by John Straley
The world refused to stop for Slippery Wilson, and that’s all he had ever asked of it. There was a cabin near a river and a beautiful woman who loved him. These things had been anchored, unchanging in his heart, for as long as he could remember. As an adult he thought he had been moving toward them, but of course he hadn’t.
“Maybe I just need a nap,” he said aloud as the chill crept through his clothes, and he closed his eyes.
“Whatcha sleeping for?” Annabelle asked. She was leaning over him, with her frazzled braids hanging toward his face and her glasses on the tip of her nose.
“I got some ice cream,” she said. “Want some?”
He kept his eyes shut, not knowing how much more curious his life could become. Then he looked over at the leather shoes and long skirt standing next to the girl, and his eyes moved up to the battered but still beautiful face of the woman, who was holding a folded cone of butcher paper with what looked like vanilla ice cream melting down the sides.
“No time for napping, pal. We got to make the tide,” Ellie said.
Slip said nothing. He didn’t move. As the tide rose it came closer and closer to his shoes. In another hour the Pacific Ocean would cover him completely.
“Where in the hell did you get ice cream?” he finally asked.
“I guess fishermen like to make their own ice cream when they come into port,” Ellie said. “I got some ice for my bruises and this old boy gave me some. Good-hearted guy.”
The little girl blinked at him, licking the sweet white cream off her fingers. Ellie reached down and put her own sweet finger to his lips.
“You know what I just figured out,” she said.
“No,” Slip murmured.
“The nice thing about being alive is that it can always get better. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Slowly Slip stood up, and the three of them together pulled the dory down the beach as the shadow of the ridgeline crept up from the sea and dipped down into darkness.
TWENTY-TWO
A demagogue, like a broken watch, can always hope to be right at least twice a day. But a revolutionary wants to smash the watch altogether, which, no matter how often it’s done, never succeeds in stopping time.
Ellie Hobbes had been both right and wrong about the trade unions. They sapped the strength out of the class struggle but they went on to improve the lives of most of their members. It took more than a year, but the newly established National Labor Relations Board finally turned the scabs out of the mine and reinstated the union boys at a better wage. Of course to this day, men keep dying in the mines; but at least management keeps raising their wages.
But this was the summer of 1935. That summer like all the summers before was atomizing into the past. It was the middle of August and already the emerald days were giving way to fall. The fireweed blossoms were turning to seed and pink salmon were churning up the rivers to spawn. George Hanson sat on the stone corner post set back in the woods. It had taken him five and a half weeks to trace them to this spot, about a mile and a half from where the new settlement of Cold Storage, Alaska, was being built. George had scrambled over fallen trees across a steep hill to get to their building site. There were skinned logs sitting under a shed roof and three stone slabs on a scoured-out patch of forest floor. Two drawknives were wrapped in cloth on top of a makeshift table. Three sharp axes leaned against a stump near the fire pit, a few feet from a snugly pitched canvas tent. It was a tidy enterprise.
George had stayed in Juneau, just long enough to make sure the kid at the bar didn’t take any heat for killing the Floodwater boss. That had been easy enough to do. The town fathers were ready to have everybody get back to work and forget the ugliness of all that had been done to break the strike. That summer, ore trucks rumbled, the stamp mill howled, Juneau’s air filled up with dust, and money jingled in pockets all over town.
George had sent his resignation by telegraph to Seattle and there was not much fuss in accepting it. Floodwater had made enough of a mess that their political muscle was not eager to flex. But neither was George’s captain looking forward to seeing a report from Alaska that included dead operatives and young boys with shotguns. Better let it all stay in the far north.
The seas were calm back in the inlet where Cold Storage was being built. Five miles to the northwest the inlet opened into the North Pacific. Fat swells broke on black rocks and gulls busied the air. Just off the cabin site the water was smooth and a few cormorants paddled the current down the beach. Just beyond, a dory pulled into view around the rocky point from town.
George sat and watched as the girl hopped out to pull the painter line up the beach. Slippery Wilson steadied the boat with the oars and Ellie Hobbes stepped off the bow with an armload of groceries. Her hair was cut short now and almost all of it was her natural color of black.
Slip was the first to see George and he nodded to Ellie, who blanched and took two quick steps back toward the boat. Slip sat with the oars still in the water.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” George said, and the two adults stared at him, eyes wide like two deer having come across a hunter.
Annabelle cantered up to him, her braids flying. “Want to see where I’m going to sleep?” she called out.
“Of course,” the policeman said, and he took her hand for the grand tour of the imagined house emerging from the forest floor.
“What are we going to do?” Slip asked Ellie softly.
“We got enough food. We ask him for supper,” Ellie said. She went to the toolshed to set down the groceries.
George looked over everything around the building site. Slip and he walked back in the woods to the stand of straight old trees. They walked along the stream near the house and talked about their water supply and the materials they were going to need. George asked questions about costs, and tools, and how to hang trusses with only a few people to help, and Slip answered slowly and carefully, always afraid about what the next question might be.
Ellie was threading venison on sticks and poking up the fire. Onions were frying in the pan and a coffeepot was burping its contents into the coals, as George and Slip walked back down to the beach fringe where the cabin would sit. Annabelle, having showed him where her area would be in the loft with a window to the north, had gone back to the log pile where she sat reading a book about canaries.
“So,” Ellie said, handing him a cup of coffee, “you come to arrest us?”
“I don’t know,” George said, blowing over the top of the mug. “I’m not really a cop anymore. But there are a couple of things I’m curious about.”
“All right,” Ellie said, “shoot.” She squatted on a log round and hung the meat over the fire.
“Ben Avery killed the union man, David Kept. You told me that back in the bar. Kept was not going along with Floodwater and he was going to blow the whistle on all the informants in the union.”
“Yes,” Ellie said.
“Why did you agree to get rid of the body?” George sat across the fire from her.
“I needed the informant list. Avery owned me as long as he had the list. I agreed to dump the body and give everything to Delaney while Ben took off and established an alibi.”
“Do you still have the list?” George asked.
Slip bent down into his tool kit and took out his tobacco tin. The paper was damp and creased from being folded up so small but George could still make out the names.
“Then who killed Ben Avery? You, Mr. Wilson?” George sipped his coffee.
“I swear to God I didn’t mean to,” Slip said, with more sadness than defiance. “He had a knife. I had his gun. We wrestled a bit and it went off.”
Slip stood up, his hands shaking at his sides. “I swear to God that’s what happened.”
“It’s true,” Ellie said.
George looked at them both, one to the other. “I know it’s true,” he said finally. “The way the path of the bullet lined up in his body matches your story. The muzzle blast on the
clothes and the point of entry—all of it …” His voice faded away, and he stared into the fire for a moment.
“And the three men in Ketchikan?”
“I’m sorry but I’m still not talking about Ketchikan,” Ellie said. “If you want to hang somebody for it you can hang me.”
“I just thought I’d ask, you know, because I’m curious, is all.”
“Well …” she said, “you asked.”
“You see … there’s a Negro at a cathouse in Ketchikan who seems a little nervous about it, is all. I just thought I’d ask you if he has any reason to be.”
Meat sizzled above the fire and scented smoke swirled around their legs. A river otter scrambled over a stump on the edge of camp then stopped a moment to look at them.
“Nobody I know has any reason to be nervous,” Ellie said. “If you have to make an arrest you can do it now.” And she held out her wrists as if to be cuffed up.
“Naw,” George said, and waved her off. “I guess I can send along that message to John down in Ketchikan.” And the otter slipped into the inlet.
“If you aren’t a policeman anymore, what are you?” Annabelle poked her head up over the log pile and pushed her glasses up her nose to squint at him.
“Well …” George let out a sigh, “I was going to live in Sitka. But, you know, I’ve got a sister there.” The four of them looked at each other as a soft wind teased the trees around them. “You know … you don’t choose family, really.”
“What about Seattle, don’t you have a house there and everything?” Annabelle called out without taking her eyes off her book.
“I guess I don’t want to go back there, miss,” George offered.
“So?” Slippery asked. “What are you going to do?”
“I was thinking about staying here for a bit. Brand-new town. Plenty of fish. No bosses stealing their cut from your catch.”
The girl slid up her glasses one more time, nodded, and turned the page of her picture book with the colorful birds sitting on their pure white pages.
“When do we eat?” she called out.
It was the summer of 1935. In Germany, Hitler had abrogated the Treaty of Versailles and the Third Reich had instituted the Nuremberg Race Laws forbidding Jews their humanity. Soon enough Will Rogers and Wiley Post would die in a plane crash near Point Barrow and Amelia Earhart would disappear into the Pacific. Soon enough German tanks would roll into Poland, the Japanese would bomb Pearl Harbor, Mr. Roosevelt’s social programs would be subsumed into the vast engine of the war machine, and the rhetoric of the American class struggle would likewise be subsumed into the nation’s comfortable memory of what we still call “life before the war.”
But none of that would matter to the four of them as they sat eating fresh venison from charred sticks. Time and history would roll across them in waves, pushing them forward then dragging them back. Soon enough, George Hanson would partner up with Johnny Desmond to run their own tug carrying supplies from Cold Storage to Sitka, where George would spend one pleasant evening at a time with his sister before catching the morning tide home. Soon enough Johnny Desmond’s wife would leave her relations down in Tacoma and move into a place in town where their kids would play with Annabelle after school.
Soon enough Slippery Wilson would be landing on the beach in Normandy, scared once again and shivering, but with the cabin by the creek securely anchored in his heart.
Soon enough Ellie Hobbes would learn to fly. She would build the first and most profitable bar in Cold Storage. She would save her earnings until she had enough to buy a reconditioned de Havilland Beaver and she would fly her family up to the high lakes above the inlet to go fishing, including her two girls and a boy she raised with Slip.
Soon enough Annabelle would grow up to become one of Alaska’s first female owners of a flying service, and she would fall in love with a kind man who fished a cedar-plank troller that he anchored off the beach near their cabin down the inlet from Slip and Ellie’s.
And soon enough Annabelle’s children would gather up in the woods beyond the old house to tell the stories and tend the graves of the people their mother had loved and traveled with that turbulent spring when she first came to Alaska and lost her yellow bird.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Straley is the author of six novels featuring the Alaskan private investigator Cecil Younger. The first book in that series, The Woman Who Married a Bear, won the 1992 Shamus award for best first novel. Straley is a criminal investigator, a poet, and is currently the twelfth Writer Laureate of Alaska. His work has been featured on Fresh Air with Terry Gross and CBS Sunday Morning. He lives on the beach in Sitka, Alaska, with his wife, Jan, and their son, Finn.
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CHAPTER ONE
ANNABELLE HAD PUT the tea kettle on just moments ago. Now it was whistling, yet she didn’t get up to attend to it. Recently the past had become a hallucination constantly intruding into the present moment, so she wasn’t certain what really needed doing.
She had been thinking about Franklin Roosevelt: the grinning man with the cigarette holder who was never photographed in his frailty. But now it was early spring in the last year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, and all the news was about the president’s failings. Flawed men kept ruling the world, and the radio in the corner with the long antennae squealed on and on about it. Not that the news mattered much to Annabelle now. It was raining hard, and all of the events of her life—past, present, and possibly future—were taking on the quality of a slightly malevolent screwball comedy.
She sat in her chair looking out the window. She had been distracted by so many things lately: presidents, family members, and lost animals all swirling around her. The glass on the door rattled, and she looked up expecting to see her uncle, Slippery Wilson, walk in slapping his wet leather gloves against his pants, even though Slippery Wilson had been dead for more than three decades. She found herself listening for crying from the crib, even though both her boys were grown men. The younger one, Miles, was down at the senior center cooking dinner, and Clive was getting out of prison.
“Never matter,” Annabelle said aloud to herself. She got up and turned off the radio in the corner.
Throughout the afternoon, she had been trying to remember the joke she had heard the day before. It was good, she remembered, and she thought that it would have been good to tell Miles. But the joke eluded her in its detail.
Out her window, the hillside fell away to the inlet. Alder trees grew quickly on the disturbed ground where the boys had built her house. A gust of wind came, and she thought she saw some darting color. A flash of yellow, she couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like a match head exploding. Yellow with red sparks flaring in the trees. She slid her glasses up her nose and was almost certain that she saw the bird fluttering up and away.
“Buddy?” she said aloud, as the kettle boiled over and doused the flame.
ON THAT SAME day in April 2000, Clive McCahon, Annabelle’s oldest son, was released from prison. He was thinking about his plan to get home.
He had hated living in Alaska as a kid. His father had assumed he would become a fisherman. His mother had assumed that no matter how he made his living, it would be made right there in Cold Storage. Only his grandma Ellie had told him not to listen and to dream his own dreams. Having grown up on an island on the North Pacific, Clive had longed for the great American highway. He dreamed of cars and deserts and long, straight roads. Ellie had always given him books about cars for every birthday and Christmas. Cars and guitars, he dreamed of, bands he heard on the radio and beautiful girls who didn’t know everything about him. Ellie had understood his itch to move on. Only she seemed to understand that living in Cold Storage, Alaska, was like being born into a small maze where everyone constantly bumped into one another. As soon as his father died in the Thanksgiving Day storm, Clive had left. He had flown north to Haines, bought a car without ever owning a license, without ever learning to drive, and took of
f. He was fifteen. Ellie’s ashes had been scattered at sea and his father’s body had never been found, so he didn’t consider that he had anything holding him to his cloistered island town.
Clive was thirty-five now. It was early April, and the clouds were clearing away after a morning rain. The air was so clean it almost burned his lungs. Clive had served seven out of his ten-year sentence in McNeil Island Penitentiary, and he was wearing his old court clothes: a dark blue suit his mother had bought him on one of his few visits home as an adult, now far too tight in his shoulders and upper arms. Feeling the sun cut through the trees, he set his cardboard box on the ground, slipped off the coat, folded it neatly, and placed it on top of the box. He had called ahead to order a cab.
There were only a few people getting off the prison boat, mostly staff members carrying lunch boxes and rain gear. There was one other inmate, a skinny white kid with red hair who walked down the dock to meet an old man waiting beside a sputtering Ford LTD. The convict approached, the man opened the passenger side door, and a woman in a blue house dress got out and threw her arms around the boy before he could put down his gear. She cried and snuffled into his neck, while the old man rubbed the back of his shoulders.
Clive shifted from one foot to another, waiting for his ride. A yellow minivan finally rolled up.
“You Stilton Cheesewright?”
Clive was still watching the kid being greeted by the old couple. He wondered if he had seen the kid inside but didn’t recognize him. He hadn’t recognized the false name the cabbie was saying, either.
“You’re Stilton Cheesewright, yeah?” the driver said again. He reached behind and opened the back door of the van.