The Big Both Ways

by John Straley

  The creek made a musical tumble over the rocks and up on the hill behind the creek the tops of the trees swayed gently in a light breeze. John turned his head around and slacked his jaw. His ears were ringing from the exertion, but still, under the music from the whorehouses and the wind through the trees, he could hear it: the soft percussive chopping of shovels striking rocky ground.

  “I told you we should have just dumped her in the river,” Ray said, as he leaned into his short-handled shovel. “This ground is too damn rocky. We’ll never get her deep enough.”

  “Goddamnit, we are not supposed to kill her,” Bill Pierce said. He was sick to his stomach. “I mean, what the hell are you thinking, Ray?”

  The short man with the barrel chest leaned on the shovel. “Don’t worry, boys. I’ll kill her then stick her in the ground, then we go catch the The Swan up to Juneau. It leaves in an hour and a half. Hell, boys, we’ll have time enough to get a beer and maybe a bath before she sails.”

  “Is it solid, Ray?” Conner asked, his voice trembling with fear. “I mean, they know we’re coming?”

  “Hell, yes, he’ll be there, but he damn sure won’t wait all night. So, let’s get back to diggin’, boys.” Ray threw the shovel over to McCauley Conner, who was sitting on a rock with his head in his hands.

  “Fuck it, Bill. I ain’t doing it,” Pierce said.

  Just off to his left John could see the trussed-up body of the little injured whore. She was breathing hard and snot ran down her face and dripped down onto the gag stuffed in her mouth.

  “Crap, Bill, seems like I’m doing all the work in this outfit,” Ray brayed at the others.

  “Quit your bellyaching, Ray. Either way, killing her is not the right move. If we shoot her and then dig a hole, no telling who will hear the shot and come running. You dump her in the creek, especially now at low tide, she’ll be found in ten minutes and the cops’ll be all over this place.”

  “They’ll just think she’s a whore. They won’t do nothing,” Ray said. He rolled a rock out of the hole they were making on the steep-sided hill.

  “Now see, that’s where you’re wrong again, Ray.” Bill Pierce stared down at him from above. “I happen to know that these local cops are softhearted when it comes to their whores. They don’t so much mind when one of their customers gets killed, unless it’s a judge or something. But it’s plumb bad for business when a whore gets killed. It’s just another good reason not to kill her.”

  “Well, she ain’t a whore anyway,” Ray muttered from the bottom of the hole.

  “You’re as dumb as a stump, Ray,” Bill said.

  “Well, I’m not dumb enough to let you be the boss of me.” Ray threw down the shovel and stepped out of the hole. “I’m going to get a beer. You deal with it.” And he stepped over the white heap lying next to the narrow hole he was digging.

  “Now hold on, don’t sulk off like an old cow,” Conner called after him.

  The footing was steep and uncertain. The slope above the creek in Ketchikan may have been the poorest place on earth to bury a corpse. Besides being uneven and hard, the thin layer of moss and dirt supported a thick bramble of berry bushes and stems of broad-leafed devil’s club with thorns like slivers of glass. Ray’s hands had dozens of these tiny thorns in them and they were making him grumpy while he dug the grave; the thorns and the fact that he was being treated like Bill Pierce’s own personal slave. He was not going to put up with it much longer, he thought to himself. He might as well just kill the lot of them and head out on his own.

  “Them bastards can do some of the heavy lifting,” he muttered to himself, and he pushed back another thorny stalk. He stumbled a bit, twisting his ankle. “Goddamnit,” he swore. “These pantywaists will wet themselves before they take care of this Red.” Then he looked up and saw the flash of the muzzle from the shot he never heard.

  Bill Pierce tried to run but the steep rocky ground threw him down and he tumbled. The second shot caught him in the neck.

  McCauley Conner jumped in the hole and tried to hide. The third shot burrowed across the scattering of fresh dirt and tore out the side of his head.

  The breeze blew, and the music still drifted up from the street. The sun slanted through the trees from the west and the understory of brambles glowed golden with the smoke from the revolver. John stood over Ellie. Her blue dress was ripped and her head was bleeding but she did not struggle or call out. He bent over her and gently straightened her dress. He set her shoe beside her. When he saw that her underwear was missing, he pumped another shot into McCauley Conner’s head. Someone might hear him. Hell, he was sure that someone had heard the shots. But he didn’t care. He put one more shot into each of them and took the gag out of Ellie’s mouth.

  “Thank you,” was all she could manage to say.

  “Peckerwoods were right about one thing for sure.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s bad for business trying to kill a whore around these parts.”

  “That seems true enough,” Ellie said.

  She stood and took the gun from the big man standing next to him. “I’ll take this. Anyone asks, this is my gun and I did the killing.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Hell you can’t. I’m not saying you have to offer it up. But if it comes to it, I’ll take the blame. You saved me and I’m grateful.” Then she stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the lips. “I’m gonna catch a boat. If a beat-up guy and a little girl come looking for me, tell them to try Juneau. Only them. You understand?”

  “I do.”

  She kissed him again and stumbled down the hill with the gun dangling from her hand like the head of a dead snake.

  EIGHTEEN

  Ellie walked across town to the wharf and climbed the ladder down to the deck of the little troller called The Swan. A sorry-looking man named Larry was standing in the door of the wheelhouse.

  “You’re not Pierce are you?” Larry said, backing up a bit into the shadow of the tiny wheelhouse.

  “Those boys ran into some bad luck. I’m here to take their place.” Ellie’s thin voice echoed under the drippy high ceiling of the wharf.

  “What kind of bad luck?” Larry almost whispered.

  “They got gunned down,” she said.

  Larry didn’t look up as he untied the line. “I heard they were supposed to meet up with a woman and bring her back.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m bringing myself back.” Ellie sat down heavily on the deck hatch. She put the gun in the cradle of her housedress and then she rubbed her good hand against her cheek. “Do you got some warm clothes I can wear?”

  “I ain’t got no girl clothes. Maybe I should wait for the others,” Larry said without looking at Ellie as he walked up to the bow. The little one-lung engine on The Swan was thumping away at idle. Water from a broken pipe dripped down under the wharf. Ellie leaned back and lay on the hatch cover. “No use waiting,” she said. “They’re dead. I’m supposed to go up to Juneau and meet the rest of the them, give ’em my report.”

  “Well … I don’t know. I was supposed to meet up with a guy named Pierce and them other two.”

  Ellie could see that the sorry man didn’t have much conviction about hanging around, so she didn’t have to sell the idea of leaving very hard. “Well, if you like you could wait and see if anybody comes looking for us, then you could explain to them what your orders were.”

  “Naw, that’s fine. I’m running late as it is.” Larry put the little boat in gear and eased away from the wharf.

  Larry had been enlisted by a union man in Juneau to bring these boys and the woman back, and he took the job only after he was paid half the money in advance. Larry didn’t think of himself as a radical. He just didn’t like the cops and the rich swells who treated him like a mule. Larry didn’t care a whit about the plight of the brotherhood of workers. Larry was motivated only by his hatred of people who were better off than he was, and they were many. All of them, it seemed, had come into thei
r good fortune by some advantage of birth. Even when he was enjoying it, Larry railed against privilege.

  “You all right back there?” Larry called out, but Ellie did not answer. When he looked back he saw that the woman with the wrecked left hand was lying on the hatch cover rocking back and forth with her mouth open. At first he didn’t recognize the sound and thought that something might be wrong with The Swan, but when he listened more carefully he could hear the keening sound of the girl’s wild crying coming from the hatch cover. He looked back once more and noticed that she had a handgun gripped firmly in her right hand. Larry closed the door to the wheelhouse, then looked below to make sure his .30-30, as rusted as it was from years on the boat, was still in its place above the galley table.

  They would travel north for a few hours and anchor for the night, but before he would lie down in the fo’c’sle he would make sure his gun was loaded and well within reach.

  The sea swell was large but gentle on the outside. The ship had rolled easily in the long-period swells, so the passengers were able to get their sea legs beneath them when they walked down the narrow corridors. In the dining hall George and the reverend sat on opposite sides of a round table. George was looking through his files and making notes. The reverend stared down into his teacup.

  “What are you working on?” the man of the cloth asked.

  George put his pencil down on the table and watched it roll back and forth with the motion of the boat.

  “Murder,” he said.

  “Ah,” the reverend said as if he had been expecting the answer all along. “I best leave you to it.” He stood up and walked away at a brisk pace.

  Outside the ship an albatross was gliding the surface of the waves with the tips of its wings dipping close to the foam of the ship’s wake. The wake rolled out from the stern of the ship in two waves that cut across all others, then those waves curled out on opposite sides of the ship and once set in motion they would never cross again. Belowdecks, passengers rolled in their bunks with the motion of the ship. Couples clung to each other so as not to fall out of their narrow beds. The oiler from the engine room stood out on the stern of the crew deck and smoked a cigarette. When he was done he flicked the butt into the sea and it winked out in the rush of the waves. George Hanson sat at the table in the dining hall looking at the photograph of the union man with the crushed skull. He sat there for another thirty seconds before he rose and walked away from the table and out onto the open deck.

  The next morning the ship was moored at the small pier at the end of Sitka’s main street. A misty rain fell on all sides as if the ship had moored in the middle of a cloud. From the uppermost deck George could just barely see the Russian Cathedral and the steep mountains that rise behind the town. Tlingit women sat with their backs against the buildings selling craftwork laid out on their blankets. The hems of their dresses were muddy from walking in the bog of the street.

  A boy from town came onboard and brought George an envelope that had been flown over from Ketchikan. The envelope had two separate letters in it. One was from young Walter Tillman and another was from Campbell River, British Columbia. Tillman’s letter said that he would be meeting him in Juneau. The miners at the Alaska-Juneau mine were going on strike and there was going to be trouble. Management was bringing in replacement workers, and every day more radicals were showing up on the docks of Juneau. “I know you’ve had more experience in these areas but it looks to me like your people would end up in Juneau,” the young policeman had written.

  The letter from Campbell River was from the bartender. George smiled as he opened the grimy envelope as if he were reading something from an old friend.

  Dear Det. Hanson,

  I been keeping an eye out for you and I thought I’d let you know what I found. The little dory you was looking for never came into Campbell River but I heard that they got a lift on a fishing boat out of Washington. I learned this from talking to the skipper of one of the mail boats. He came into my place and tied one on when he was heading home. He said that he heard from a pilot that the blonde woman ended up in a cannery up the coast a ways. Then I heard from a friend who worked on airplanes that a woman was flown out of that cannery up to Ketchikan. My friend said that this lady had boogered up her hand pretty good and the cannery fired her. I haven’t heard anything about the man, the girl, or the bird. I’m writing you this because I told you I would. So that’s what I’m doing. I don’t expect no more money, but if you have other things you need looked into I’d be happy to work something out.

  Sincerely, Tom Stanton

  George went to the ship’s purser and bought an envelope and paper and wrote a short note back to Campbell River. He put ten dollars in the envelope, folded the note around it, and gave the letter to the purser, asking that it be hand-delivered to Tom in Campbell River on the Admiral Rodman’s return trip. The purser said he knew the establishment and would make sure Tom received it.

  There was construction going on close to the dock, so along with the ship lowering its cargo onto the wharf, there were workers carrying buckets of concrete and the slap of hammers filled the air.

  George knew his sister lived somewhere in town. Perhaps it was his work, perhaps it was his new-found connection to the ship, but he decided not to go ashore to find her. He had known for a few days now that he didn’t want to see her. All familial connections felt like the outriders of grief. He did not want to retell his sad story. He did not want to hear the undertone of unsought forgiveness that would almost certainly be in his sister’s voice. He did not want to know the details of her plans for him.

  He was in Alaska now. On a ship floating the current. This little town, which was building for the future, could go on and do just that, without him and his sad story. It was not time to go ashore.

  The stevedores whistled up at the winch operator as a black-and-white dairy cow hung in midair on the end of a sling. The animal’s wide eyes seemed to be pleading. Her sides fluttered with panic as her lowing wound down the street like a traffic jam. A kink in the line finally slid through the block and the animal was lowered to the dock, where a man unhooked the sling and led her away. Her small feet made a chunking sound on the timbers.

  George turned and walked back to his cabin to reread his telegrams and enter the information into his own reports.

  From that day on, Slip and Annabelle did not fight the tide. When the wind or the tide was too strong against them they would find a calm bight in the lee and rest. They both learned to fine-tune the technique of milking the tide by following the fair currents as they ebbed and flowed through the passage. At high flood they could ride the current in a broad band down the middle of the channel, and at slack water when the tide was changing they would pull in closer to the shore where the vestiges of the fair current still swirled. They could get almost seven hours of fair current this way when the wind didn’t collude with the moon to stop them dead in the water. They slept on the boat, sometimes drifting through the night with Slip keeping a sleepy eye out for boats and sometimes pulling against the anchor when they could find a place shallow enough for their short anchor line. When they needed water they would row under a waterfall coming down the side of the mountain and funnel the water with the tarp into their keg. When they had the need for privacy they used the tarp and one of the oars as a screen.

  They rowed early in the morning when the wind was calm, and on a few days when the wind was from the south they put up the sail. Annabelle would steer when they sailed and sometimes she rowed at the peak of the current. Slip would rest, often lying in the bottom of the dory as the girl pulled on the long oars.

  They never found Buddy. Eventually Annabelle stopped looking for him. The fate of the yellow bird became a story to which she did not know the ending. All she could do was study the charts and keep the remote possibility of his return alive in her heart.

  The inlets were widening out as they moved toward the open ocean. Islands started to appear in the distance. Boats
rolled past them: fishing boats churning toward the open sea and towboats headed up the Inside Passage. When they saw a new boat, Slip would wave the end of the painter line tied to the bow, hoping they would recognize his need for a tow, but each boat they saw kept right on going.

  They were going to head for the farthest island and wait there for perfect weather to cross Dixon Entrance. The current here was harder to milk. As the inlet widened, the changing current swirled in less predictable ways, and sometimes the distances were too great to change course for the chance of a favorable current. So they pulled on the oars, sometimes together, and made their way toward the island.

  One early morning the water was exceptionally calm as if they were rowing through a blue-green oil, and as they pulled, little silver fish boiled to the surface. When it first happened Slip thought it was some kind of freak wind disturbing the waters around the boat. The water hissed with the roiling of millions of small silvery fish. Slip pulled the dory toward the boiling surface and both he and the girl looked down into the water to watch the kaleidoscopic swirl of fish.

  From the surface it appeared to be a single organism, shifting and darting beneath the boat. The school of small fish flashed silver as they swam in one direction then flattened to green as they all changed direction at once. They moved as with one mind, a single entity made up of thousands of individuals.

  “How many are there?” Annabelle asked.

  “I dunno. Lots of ’em. Maybe a million. I don’t know.”

  “Do they always stay together like that? In a big ball?”

  “I suppose so,” Slip said.

  Then a larger flash of silver torpedoed through the silvery fish and the one organism shattered. A salmon darted into the group and came close enough to the surface that Slip could see the small flash of silver in the salmon’s mouth. The single school became several smaller schools, each turning frantically. More salmon circled in from the deep. It was hard to see the little fish as individual creatures until one of the salmon blasted in and Slip could make out a few individuals that had been stunned by the salmon charging into the mass. The stunned fish became fixed points in the fluid motion of the sea. Then the salmon came in hard and snapped them up in their jaws, setting the whole school churning and roiling again.