtsleeves and put his jacket back on. The black man went to attend to some girl crying down the hall, and the doctor kicked a flimsy chair into place and sat by the bed.

  In a few minutes Ellie opened her eyes.

  “Good evening,” the doctor said, with evident pleasure in her company.

  “If you say so,” Ellie managed.

  “Yvette says you are not a working girl.” He was standing now.

  “No,” Ellie said, as she watched him open his black bag.

  “That’s a sound decision. These girls don’t prosper for long.” He took the tools and wiped them with a clean rag and put them on top of his black bag. Then he wiped his hands on one of Yvette’s clean hand towels.

  “Would you consider having a drink with an old man?”

  “If we can have it up here,” Ellie said.

  “You’re in no shape to go anywhere anyway,” he said, watching Ellie lifting up her tender hand from the ice.

  “Where are my fingers?” she asked, confused and forgetting that she had thrown them into the sea.

  “I suppose wherever you left them,” the doctor smiled.

  “How about that drink?” she coughed out.

  “Of course. I believe I have a bottle of port stored here. I will bring us some glasses.”

  Ellie closed her eyes as he left the room and didn’t remember him coming back. She only remembered waking up with a glass in her right hand.

  She sipped slowly. Her right hand shook violently but she was able to crane her neck forward to take in a bit of the sweet liquor. She closed her eyes and listened as the doctor talked about the rain in Ketchikan and the things he missed by living there. He had once lived in San Francisco and he missed the musical theater and the lecture halls. He missed the smell of eucalyptus in the early mornings and the taste of ripe yellow pears. They drank their port and Ellie told him about the qualities of the Lockheed Vega. She told him everything she knew about Amelia Earhart and of her own desire to fly around the world.

  “What would you do on such a trip?” the doctor asked, as he poured her another glass of port.

  “I would just look down on everything.” Ellie beamed drunkenly though she had only sipped her second drink, and the doctor smiled.

  He downed the last of his drink, then slapped his thighs and stood up. “I’m going to totter home. It was a pleasure speaking with you. I’m sure I’ll see you tomorrow.” Just as he was about to walk through the door he turned back and said, “I’m sorry but I never asked your name. Would you mind telling me? I’d rather keep you in my books by name, seeing as you’re not one of Yvette’s girls, which is how I usually note them down.”

  “Ellie Hobbes,” she said, flush with port and good feeling toward the doctor.

  “Really? Ellie Hobbes?” he said, and he scratched the top of his head before putting on his hat. “I know that name for some reason. No. Wait. There was somebody asking after you,” he said.

  “Really?” Ellie’s voice cracked slightly. All of the good will she had felt for the doctor was chilling in her bones. “Who?”

  “I’m not sure, but it was someone who was downstairs this morning … uh … taking advantage of the services here.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Slip woke up before the sun appeared over the ridge. The dory was dawdling at the end of its tether. The sky was the color of lead, with a few clouds smeared across the tops of the ridges. His arms ached and his hands felt numb. It was the rowing, he thought, and the repetitive motion of swinging the maul on the piling crew. Each morning now his arms ached and he would have to throw his hands over his head and shake them to get the feeling back.

  Annabelle was sleeping under the tarp and the yellow bi
rd sat hunched in his damp feathers under the forward thwart. The dory had swung under the overhanging tree during the night as the tide turned, and now the current was running north. There was a slight breeze from the south and the dory pulled against its painter line. The tide was lower now than it had been when they had first tied up for the night, so the line hung at a right angle to the water and was tied high over Slip’s head.

  He was in no hurry to be going except for the fact that the current and the wind were fair and the combination of the two would make for some good headway to the north. He dug down into the food trunk and found one of the sweet rolls Annabelle had stored away, and he ate one as the dory tugged on the painter line and the sun eased up above the ridge.

  The immediate problem was that the end of the painter line was almost a foot beyond his reach. He could pull the dory so that it was directly under it, but he could not reach the knot that he had tied so easily when the tide was higher. The wind was building and everything in the inlet seemed to be wanting to push them on their way. Slip pulled on the rope and lifted his feet just a few inches clear of the rowing seat. He reached the knot but the boat drifted back so quickly that he was hanging above the water.

  “Annabelle,” he said, “honey, can you give me a hand here?” Only the yellow bird responded by poking his head out and scowling at Slip, giving a short noncommittal peep.

  Slip bent himself in half and wrapped his legs around the trunk of the overhanging tree. The tree bobbed a bit with his weight but seemed solidly wedged between its torn root wad and a sturdy outcropping of granite that kept it from falling into the inlet. Now Slip hung like a dead monkey being carried back to camp by porters.

  “Annabelle. Wake up. I need a hand.”

  Again, only Buddy responded with an indifferent peep.

  The sides of the inlet at this spot were near vertical and so smooth that it was impossible to go to shore. He was able to hook one of his legs around a limb of the snag and leverage himself onto the upper side of the log. Now he sat astride the log as if it were a pony.

  “Slip? What are you doing up there?” The sleepy girl was sitting upright, rubbing her eyes, with the tarp still wrapped around her shoulders.

  “I’m in a fix. Can you row the boat so that it’s underneath me? I’ll untie the line and then drop into the boat. Just pull as hard as you can and row up underneath me.”

  She looked up at him as if he were some improbable figure from a dream she might still be in the middle of. She rubbed her eyes once more, then lay down in the boat and pulled the tarp up over her shoulders.

  “Hey now, listen, I’m serious. Wake up,” Slip called down from his perch, and the girl sat up again with the same expression of sleepy surprise to be back in the same dream.

  Eventually she rustled around and got the long oars in the oarlocks. The wind continued to pick up and the waves coming down the inlet were building. She pulled on the oars but could make no steady headway. What she gained into the wind with one stroke was taken away during her glide back for the next one. The boat barely jogged against the painter line. Slip finally untied the painter line from the snag and was able to jerk the line so that the bow of the dory swung directly under him for a moment. He told her to row as hard as she could to keep the boat moving toward him. He would jerk on the line and then lower himself back into the dory before it drifted downwind.

  “Are you ready? One … two … three!”

  Annabelle pulled on the long oars and Slip jerked the rope. The dory slid more than halfway under the snag and Slip scrambled to lower himself down into the boat. Annabelle took short fast strokes with the oars, splashing the water and straining as hard as she could. Slip rolled under the tree and dangled just inches above the boat for a moment. But a gust rumbled down the inlet and the dory moved off. The sleeve of Slip’s coat was tangled in both the tree limbs and the dory’s painter line. The dory eased downwind.

  “Pull on the line,” he called out, and the girl set the oars down with a clatter and pulled on the line to bring the boat back under the dangling man. With one hard tug the painter line snapped the twigs in the snag and zipped past the fabric of Slip’s sleeve. The end of the line fell in the water, and the dory went drifting away from his kicking feet.

  “We can try it again!” he called out to her through the blustering wind. “Just row up underneath me.”

  She scrambled back to her seat and picked up the ungainly oars once again. The dory wallowed in the waves and the wind pushed the bow toward the middle of the inlet.

  “Pull, honey. You can do it.”

  But of course she couldn’t, and by the time Slip saw that it was impossible for her to row back to him, she had drifted so far he knew he would not be able to swim to her. He knew enough from his recent experience to know that the cold water had a way of gripping his muscles in a kind of seizure. He might be able to survive in the water for half an hour or so but he would never be able to make up the difference between himself and the wind and current-borne dory.

  “Slip!” the girl called out. “What should I do?” Her voice was becoming faint in the rumble of wind but he could hear the shrill edge of panic in her voice.

  “Don’t do anything crazy,” he shouted.

  “Yeah … like crawl up into a tree,” the girl yelled back, obviously angry to be left alone in the moving boat.

  Slip waved to her as she shrank into the distance, and he could barely make her out as she waved back.

  A shipping agent came into the little café and informed George Hanson that the Admiral Rodman would be delayed at least seven days and perhaps ten. Parts were not available locally and would have to be found, then flown up from Seattle or Vancouver. It was regrettable, the agent said, but there was nothing to be done.

  Walter Tillman offered to fly George anywhere he wanted and George knew that would be the responsible thing to do. But he thanked Walter Tillman and sent him on his way. George said that he would do his best looking for the dory there in Craig. He would ask around, he said, and would be in contact with Walter as soon as he made landfall in Juneau.

  Young Walter Tillman looked at George and said, “You won’t get much out of these folks here, sir. They’re a hard bunch.” George smiled at the young man and thought that surely his experience would count for something.

  But in the next few days George discovered that the young man was right. He walked the docks and drank coffee and tried to talk with the fishermen and beach loggers, but all he got was a series of courteous dismissals. When he asked about the small dory and the girl with the yellow bird, the conversations went dead.

  The Indian people he spoke with gave him nothing at all, denying any understanding of his questions but giving him the impression of full cooperation. The white people simply turned him off. After the first of such interactions George began to see something familiar about these folks tucked back along the wild coast. There was something of the Big Finn in all of them: the wariness of authority and a stiff-necked defensiveness around anyone who dressed in expensive clothes and asked questions without a long and proper introduction.

  Then George remembered the history his father had taught him. After the Centralia debacle back in 1919, the state of Washington had started enforcing the Sedition Laws. Anyone could go to jail for ten years for just having once been a member of the IWW. Anyone found with a Red card or a pennant with the words ONE BIG UNION emblazoned across the fabric could be arrested. The Big Finn kept no radical materials either on his person or in his home. He stayed in Washington and kept the fire alive. But many of the most public of the radicals began to scatter. There was more than one island off the wild north coast that held old seditionists. They fished and strung radio antennas above their cabins to pull in the scores of the distant ball games, and they kept to themselves. The islands around Craig had a fairly high density of hermits and folks with new names and histories, and their neighbors knew to give them both their privacy and their loyalty.

  During G
eorge’s days in Craig, the weather was fair with only a few showers blowing through. He stayed on the ship, where he ate meals of fresh fish and crab that the galley prepared to keep everyone’s spirits high. George even rented a small skiff and a fishing pole to spend days out on the water, telling himself he was looking for the dory with the little girl and the yellow bird. But in fact he was not looking for anything that reminded him of Seattle and the corpses there.

  William Pierce and McCauley Conner had indeed been drinking downstairs in Yvette’s sporting house, while Ray Cobb was eating at a soda fountain down the creek. They had gotten a ride on a fish-packing boat that left Craig the same afternoon the Admiral Rodman had arrived.

  The three men were an ill-suited bunch, dirty and mismatched. Pierce had a certain stiff-spined dignity. He was tall and he stood up straight and always appeared to be scouting the space around him. Conner was a rheumy-eyed dreamer who always had at least half his attention turned inward. He stood with a slouch as if he were looking for something to lean up against. Cobb was a short cairn of hard-packed flesh and muscle. Wherever he stopped he seemed to be affixed to that one spot until some stimulus, food usually, would tip his bulk forward and he would shamble back into motion.

  David Kept had been a good friend to the members of his local. He had gotten them more money and had kept them focused on attainable goals that seemed to grow closer with each month. Kept had stood on the bull rails and made the members only promises that they all could keep, and they had believed him because their lives continued to improve under his leadership. There were better money and predictable hours, fairness in the hiring hall, and no special treatment for “friends of friends” from the outside. David Kept ran a good shop and he was well liked by a group of working men who had no other friends like him.

  So when his body was found in the trunk of the Lincoln, the membership commissioned its own investigation. The national office wanted to work through the police, but the boys on the docks were in a hurry. Besides, no one trusted the police. Even if David Kept had made inroads with the local cops, the boys boosting the bales and slings had no more use for the cops than they did for a dose of the clap. They would handle it themselves without the police and without the Floodwater boys who oiled through every public meeting and informal gathering. Even though David Kept had no wife or children, he had family … and they would take care of his interests now.