by John Straley
Calvin stood behind me. “We got him over on Admiralty. Brought him back on my uncle’s skiff. Auntie came from Sitka and wants to take some back with her and I was going to give the rest to her family.”
“You going to can him or freeze him?”
“I think we’re going to eat him tonight or the next day. I don’t know. Listen, you’re just going to wash, right? I mean you can’t do anything else in here with him, you understand. Just wash and wash up good and don’t touch anything.”
I heard an old woman’s voice croak behind him. “Calvin, get back in there and bone that deer out. I want to take some to the Home. Mr. Younger, come with me into the other room.”
Calvin stood aside and I saw Mrs. Victor in her wheelchair. Her fists knotted around the rims of her wheels and her jaw jutted up at me. Now my stomach was a dark burrow of sleeping animals again and I turned white at the thought of how bad my case had become.
“One second.”
I washed my face. The bathroom was clean, and there were clean towels, blue and pink, on the rack. The tile was coming off around the tub and the toilet ran continually but there was hot water. I gingerly washed around the fresh scab on my nose and I examined myself for any other damage. I tried to pull myself together. I tucked my shirt in. I was both drunk and hung over at the same time: self-conscious and queasy but still a little spinny. These are the times that one makes the meaningless promises to stop drinking. But I was old enough to know better.
I went into the bedroom. There was a stool and a cot set up in the corner. Mrs. Victor positioned her chair in the middle of the room and rolled around to face me.
“Do I pay you for your hours in the bars?”
“No, ma’am.”
“What have you found?”
I briefly considered telling her how sick I was, thinking that would illustrate the state of the case, but I knew I was being selfish. I sat on the stool and rocked from one cheek to the other. My mind was blank. It was like snorkeling a hundred miles offshore, looking down into the ocean and seeing only the gray-green screen of deep water with the corona of the sun marking a big zero in every direction that I looked. Then a few thoughts swam by.
“Your grandchildren are angry, and Walt Robbins thinks that they know more than they are telling.”
“Yes.”
“Your daughter-in-law is lying to me and I don’t know why.”
She nodded her head, continuing to stare.
“And someone is trying to kill me, but he is not very direct. And that tells me that he is a thoughtful person and not just crazy mean.”
“Is that all?”
I nodded and looked down at the old scabs on my fingers. She took another breath and spoke slowly to me as if English were my second language.
“Do you know about the trouble in my son’s family?”
“Some of it. Do you?”
“Some of it. It had to do with a girlfriend and Louis being too … too … mannish.”
She rolled closer to me, almost touching my knees with hers.
“Walter Robbins called me yesterday and told me you were coming and he told me that you would be drunk. He told me to get you cleaned up to meet him on the city dock. Last night my nephews found you out on the street and brought you here. I flew to Juneau to talk to you. Walt will be here today.”
“I don’t know that much. I’m sorry but it’s a wasted trip. I don’t know what you can talk to me about.”
She lifted a finger as if to begin drawing a picture in the air. Her eyes were focused somewhere behind my head.
“I used to tell all of my children and my grandchildren this story. It was told to me by my father’s people in Yakutat. My uncles told it to me. It is a true story. I know you will not believe it is a true story. White people do not believe these stories. Just try and listen.”
Calvin and the hatless one came into the room and Calvin gave me a cup of coffee and then they both sat down on the floor with their backs to the wall looking up at their auntie.
“A long time ago there was this girl. She had brothers. Her brothers were good hunters and they never were hungry. The girl walked a long way away to pick berries and bring them back to her brothers and they were happy with her. This girl married a brown bear. She met him in the berries and the brothers did not know about him. She would go out and meet him and they would pick berries together. This girl married the bear and just about the time she was becoming a woman she moved away from the village and did not tell everything to the brothers. The brothers were not so happy but the girl would still bring them berries and they would eat.
“She loved the bear and they had two babies that were … I don’t know … kind of half-bear and half-people. These babies could pick berries and hunt and these babies were good fishermen, too. Their uncles never knew about them but they were curious about their uncles. When they got older and older they began to hunt closer to their uncles’ village. One day the uncles saw the bear-human babies. The babies ran and told the girl. The girl told her husband. This girl, she loved her husband so much. The husband said that they had to move their den farther away from the village. This girl—she was so pretty. She cried and cried and said that she did not want to live far away from the village. Her husband said that if she would not leave their den he would go back to his bear wife because it was not safe for him there. He told her he was going to go hunting. He asked her to pack all of their baskets and blankets and he would come back for them later.
“Then the bear went hunting. This bear was big, and a good hunter, too. After this bear went hunting the girl called her babies inside and asked them if they loved their father, this bear. She told them to wait for him to come back from hunting. To wait for him down on the white sandy beach. To wait on the sandy beach and when he came back they were to kill him. They were to eat him and put his skin out on the rocks so the uncles would find him and know the bear was not hunting near the village. The babies listened to their mother, this girl who was so pretty—and when their father came back from hunting they did just like she said. And they ate him and laid his skin out on the rocks for their uncles.”
She placed her hands down to her sides. Calvin took a drink of his coffee and cleared his throat. I kept staring down at my old scabs. She looked at me with sympathy and a little disgust.
“I knew you wouldn’t believe it. No matter what you tell a white person it all goes to the same place. Get yourself something to eat and go to the dock before noon. And, Calvin, get that deer boned out.”
She turned on the radio and I knew from that my audience was over. She turned and looked at me one last time.
“I will see you in Sitka,” she said.
FIFTEEN
THE MOUNTAINS WERE staring down at me like my parents. My head hurt so much I couldn’t tell if I actually saw them or was vividly dreaming in the process of waking up.
I was sitting on the bull rail of the municipal dock in Juneau staring out to the Gastineau Channel with a cup of coffee in a paper cup in one hand and a toasted onion bagel in the other. Miraculously, my duffle bag with my clothes and papers was sitting on the dock. I was dangling my feet about fifty feet above the water, and a raven was staring at me as if he were from the Temperance League. I had no clear memory of the events of last night and of the days before. In the foreground was Mrs. Victor in her chair and the story of the woman who married a bear. I also knew with what felt like an emerging certainty that I was supposed to meet Walt Robbins here. Meet Walt, meet Walt, that was clear. It was not just an appointment but some sort of imperative. I was still struggling with a new form of accounting but I kept running into the exposed blade of my headache.
It was not raining, but the air was thick with moisture. There was a swirl of cloud in the middle of the channel that rested ten feet from the surface. The cloud moved slowly in wisps, floating on the imperceptible waves of heat radiating off the water. It moved in on itself and away; it was translucent, and when the sun broke briefly fr
om the mountains on Douglas Island it rose in a curtain of mist and disappeared into the dense atmosphere of water and light. I thought of a roomful of silken veils, and Hannah dancing as the heat began to rise. There was a curtain beaded with glass crystals and a tropical wind swirling through the room. There was a glass of milk on a long bench and Dizzy Gillespie was lifting his horn to his lips. I watched him close his eyes and pucker way down in his weird distended, bullfrog neck, then I heard the blast of a boat’s signal horn cutting through my dream and I saw Walt Robbins’s troller coming through the mist to tie to the lower floating dock. Walt was in the wheelhouse and was waving to me to come down the ramp and prepare to take in the bow line.
I looked around for someplace to set my bagel. I stared at the raven, gave up any thoughts of guile, and offered it to him. He took half and stepped off the dock into a clumsy, heavy flight, alighting on a lower piling where he ripped into the bagel like a bear into a salmon, chuckling and cackling, apparently to himself.
I balanced my coffee down the ramp and made it to the edge of the dock about the same time the Oso did. The diesel engine was thrumming at low RPMs. About six feet from the edge of the dock, Walt put the drive train into reverse and gently eased the boat in. He came out the side door of the wheelhouse onto the narrow deck and threw the bow line the two feet to me. He gestured toward the forward cleat. He then went directly to the stern, grabbed a line and hopped onto the dock, took a wrap on the cleat, and slowed the boat to a stop as I began to tie the bow line.
“My God, but you look rough, son.”
“Not so bad. When do we have to pull out? Do I have time to make some calls?”
“I guess you can make any calls you want. But we have to get going to make the best tide.”
The Oso was an old-style trailer with a small wheelhouse that was bolted onto the massively built wooden hull. It was bolted on so that if it was swept away in green water the hull would be mostly intact and the small hole could be plugged. The stern was long and swept under to the waterline where she was driven by one propeller. The engine sat amidships right next to the deckhand’s bunk. It was small and dark inside the hull. The oak ribs and the cedar planks were unpainted and deeply stained with the carbon of diesel stoves and years of oil lamps burning at the heads of the bunks. This was a workboat: a floating tractor. Not built for romance, but now romantic in its old age.
“I’ve got what gear you’ll need below: boots and such. I don’t want to rush you, son, but I think we really should be going.”
“Okay. Just one thing.”
I turned and set my cup down on the bull rail and walked up the ramp again. There was a man in a clear plastic raincoat speaking to a woman in German. They were trying to frame a picture of the Oso to include me as I walked up the dock. The closer I came, the further back the man moved until finally he stumbled and nearly fell backward. The woman gestured wildly and said something that sounded like a command to him in German.
I went to the pay phone, called the hospital in Sitka, and asked after Todd. Fluids, infection, fever. If the fever didn’t go down by tomorrow they were going to have to go in again and irrigate the wounds. I hung up.
Then I called Duarte and asked him if he would take Toddy’s fish tank over to the hospital and I asked him to check the house to make sure the windows weren’t leaking around the frames, and to pick up my mail. Duarte was grouchy that I’d waked him up, and he acted at first like I had asked him to dig the Panama Canal, but he lightened up when he figured he would get a shot at my refrigerator. I hung up.
The German man was inexplicably trying to get another shot of me, and his wife now had a tissue in her hand.
I felt okay about asking Duarte to run errands for me. If he said he was going to do something I could count on it. It was the things he didn t mention that I had to worry about.
I made one last call to a friend at the Sitka flight service and asked her to double-check some things. I dug into my pack and looked through the file and found the phone records from Emma Victor’s house on the night Todd was shot. There was no record of a call to my house on that evening.
I turned from the pay phone and bumped squarely into George Doggy’s chest.
“You’re looking rough, Younger.”
“You’re looking very large, Doggy. What the hell are you doing standing on my shoelaces?”
“Younger, I heard that you were around and I thought I just had to see you.”
“I got a boat to catch, Doggy. Listen, I’m staying out of trouble. Unless this is official.”
“Oh no, nothing official. A citizen turned up last week and said you stole some of his money and threw him down the stairs for sport.”
“A misunderstanding.”
“I also heard that this same citizen was supposed to get a wad of cash for shooting you with a large-caliber handgun. And he didn’t collect until someone dropped at least part of it by the hospital.”
“Can you beat that? I’ve got to go.”
“Listen, Younger, I’m sorry about getting on you like I did at the hospital. I… hell, I’m not going to try and be nice to you, it’s just I’ve got something you should see.”
He handed me some papers and I recognized forms from the Sitka Police Department.
“It’s the police reports on the gun theft. Do you want to guess who the witness was?”
I shook my head.
“Giving phoney names can backfire, if someone sees you or you need to backtrack on your story. The Sitka witness used her real name because she was afraid someone in town would recognize her. It was Emma Victor.”
I looked down at my shoes. Again, I was trying to think of some dazzling quip to let Doggy know that I fully understood the implications and was on top of everything.
“Wow. Whaddaya think?”
“I don’t know, for certain. But Emma Victor isn’t at her home, and neither is her plane. I know that you and Robbins have something cooking and you’re going out to the cabin in Prophet Cove. I thought I’d warn you that it’s possible you’re going to have company.”
“Do you know what Walt and I have cooking?”
“No. But I want you to tell me.”
I grabbed Doggy by the shoulders and swung him around toward the water. I put my right arm around him and yelled over to the German couple, “Picture. Picture.” The man immediately lifted his camera to his face and snapped one. Then he waved a clumsy wave of appreciation and said, “Very good photo—very handsome” as I turned and walked down the ramp.
“Be careful, Younger. I’m retired. I don’t need any more business. Particularly if you wash up on some beach somewhere.”
I waved over my shoulder. “Very good photo—very handsome.” I didn’t look back to watch him go.
Walt had the bow line untied and was standing at the stern holding the line looped around the cleat. I had a sense that it wasn’t only the tide that rushed him. He was staring inward and down at the water. His jaw moved slightly as if he were grinding his teeth. He was untying an emotional knot that had been cinched tight years ago. He was working, working it, his mind and his hands rubbed raw by the effort.
As I walked down the ramp he gestured for me to hold the stern line and he made ready to go to the wheel. Walt was a man comfortable in motion, and knots, hard implacable knots, irritated him like a drop of gasoline in the eye. I waited until he was at the wheel and put my weight against the hull. I pushed away from the dock and stepped high up onto the gunnel. She was perhaps fifteen tons of dead weight but she floated free of the dock like an airborne seed. I looked to the wheelhouse. Walt was scanning the channel, and although he was tapping his foot he didn’t appear to be grinding his teeth.
It was going to be a ten-hour run to the hunting cabin near Prophet Cove. The clouds were low and the water would be smooth, at least until we rounded the point and turned to the west. If I was going to get any rest, the smooth water was the time to get it. Walt gave me earplugs and headphone ear protectors and st
ill the sound of the engine near the crew bunk vibrated my blood vessels. I wadded my coat under my head and pulled a sleeping bag over my legs and closed my eyes.
These morning naps can bring vivid dreams, but on that morning the motion of the boat and the constant grinding of the engine slipped me into a blurred atmosphere. I floated on the thin surface, and below there was a dark world of tiny-eyed crustaceans. I only had a vague sense of the blooms of the algae and euphausiids, clouds of nutrient with droplets of herring and drifts of salmon, but I could feel their presence as if they were restlessly tapping on the hull of the Oso to remind me to stay awake, stay awake.
Wake up, son. You better take a look at this.”
I had no idea how long I had slept but the engine was idled down and the drive train was out of gear. I climbed the ladder to the cramped wheelhouse. Walt had a cup of tea in his hand and he gestured out the side door.
“Go forward and look about twenty feet off at two o’clock.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, just go take a look.”
I wasn’t completely sure if this was a prank, a test, or more of the dream seeping into my awakening. I ducked my head and went forward by the anchor winch. I squatted down and looked out at two o’clock.
The Oso was two hundred yards offshore and I could see the lead gray rocks blend to the mat of moss and spruce and hemlock forest. There were three eagles perched in the trees, scanning the water. I turned around and looked at Walt and he smiled and nodded back. Eagles? I thought. He woke me up to show me some fucking eagles? I looked back toward the shore. There were quite a few gulls and I noticed four sea lions curling through the water. Then about ten feet from the hull I saw a bubble the size of a cantaloupe break onto the surface and then another and another, arching out into a circle toward the shore.
I never feel my body in my dreams, it’s as if I have no biology in my subconscious. In my dreams my emotions are—just there—in the atmosphere of the dream, like rain or background radiation. One good clue that I’m not dreaming is when my body sends me specific messages. As I watched the bubbles start to close in a perfect circle about forty feet across I could feel the hair standing up on the back of my neck. My breath was short and my eyes started to tingle.