by John Straley
So as Ellie had been flying over the mountains in the Vega and Slip had been packing his and Annabelle’s belongings for their dory ride north, William Pierce and McCauley Conner were lying naked on either side of a sleeping whore named Beatrice. Ray Cobb was down the street drinking one glass of soda water after another and belching so loudly that some of the patrons were moved to complain.
“Christ, I miss my home,” Conner said, his skinny hairless shin draped over the sleeping woman’s backside.
“Listen to you. You got a bed and money in your pocket. Hell, there’re men all over the world who would envy us.”
“I still wish I was someplace else. Doing something else.” And he rolled over onto his side, away from the girl, who stirred slightly and murmured something from her dreams.
“This is different from the usual. I grant you that. But it’s got to be done. You said so yourself when it first came up.” Bill Pierce was stroking Beatrice’s neck, hoping she’d stay asleep. Even though the men had bathed the night before, the sheets were still sooty with coal dust and smelled of fish oil. Bill wiped his nose. “You said so yourself,” he repeated.
Out the open window they heard an airplane passing overhead.
“I know what I said, but goddamn, Bill.”
“We’re just going to take her and the kid back south.” Pierce spoke softly, rubbing the white skin of the woman’s thigh.
“Why’d we have to bring Cobb, anyway?” Conner asked. “I thought he was going to die down there in the bottom of the ship.”
“Cobb insisted he come along. He says he’s got more reason to stick up for Dave than anybody.”
“I don’t like him,” Conner said, and the girl began to stir. “He’s got too big an appetite or something. I don’t know.” Conner brushed dark hair away from the girl’s face.
Pierce sat up on the edge of the bed. “We’ll keep an eye on him. We’ll get this done and be home.”
“No killing. You sure of that?” Conner put his hand against the girl’s cheek.
“Not if it can be avoided.” Pierce pulled up his pants.
“God, I miss my home,” Conner said. Then he kissed the girl and she opened her eyes and smiled.
Ellie stayed feverish for several days. She drank water and nibbled on stale bread that John brought to her from the restaurant down the street. On the third day he brought a proper dinner—rice, fish, and onions—and it was hot and had a fine hint of salt and ginger.
The whorehouse was quieter than Ellie had expected. There were footsteps padding down the hall, creaking floors, and the continued opening and closing of doors. If she listened she could hear the creaking of the box springs and the murmur of women’s voices uttering encouragements. Outside, the noisy creek became silent twice a day as the tide came up high enough to fill the narrow rock basin with seawater. She started using the tides as a clock to keep track of the day. On the fourth day she used a radio telephone downtown to call the flight service in Campbell River, trying to get news from the cannery, but all she could find out was that Slip and the girl were no longer there. The phone line hissed and popped, and when the flight service secretary slammed down the receiver, the silence on the line scared her.
Yvette changed Ellie’s bandages once a day, and each time she gave the invalid one more day before she would have to start turning tricks. Ellie shook her head and said she wouldn’t, and Yvette would threaten to throw her out and Ellie dared her to. Yvette would storm out of the room leaving an angry wake of silence. Then Ellie would walk down the backstairs to help John and the crippled Chinese girl with the laundry.
On some afternoons while she waited for sheets to dry, she read magazines on the porch. Sometimes Doc Williams would come to check on her and they might drink a glass of red wine and visit about the news of the day. Williams liked to converse, which was fortunate because he was good at it. He favored art and politics. He liked Roosevelt and the New Deal. Ellie avoided politics but was happy to listen to him talk about French painting and German composers. Sometimes during their conversations she dozed off with her head propped against the porch railing, dreaming of music she had never heard.
Some men came into the whorehouse early in the day. They usually walked quickly and ducked into doorways hoping no one would notice them. Late at night men would sometimes come in groups, arm in arm and singing. Judging by what she could hear through the thin walls, the quiet men during the middle of the day were more voluble in the rooms with the girls. They would sometimes call out names or begin to plead and order specific attentions. Once she heard a man, visiting at what must have been his lunch hour, recite the Lord’s Prayer as he made the bed frame rattle against the wall.
The louder party boys were generally quieter once they came upstairs. Many of them, she suspected, were essentially scared of women and hence the need for the big show out on the sidewalks. But occasionally these party boys became violent, and John would bound up the stairs and, with a thudding of their bare heels on the uneven floor, the big black man hauled them outside as if they were sacks of coal. Doc Williams would come then and soothe the girls with paregoric, or morphine if the injuries were serious enough. Most often he calmed them by simply sitting at their bedsides, listening to them talk about their fears and about their plans for their future.
“There’ll be far too many millinery shops in the world if all of these girls were to achieve their dreams,” he told Ellie.
Mindful of her need to repay Yvette, Ellie found ways to be useful. She carried coal for John or she helped the girls with the laundry. When they were blue she would sit and play cards with them or simply listen to their rambling stories. They were decent girls, mostly immigrants from Europe, sturdy girls who seemed to bruise easily but didn’t enjoy complaining. Their given names were often long and difficult to pronounce so they adopted American names with their customers. They were Betty or Sally and sometimes Claudine upstairs, but playing cards back in the kitchen or running their clothes through the ringer washer, they would call each other the pet names of their youth. They smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and drank whiskey from their own clean glasses and talked of the lives they had left behind in Budapest, Prague, or Dublin—the dirty stone streets and the roofs that leaked. All the while the rain pattered down on the shake roofs of Ketchikan and the lonely men queued up under the clogged, overflowing gutters until Yvette let them in.
It was there that Ellie brought up the idea of forming a trade union. “It would be the most powerful union on earth,” she said. “Imagine a strike. My God, what a beautiful idea. Jesus, girls, imagine it.”
“The wives would be the first to beg us to come back,” a sad-eyed girl spoke up.
“Explain to me why you need Yvette,” Ellie asked the girl named Petroska.
“Shut up, Ellie. You’ll get us bounced out of here,” another whore called out from the porch, where she was helping Alice wring out her second load of sheets for the day.
“I’m just asking. I like Yvette as much as any man.”
“Any man?” Petroska asked with a smile.
“Perhaps not any man. But I like her, and I can understand why you like her too. But she gets paid for being generous to you. When you are generous to her, it comes out of your pocket, and when she is generous to you it also comes out of your pocket. That’s all I’m saying.”
“You’ll get these girls in trouble,” John said, smiling. He was turning the crank on the old wringer and feeding a wet sheet through.
“These girls are already in trouble. That’s all I’m saying.” Ellie made an emphatic gesture with her left hand and it bumped the edge of the table. Wincing in pain, she pulled her arm back and cradled it against her chest. “Damn!” Her eyes were clamped shut and tears squirted out the corners.
“Poor baby.” Petroska patted her cheek with a pale hand. “Poor Ellie. There will be no revolution in America,” she said, as if she were comforting a baby.
“Why’s that?” Ellie shot back, still cra
dling her throbbing hand.
“Because Americans are children. They could not endure a revolution. Trust me, Ellie, this I know for sure. Americans are babies, big and fat and happy. There is no revolution for such people.”
“You haven’t seen much of the Depression over here.”
“Pagh! This is nothing. This is as bad as it’s been and it’s still wonderful. No, sweetheart. No revolution. You should try selling something else.”
“What, silk stockings and tractor parts?” Ellie did not like being condescended to by a whore. A whore who was being exploited whether she knew it or not.
“I like silk socks. Very good,” the Russian girl said.
“All right, you two, enough. Help me with these sheets,” John called out. He had a basket of laundry and was backing up against the door to hang it out to dry along the side porch of the building that had a wide eave and got springtime sun. Most of the laundry for the house was picked up by a Finn to be done over at the steam laundry in town, but Yvette charged the girls for that service so many of them paid John a lower rate to save a few dollars. Ellie pushed against the back door with her back and stepped out onto the porch. John set the wet laundry down and walked back inside.
“Hang it, then you can come back. I’ll make us some coffee and I’ll take a look at that hand again.”
“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, John?”
“I do,” he said, “and I agree. But the laundry needs doing.” He turned to her with a smile. “Then I’ll change that bandage for you, comrade.” The door swung shut.
It was afternoon and a soft rain was falling. The clogged gutters continued to drip thirty feet onto the low-tide rocks of the creek bed. Ellie walked toward the front of the house, listening to the patter of rain on the boardwalk.
She was reaching for the first clothespin when a large, dirty hand reached around and covered her mouth. At first she screamed but the hand clamped down harder and pinched off her nostrils. Then she bit down hard onto the fleshy hand, which tasted like coal dust. The owner of the hand let out a hissing sound and someone slugged her in the stomach hard enough for her to black out for a moment.
“Let her breathe, Ray,” someone said, and when she opened her eyes she recognized William Pierce and McCauley Conner standing just in under the dripping eaves.
Ellie tried to kick Pierce in the crotch but whoever was behind her choked off her air again, and all she could sense were her heels hitting the top of the steps as someone dragged her off the porch.
Annabelle pulled against the big oars but they were awkward in her hands. When she did manage to get a good bit into the water with both of them, the combination of the wind and the current continued to push her down the inlet, away from Slip hanging on the tree.
Buddy sat on top of his cage, ruffling his feathers and calling out in his high irritating voice. The girl pulled on the oars and looked at the yellow bird with the bright red spots on his cheeks. She watched him and dreamed of being able to fly. The ends of the oars skittered over the top of the water and she splashed the stern of the boat. Buddy shook himself and started to fly.
She watched him fly in wide circles around the boat, dipping toward the water, and it looked as if he were mesmerized by his own reflection. He was like a bolt of tropical sunlight in this muted gray-green world. The circles got bigger and bigger around the boat.
“Buddy,” the girl called out softly, short of breath. “Hey, over here.”
But the vain yellow bird, for whatever reason, flew away. He rose up into the canopy of tall trees and disappeared like a spark.
Slip sat very still. He knew that if he fell in the water there was a good chance that he would be able to claw his way up onto the face of the rock. There were ledges, after all; some ferns grew out of the rock and somehow this tree had taken root before it had fallen over. Or he could cling to the rock so that he might not die in the cold water. But still, he would not be able to go anywhere. His only real hope was that there would be a passing boat that would see him and somehow offer help.
A kingfisher flickered up to him and settled on the snag. He looked at the bird and tried to imagine changing places. He thought of flying out over the water and into the wheelhouse of a warm boat, where there was coffee boiling over on the metal grates and the cook had bread in the oven. Slip thought of Johnny on the Pacific Pride and wanted nothing so much as to see its black hull push around the point and come over to him so that he could simply step off the snag and onto the front deck.
By late afternoon the wind was calm. His legs were cramping. He had decided to try to snap the log all the way off by breaking it with his weight and twisting on the branches so that it would float free. He stared straight down where the calm water was flowing now in the opposite direction from when he first climbed up there. He began to bounce. The tree crackled and back near the fulcrum he heard a sharp popping. Just as he was about to stand up and plan his last push, he heard the girl’s voice.
“Slip? Hey, Slip, you know what?” She was rowing the dory easily now in the calm water and fair current. She was a hundred yards away.
Slip waved. “Come on,” he yelled, and she pulled against the oars.
He watched her approach, and he felt an aching love for her. Soon she floated just a few feet underneath him, and he was able to easily lower himself into the dory.
“You know what?” she asked.
“No, honey, I don’t.”
“Buddy flew off.” Her eyes were red and she looked older to him now, her frown having grown stiff.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Slip said, and his voice was broken from not having much use for most of the day.
“He just flew off,” she said.
“Well, let’s take a look around for him,” Slip said. “He’s going to be around here someplace,” Slip said. And he put his arm around the little girl, who broke into tears, sobbing into the dirty wool of his old red jacket.
John lost track of the afternoon. He worked on laundry, and then did a short carpentry job of shimming a new door for one of the girls’ rooms, which took him much longer than he expected because nothing in the sagging old whorehouse was square. He finished that job and lay down on the cot he had set up by the kitchen, took a drink of wine, and closed his eyes in gratitude for getting some rest before the night’s work.
When he woke, the sun was slanting down the back of the building. The tide was out, so the creek was snaking between the algae-covered rocks. As he woke he remembered that he had never changed the girl’s bandage. It would be getting ripe by now and he should take care of that before Miss Yvette caught wind of it.
He went down to the kitchen, where the Chinese girl with the bad leg was stirring a large pot of stew and listening to the old Victrola she had sitting on a stool.
“Where is Ellie at?” the black man asked.
“No, sir, don’t know,” the girl said, without raising her eyes from the pot. “Whores mad, though.”
“Why’s that?” John asked as he sat in a straight-backed chair by the big table.
“Did not hang clothes.”
John looked at the girl. “What do you mean? What’d she do with them?” John shot back.
“Just leave basket of wet clothes on porch. Now some are saying they’ll be wearing dirty unders tonight. That make Miss Yvette angry and it ain’t their fault.”
“Where’d she leave the basket?”
“Just out there by the door. Left the basket and walked off. But I take care. I take care.”
“How?”
“I find the basket out there and I hang clothes. Girls will have clean unders.”
“Well, that’s good. Thanks for that,” he said, but his voice was drifting off with some indescribable concern for the girl with the mangled hand.
“I’m wondering where she went. You have any idea?”
“No, I don’t.”
John stood up and went out on the porch. The clothes hung in the shade under the eav
es. They had missed the direct sun on this side of the building and the evening sun was slanting around the corner. He touched the sleeve of a cotton nightshirt. The fabric was still damp. He stood on the porch fingering the material and looking out toward the alley. There was music seeping out from under the doors of the parlors along the creek and he could hear the footfall of two men wandering up the boardwalk with tentative steps. The blue sky was darkening to a purple bruise and the fat crows stood sentinel on the wires overhead.
His eyes followed the clothes down the line and then to the edge of the steps. Then he turned and walked back upstairs to her room and lifted Ellie’s suitcase out from under the bed to see that it was still there. He looked in the drawer of the bedside table and found the revolver he knew would be there. That she had a gun didn’t bother him. He felt it in her waistband that first night he carried her up the stairs with Yvette. He had put it in the drawer. It was a good thing for a crippled-up whore to have a gun but it was not wise to tell Yvette about its existence.
He went back to the porch and sat down on the steps. He looked in the dirt near the path. There were footprints scrambled in the mud and gravel. Two men, and between them the dragging heels of a woman.
Thirty feet down the path he found her shoe, and twenty feet past that he found the button from a man’s coat, the thread still holding in its holes. The tracks were scattered and then confused. There was a bit of blood on the handrail of the boardwalk, and John was hoping that Ellie had bitten someone and made a getaway. Then he saw a hank of bleached blonde hair caught in a splinter of the decking and a larger stain of blood. He stopped and looked around. He put her shoe in his pocket. The crows were hopping down the boardwalk as if they were following him to food. This was probably a good sign, for if there were a fresh body dumped somewhere, the crows would not be waiting around for him.