by John Straley
She turned for a moment to say something to Annabelle. She wanted her to see the whale. Then she grimaced, realizing that she was alone on The Swan, with the drunken skipper curled up in the bunk below cradling a rusty saddle gun.
The Alaska-Juneau mine dominated the mountain on the east side of Gastineau Channel just south of the town of Juneau. The old Treadwell mine on the other side of the channel had flooded with seawater and collapsed in 1917 and was now abandoned, leaving the Alaska-Juneau as the richest place for gold in the territory. The Klondike gold rush had made a few prospectors rich, but had made the fortunes of many more who were quick enough to sell supplies to the frantic gold hunters. Many of the biggest buildings in Seattle and Portland had been built with money made from selling gear to Alaskan fortune hunters, many of whom limped home broke if they made it home at all. Mining had always been more profitable for the storekeeper than it had been for most of the miners themselves. So when Alaska’s biggest gold mine was standing idle because of a strike, the merchants of the territorial capital were incensed. This was their livelihood the miners were fooling with.
The A-J mine, as it was called, was made up of a honeycomb of tunnels back in the hard rock of the mountain. These mines were riddled with seeps of fresh water and rotten shale. There was some quartz and microscopic amounts of gold. To make any profit at all, hundreds of tons of rock had to be jackhammered and blasted away, carted through the tunnels, rolled down into the stamp mill that was built in stair-step fashion on the side of the mountain, and crushed into dust. When the crushed rock floated away, flecks of gold were left to settle. It took hundreds of men stooping and straining in damp rock crevices to get a pouch full of gold. On May 22, 1935, the miners voted for a raise, a forty-eight hour workweek, some kind of hospitalization plan for the injuries they knew were part of the work, and finally they wanted more than two days off a year. A squall rose up from management. They insisted that this would make the Juneau miners the most coddled miners in the world. Alaska had jobs. More miners would come. They didn’t care if the president of the United States was driving the country toward socialism; they were not going to pay.
The miners had stayed out and blocked any scabs from entering the shafts. By June, a “miners association” had formed with the help of the Juneau city attorney. The men belonging to the Arctic Brotherhood, a fraternal order of middle-class merchants and professionals, stood four-square behind the new miners association, as the scabs were called. The city fathers assured the scabs that they would be allowed to cross the picket line and go to work. Carl Tisher’s son, Amos, was one of these replacement miners. He just wanted to work and he didn’t like the threatening taunts of the strikers who stood defiantly out in front of the Union Hall.
Once Amos had walked by the hall and a miner stepped in front of him, blocking his way. “Where you headed, bub?” the man asked, and he took a tobacco pouch out of his shirt pocket.
“I’m just going for a walk,” Amos had said in a tone that was more defiant than he had intended.
The man sprinkled tobacco in his paper, licked the edge, and rolled his smoke. “You got a match?” he asked Amos.
Amos said, “No.”
Then the man took a section of pipe out of the back of his pants and slashed it across the boy’s head, splitting his ear and laying him out on the boardwalk. Amos lay on the planks of the sidewalk, dimly aware of his blood dripping between the cracks in the planks.
“You better stay the fuck away from the mine, or it will be worse the next time,” the man said. He lit a wooden match with his thumbnail, fired up his smoke, and threw the match on the boy’s head. The dull eyes of the men beside the Union Hall stared at Amos as if he were a rabid dog. They didn’t really care who put him down, just as long as it was taken care of quickly.
Amos limped away. He had made the mistake of writing his mother that night. He sat in his boardinghouse room that he shared with two other men, and scribbled out a few lines in pencil, while the two men sat on the single bed watching him work.
They had taken the single room thinking they would be working shifts and able to avoid each other, but now that none of them was working their quarters were tight. The landlady didn’t mind because she was charging them each the same rent as she would have for the single bed. She could live with tripling her money as long as they didn’t break the bed. If they did, of course, she would charge them for it.
Amos was hoping to get a job and find a girlfriend in Juneau. He hated the life in the Gulf Islands back home. He hated the smell of sheep and cedar chips. He hated the feeling of being bound up on the tiny island. Juneau was landlocked, but there was plenty of activity, cars churning up the hills in summer and the rumble of oar trucks on the plank roads. There were people walking into restaurants wearing tailored clothes and women with strange accents calling down to you from second-story windows. These women had beautiful dark eyes, and when he looked up at them his heart would tighten with the thought of walking up those narrow stairs. Amos didn’t care how many times he got his head cracked, he was going to work in the Alaska-Juneau mine.
It was late evening by the time The Swan made it into Gastineau Channel. The A-J mine was as quiet as the pyramids as the little troller sputtered past. Trucks rumbled up and down the wharf along the front of town. They had passed shacks along the edge of the channel where Tlingit boys were throwing sticks into the water and their mothers stood watching with a pail in one hand and a baby on their hip. The smell of coal dust eased down the channel toward them and the lights from the little wooden buildings seemed as yellow as rotten teeth.
As they pulled in toward the wharf, Ellie could hear men arguing and women laughing back up the side streets. Dogs barked on the hill and someone was breaking bottles on the rocks in the scrubby trees above town. Ellie again cupped her bad hand in her good one. Then she put it gingerly into the pocket of the wool coat she had borrowed from Larry. She checked the revolver in her pocket and pulled a filthy cap down on her head. As the boat got near enough to the dock, Ellie jumped and took the mid-ships line to wrap around a cleat.
“I’m going to go find the boys. They’ll be looking for my report. I’ll tell them you did good, Larry.”
“Not so fast there, little missy.” Larry was holding his .30-30 at his hip and he was pointing it straight at Ellie’s belly. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“What is this? You don’t know who I am, do you? When they find out you’ve been threatening me you’re going to be in a whole new world of hurt.” Ellie stood with her right hand on the cracked wooden grip of the revolver plainly showing above her pocket.
“Yeah, that may be so. But I’m getting paid to deliver you … or at least somebody from Ketchikan, and I ain’t gonna risk not gettin’ paid the rest of my money by having you run off somewhere leaving me with only my word on it.” Larry tried to pull back the hammer on the rusted rifle and Ellie could see he was having trouble.
“Well what you gonna do, parade me up the street at gunpoint?” Ellie leaned forward as if talking to a child.
“Yeah, well … I don’t know. I just know I ain’t letting you go uptown.”
“All right, then. I’ve got an idea. I’ll stay here and you go get the boys.”
Larry mulled this idea over. He wanted to go uptown in the worst way. He had run out of beer a day before and he was about as dry as dirt. He liked the idea, but there was something in the back of his mind that was bothering him. “What do I get as security so you won’t run off?” Larry asked.
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you my gun. I don’t go anywhere without it. I’ll wait to get it back. Look …” And she pulled out the revolver, showing Larry how the cylinder spun and the hammer actually pulled back. “You can even use it to shoot me if you want. Hell, it’s a damn sight better than that rusted-up fowling piece of yours.”
Larry smiled. He knew he could trade the rifle for whiskey uptown and keep the new pistol for himself. He’d get himself a drink a
nd Ellie would have to watch the boat.
“It’s a deal,” Larry said, walking slowly off the boat still holding the rifle in front of him. Ellie took out the revolver and turned its handle out to Larry. He smirked, and tucked the pistol in his pants. Then with some effort, he cranked the three cartridges out of the saddle gun and dropped the empty rifle onto the deck of the boat.
“You stay with the boat now. I got your gun, and I’m gonna kill you if you wander off.”
“I understand, Larry. I’ll be right here,” Ellie said. She looked over her shoulder at a steamship slowly churning up the channel toward the wharf just ahead of The Swan. A few crows darted out of the shadows and sliced the air under the wharf. One of them was holding a mussel in its beak.
“Yeah, you better be here. I’m gonna get the boys up at the Union Hall right now.”
“All right,” Ellie said. And she stepped back onto the boat, waving as Larry labored up the ramp of the rickety floating dock.
Once the drunkard was out of sight, Ellie hopped off the boat, walked up the ramp, and headed away from the clatter of the barrooms. She smiled to herself as she walked down the boardwalk, thinking of how much the cops would believe the sorry man’s story when they found the gun that had killed three men in Ketchikan and two in Seattle tucked away in Larry’s pants.
George Hanson had been gloomy during the trip from Sitka to Juneau, and the sight of Juneau on that early evening did nothing to raise his spirits. The big empty mine on the hillside seemed to suck the sound out of the air. A motionless layer of smoke hung just above the rigging of the ship, and this gray cloud had thin appendages reaching down into the blackened chimney pipes of town, so that there appeared to be a giant spider walking along the rooftops. Sunlight did not seem to brighten a town like this; it only highlighted the shadows.
There was the usual commotion when the Admiral Rodman tied up at the wharf. After some jockeying around with the tugboats getting her turned around and into her place, the crew threw the lanyards to the dock boys and they pulled the heavy hawsers to secure the ship to the dock. There were men yelling back and forth, teasing and laughing. There were several families waiting for the ship to dock and a group of men in dark suits holding on to manifests waiting to check off some important cargo. A white bull terrier walked through the small crowd gathered on the dock. The local people seemed to defer to the fat dog as if it were an important personage. It wasn’t until much later George learned that the old dog was, in fact, a revered member of the community who was rumored to have the uncanny ability to predict, and be at the dock to greet, unexpected ships.
George scanned all the faces at the dock wondering if the dog was to be the only one to great him. But soon enough he found the grim young face of Walter Tillman cutting through the crowd.
“I flew up here yesterday. My captain said I was to bring you this report myself,” Walter called out, as George walked down the gangway.
“It’s good to see you, Walter,” George said, reaching out his hand to the young police officer.
“Yes sir, I wanted to tell you about the murders we had down in Ketchikan. I think they relate to your case and to the people you are looking for. On June third we got a report …”
“Let’s take care of my bags first,” George interrupted. “Then let’s go someplace private where I can give you my full attention.” George handed Walter his briefcase and they walked over to where the crewmen were starting to unload the first sling of passenger baggage. “It’s best that people don’t know our business here, don’t you think?”
“Oh, yes.” Walter stood with the detective’s satchel clutched to his chest. George could tell that the young man had been ready to give his full report and to not do so had created a kind of vacuum in his brain.
George gathered up his one leather case, gave the crewman a dime, slapped Walter on the back, and started to walk uptown.
Later, after he had shown the Seattle detective to his boardinghouse, Walter cleared his throat and started in on his report. “On June third the department got a call concerning some loud noises down on the creek. No one from the department responded, but the next morning one of our officers was speaking to a woman who runs a sporting house on the creek. She reported that one of her employees, named Ellie, had disappeared without telling a soul.”
“Did this woman have an injured hand?” George Hanson asked.
“Yes sir, she did.”
They were sitting in the empty parlor of the boardinghouse built against the hill. It was a clean house with rooms sharing a bath. It seemed to George that every flat surface in the room was covered with decorative lacework. The room smelled of coal dust, and all of the doilies seemed to have a light film of soot over them, so that if he traced the tip of his finger along the lace it would leave a faint line.
“The woman apparently had lost some fingers in a cannery accident and this … uh … proprietress of the establishment … was helping her back to health. A local doctor had treated the badly wounded hand.”
“This girl, Ellie, was she a longtime whore there in Ketchikan?” George asked, as he fingered one of several white satin roses set in a china vase.
“No sir, she had come there quite recently, just a matter of days I think. I don’t know if she had been actually working as a whore. I didn’t check on that.”
“That’s all right,” George smiled.
“Well, sir, I went down to the creek to look around and I saw that there were eagles feeding back up in the woods and that’s real strange unless someone dumps a carcass or something. So I went up and found them.”
“Them?” George put the rose down and stared at him.
“I found three men shot to death. Two slugs in each of them. Two men shot in the body and one shot in the head. The man shot in the head was in a small trench that someone had dug out on the hillside.”
“What else?”
“There were some women who worked along the creek who said they knew the three men. They had arrived together and they said they were from Seattle on their way to Juneau. One of the girls got a name that she believed was a real name, because you know, many of the men don’t give correct names. She said his name was Ray and that this Ray was not very … how did she put it … he was not very genteel.”
“What’s that mean to a Ketchikan whore?”
“She said he used rough language with her and was violent during the performance of her duties.”
“He beat her?”
“In a way that made her think he was enjoying himself.”
“Ah.” George leaned back and looked out the window of the boardinghouse. Trucks rumbled down the wooden streets downtown while up in the woods there were songbirds trilling.
“This woman, Ellie, was she blonde?”
“Her hair had been dyed blonde some time ago, according to the women she worked with.”
“Anything else?”
“One of the girls at the house where Ellie stayed said that she was polite and sober. They said that she had encouraged them to start their own sporting house.”
“Start their own?”
“Yes, one of them told me that the injured girl had told her that she owned her body and that the madam of the house was exploiting her.”
“Well, bless her heart. How about the other three men, the ones you found dead. Had they tried to bring any of the whores of Ketchikan to the revolution?”
“No, sir, it appeared that they were pretty much all business.” Walter Tillman was blushing as he reached into his own satchel and took out some grimy-looking photographs. George glanced down at the top one where McCauley Conner stared up into the lens with half of his skull blown out into the dirt. The flashbulb’s glare put a glaze on his face. His mouth was open in a misshapen oval that appeared to be frozen in place.
“All business,” George muttered.
He flipped through the pictures. George knew that photos somehow captured the essence of a murder more than any story could: the lit
tle man splayed out on the stones, head cocked awkwardly and his soap-white limbs pinwheeling from his body, his mouth stuffed with darkness. Policemen caught in the glare, walking around the body as if they were burglars. Then the photos of two other men with their faces pulled apart and their bodies so askew that it looked as if they had been dressed in someone else’s clothes: their bellies peeking out from their shirts, their ties flopped up into their eyes. Most people died in one bright flash of chaos. Murder wasn’t a story, George thought, it was that moment when a story ended. This moment of ending was where a homicide detective lived.
George pushed the photographs aside. The landlady had put out a plate of sandwiches. There was a pitcher of buttermilk in the icebox, she said. George offered Walter a sandwich and they sat without speaking for a few moments. Somewhere up the hill George could hear water running in a creek. A boat horn blasted in the harbor. The photographs of the bodies sat between the two men.
“Anything else?” George asked the young policeman.
“Your office in Seattle wants you to contact them. It sounds like there are revenge killings going on.”
“Who is dead?” George looked around for a glass to put some buttermilk in.
“A man named Francis Miller was killed in the steam baths. He was a Floodwater operative.”
George let his hand dangle in the air above a dust-coated glass. “Yes …” he said, “I knew him. He was called Fatty.”
“I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t know he was a friend of yours. He’s dead, sir. Shot in the head three times.”