by John Straley
“Did they break up the family?”
“He was ordered to stay away from them during the criminal investigation and the legal proceedings, then he was ordered by the judge to go get alcohol counseling.”
“Did he live with his girlfriend during that time?”
“I don’t know. In the reports it just said he was staying with friends. I suppose you’ve seen the court records?”
I nodded, and licked a spot of ketchup off my finger.
“Is there any evidence that he sexually abused his daughter?”
“No. All we have is a confused girl who is devoted to her mom and dad. She was caught in the middle of a war between the two. Not an extraordinary story.”
I thought for a moment and then asked, “What about Walt Robbins?”
“There is nothing in our records about him. That is, other than the fact that his old address was listed, by the mother, Emma Victor, as a possible home for placement of her two kids. Although he wasn’t married at the time, his house was considered a safe house.”
“What about De De?”
“De De was his, from a marriage that had broken up years earlier.”
“What happened to his wife?”
“I heard she died.”
“You know how she died?”
“Cecil, give it up. Louis Victor is dead. They have a killer in jail. They aren’t going to let Hawkes out of jail and open up an investigation into the possible motives of Walt Robbins. You know they aren’t.”
“Nobody arrested the person who killed De De Robbins. The person who killed her didn’t want Hawkes to get off.”
“You think Robbins waited for years to get Louis? That he then killed his own daughter because she was going to blow his alibi? Doesn’t it matter that Alvin Hawkes, insane as he seems to be, virtually admits he killed Louis?”
“He also says that there are voices being transmitted from the center of the earth. And if Hawkes is the mastermind behind this, who shot Toddy? Who is trying to kill me?”
The plates were cleared away, and now I had nothing to dabble with, but I twisted a napkin into a tight knot.
“Maybe it’s unrelated. Any number of the wacky friends you end up drinking with are capable of taking a shot at you. These events are more likely random than not. Face it, Cecil, you don’t have a theory.”
“I don’t know. Maybe Lance and Norma …”
“The kids? Weak, Cecil. Did they shoot Toddy, too?”
“I dunno….” The napkin was a knotted coil between my fingers.
“The kids are here in Stellar. And they have been for about two weeks.”
“Both of them?”
“Both Lance and Norma. On the night that Toddy was shot, they were here. Nowhere near Sitka.”
I set the white greasy snake of the napkin down carefully, almost formally, on the fat-streaked table. On the TV a montage of images from the news was flashing across the screen in time to thumping synthesized music. A general with arms upraised, a soldier and a dark-skinned baby. The crowd had thinned out in the restaurant but there was still plenty of noise.
A man walked by outside with five sled dogs tethered together. I could see they were all yipping and pulling in different directions. The man, in snow boots and traditional parka, was straining against them and moving his mouth but I couldn’t hear the dogs or his voice.
“I want to talk to them. I want to talk to the kids.”
“I think Lance and Norma are staying in one of those shipping-box houses down by the river.”
“Can you take me there?” I asked as I stood up and put on my coat.
We walked outside through the arctic entry way filled with men and women talking and dozing off. We came out into the full cacophony of sound: the dogs barking, the man yelling, the snow machines along the highway chattering along like chainsaws on skis. I felt drowsy myself and would rather have stayed in the doorway drinking Canadian whiskey from a plastic bottle.
Hannah watched me hesitate. She had her parka on and a scarf across her face. She touched my arm.
“You’re such a baby when your theories don’t pan out.”
Right then I didn’t care to be in Stellar, talking to a woman who used to love me.
I put my arm around a man in the corner. “Give me a drink, okay?” He did. I offered him a buck but he smiled and wouldn’t take it. I took one long swallow, wiped my mouth, and walked toward Hannah’s truck.
ELEVEN
HANNAH DROPPED ME down by the slough, pointed her finger toward a stack of empty cargo containers, and drove away, the thin crust of snow squeaking slightly under her tires.
I guess it doesn’t bother me that most of the time I live in an imaginative world the size of an overturned teacup. But in the minutes that I walked away from Hannah’s truck down the banks of the lower Kuskokwim, my dream was as broad as the actual horizon. I had the illusion of seeing everything. The mountains were as distant as abstract thought, the river was intimate and real. I took two deep breaths and felt my eyes widen. My feet sank only slightly in the hard sandy soil. I walked upstream.
It was cold by the river. I wasn’t dressed for anything but chatting in a cafe. I shifted from foot to foot, trying not to look conspicuous in my leather coat and thin-soled shoes. Two dogs barked at me from the ends of their chains. Shipping pallets were stacked in piles. I was so out of place, I could have fallen to the tundra from the enormous sky.
My chest felt empty. I was cooling off quickly. A small boy walked by in a parka, blue jeans, and insulated boots. I asked the kid if the Victors were around. He didn’t look up at me, but pointed at the stack of cargo containers and wiggled his boot toe in a chunk of dirt that was free of snow where a fuel can had sat overnight. He pointed again, as if he were telling on somebody.
I walked upstream around two bends of the river that were fortified by pilings. Flat-bottomed fishing skiffs, drift boats with their outboard engines propped up, were hauled up on the hardened mud of the riverbank. The river was slow and brown, tired at the end of the season and speaking softly. The air was cold but still damp with the fall.
I slipped several times making my way over the rough-hewn levee, then I popped down on the other side into what looked like somebody’s camp. There were four freezer vans, the kind hauled by truck and then loaded by rail to be shipped by barge. The mail boat. The bringers of avocados and even snow machine parts. These containers are the fifty-gallon drums of the post-oil boom. They were blocked up on pilings and between them was a pitched shed roof. The whole arrangement made a kind of open-air compound. You could live inside the vans and work out under the roof. There was a wood fire in an upright steel drum sitting at the back edge of the roof line. Dried fish hung in strings, their bodies split open and dangling loosely like strange tropical leaves. There was a radio playing from somewhere in the darkness of one of the containers. On the right side of the vans there was a snow machine with the cowling off and parts of the engine spread out on top of a carpet of cardboard. The smell was a faint mixture of oil, disinfectant, dried fish, and sewage.
I saw an old Sunbeam percolator sitting on top of an outboard engine mounted on a rack: plugged in, light on, nothing bubbling in the half-moon glass top. I reached for the mug on top of a footlocker and heard the sickeningly familiar sound of a shell being jacked into a chamber.
“I don’t think I know you.” A woman’s soft voice reached up and buzzed like a bug in my ear.
I turned around. I was too self-conscious to raise my hands in the air, and was feeling too stupid to be either smart-assed or belligerent.
“I’m sorry. My name is Cecil Wayne Younger.”
I spoke into the dark opening of the container. I thought if I gave my whole name it would have more of a ring of truth. I had walked smack into someone’s home without realizing it and now I stood a good chance of being shot. I winced, and tried to look goofy and nonthreatening.
“What kind of name is Cecil Wayne Younger?” At least this was a g
ood question, and the beginning of a discussion.
“It’s Scottish—at least, I think it’s Scottish. Listen, I was wondering, if you are planning to shoot me, do you think we could talk a little first?”
“I’m not going to shoot you, Cecil Wayne Younger. I was just wondering why someone dressed like a Juneau pimp was wandering around helping himself to my coffee.”
She stepped into the light and cranked the shell out of a small-caliber rifle. She was a young woman, with high cheekbones and a narrow nose. She held her thumb down into the magazine to keep the next shell from advancing. She closed the breech, leaned the rifle against the side of the door, and jumped down onto the dirt. She was wearing brown insulated coveralls over a purple hooded sweatshirt. She had short black hair, tied back with a red bandanna. Her voice was rough, almost raspy, but with a child’s cadence, as if she had memorized everything she was saying.
“You are from Juneau, aren’t you?”
“How’d you know?” I asked, afraid of the answer as soon as I had spoken. The most identifiable Juneau pimps worked in the legislature and it hurt me to be confused with them. Especially here on the lower Kuskokwim.
“We’ve lived down there. I think I might have seen you before.”
She looked at me with a steady brown-eyed gaze and as I returned the stare she broke off eye contact and started looking for a cup. She didn’t have the assurance of her grandmother.
As I watched her look for a cup that was right in front of her she brushed away hair that had long ago been cut off. She curled the tips of her fingers up and around her ears, scooping at hair that wasn’t there. She did this three times, and when she saw I was watching she curved her palm around her head to make it seem like she was scratching her neck.
“Your name is Norma, isn’t it?”
She looked back up at me with a sudden start, like a doe caught in the headlights.
“You’re that detective guy….”
The cup fell off the footlocker into a pile of box-end wrenches. I reached down and picked it up. The porcelain was chipped and there was grease on the handle. I squatted by the pile of tools and handed it up to her. She had to walk closer to me to reach it. She didn’t want to. I was left with the cup.
She curled the long hair of her childhood over the stubble above her ears. She looked straight at the ground and not at me or the cup. Smoke passed in front of the opening of her hood, though I’m sure she didn’t notice. The wind blustered in and the fish swung on their strings, knocking the hard-dried flesh together slightly.
“You’re that detective guy Momma talked about. You’re after Gram’s money. She’s a crazy old lady and Mom says you’re going to run up all kinds of bills and charge her a million bucks to open up the old stuff, the old … stories.”
“I guess there are some stories that are older than others. A friend of mine was shot the other day.”
A man spoke from the darkness. “She’s a hard life, isn’t she?”
The new voice was deep but still somewhat nasal. Around the corner came a young man dressed exactly like Norma Victor but with a torque wrench in his hand. His voice and his muscles were tight. He had a rolling sway to his walk. His chin was cocked up, and his head swayed slightly as if he had bad eyesight and was scanning the area to locate me more accurately by smell.
“She’s a hard fucking life for a guy with nothing better to do than dig up garbage.”
“I take it we’re talking about me,” I said, with a happy songbird note in my voice.
The end of the torque wrench appeared a quarter of an inch in front of my nose. It appeared so suddenly I didn’t have time to be startled. I was more fascinated. It was almost like a parlor trick.
“You’re absolutely correct… we’re talking about you.” His voice smoldered like the deepest layers of wet compost. His breath was in my face. The wrench did not waver.
“Well, I just wanted to be clear.”
Startled women with high-powered rifles are something to be wary of, but angry men with torque wrenches—if they can’t be teased into a good mood—are more dangerous, at least in the short term.
He gave me just the slightest bump on the bridge of the nose. Painful, but almost friendly in its restraint. The pain fanned out up my forehead like a bad memory from childhood. His arrogance was so thick he was pleased to be insulted by an underling. I stopped smiling.
The wrench hung in the middle ground between us. His eyes were black and his hair almost scalp-shiny short. He was obviously Norma’s brother, Lance, and he was not smiling either.
“You’re right. I was stupid blundering in here, and I’m sorry. I am. All I want to do is have a short talk about your grandma and why she would want me to look into an old case that no one else wants examined. That’s all I want to do …”
His eyes brightened, and the roll of muscle around the hump of his shoulders relaxed. He came off the balls of his feet.
“And if you hit me again with that wrench, I’m going to try and kick your lungs out.”
He smiled, and reached down for the coffee cup that was still dangling from my finger. He knew a bluff when he heard one. He poured himself some coffee from the Sunbeam. He walked back under the edge of the roofline and looked out over the river and the tundra to the north. He had his back to me, and puffs of vapor came over his shoulder as he spoke.
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Pieces of cut-up pallets burned and popped in the fire at the bottom of the drum. A black bird walked the soft mud flat by the river, and beyond the river the tundra was hiding itself in low rises that shortened the horizon and brought distance closer in.
“You know what I see when I look out there?”
The fire sizzled and I held my tongue. I’m a sucker for stepping on rhetorical questions but this was not the time. He slumped forward a little and shoved the toe of his boot into the top of a motor oil carton that happened to be lying in front of him.
“I see nothing. Nothing to get in my way, and nothing to stop me from doing exactly what the fuck I want to do. That’s what wilderness is for. That’s what brought the pioneers here. I like it. It makes me feel good. You know I could feed you to this river and nobody would give a shit.”
“It’s a great country, isn’t it?”
Norma moved in between us, looking down as if she had misplaced something and was just happening to look for it.
“Lance … come on. We don’t need to … do anything.”
She looked up at her older brother. I could see her eyes; they were pleading. There is scant shelter from violence in this country and it didn’t look like this lean-to would do for her any longer.
“Let him go.”
Fuck it. This was getting like a ping-pong game.
“The trouble is, Norma, I’m not going anywhere, so maybe he is going to have to … do something.”
Thinking back on it, I can’t believe I said this. As much as I worry about getting into confrontations, when I find myself in the middle of one I get a little giddy. Or maybe stupid.
The muscles in Lance’s back bunched; he looked almost as if he had a hump and his eyes were narrowing.
“Calm down, pal. All I want to know is why would your grandma want to hire me after all this time? It’s all wrapped up. Why doesn’t she think so?”
“My grandma is an old, crazy Indian. She doesn’t trust anything that white courts or police do. She …”
“She doesn’t accept his death,” Norma said as she moved behind me and poured herself some coffee. She brushed back her imaginary hair. Her eyes darted between Lance and the ground as she spoke.
“She can’t accept the fact that she bears some responsibility for his death.”
“What’s her responsibility?”
“Alvin Hawkes was … is … some kind of cousin. He’s related to our grandfather’s people in Illinois. Grandma asked Dad to hire Hawkes for the season. His family thought that coming to Alaska would do him some good. She was the one who
brought him out here. She set it up so it could happen.”
Anvils. I looked out at the tundra. Was this whole thing just about the old lady’s guilt? If she hadn’t helped arrange the job for Hawkes, would her son still be alive? If I just showed her that she wasn’t to blame, would that be the whole truth?
The little boy with the parka was rolling a bicycle wheel without a tire in the mud. It left two narrow parallel tracks. He could roll that wheel a thousand miles upriver and the tracks would never meet. But anvils do not fall out of the sky.
“Look, I bet you have a morbid curiosity. You want to see something?” Lance asked.
He walked over to the container door where his sister stood. He reached up into the shadow and brought down a rifle.
Norma winced and turned her back on him. “Lance, don’t!”
“Come on, take a look. This is a 45–70. It’s the one that killed my dad. It took some doing but I got it back from the police. I had to rebuild the stock and some of the parts. The original stock had a scratch mark where a bear almost got him, but it was totally trashed when the troopers brought it up from under the water.”
He held it up like a trophy fish.
“I saw that bastard throw it in the bay. It lay on the bottom for a few weeks but when they brought it up the ballistics matched the fragments of lead that came out of my father’s brain. Now what do you want to know?”
“Why do you keep it?”
“It was his rifle. It reminds me …”
He turned toward the fire and held his hands over the heat and looked out at the water. Norma walked over to him and kneaded the muscles of his neck and shoulders. He bowed his head as soon as she touched him.
“It reminds me of … nothing.”
“We watched him go to shore that night.” Norma spoke into the back of his jacket.
“Hawkes had gone nuts. Papa went in to see what he could do. The weather was bad … blowing forty and the bottom was sandy. During the night we had to reset the anchor because we were dragging near the rocks. We saw lights in the cabin but that was all. We never heard or saw any fight. We didn’t know. … We didn’t know.”