Gone Alaska

by Dave Barrett

  GONE ALASKA

  GONE ALASKA

  A novel

  by

  DAVE BARRETT

  Adelaide Books

  New York/Lisbon

  2019

  GONE ALASKA

  A novel

  By Dave Barrett

  Copyright © by Dave Barrett

  Cover design © 2019 Adelaide Books

  Published by Adelaide Books, New York / Lisbon

  adelaidebooks.org

  Editor-in-Chief

  Stevan V. Nikolic

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

  manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in

  the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For any information, please address Adelaide Books

  at info@adelaidebooks.org

  or write to:

  Adelaide Books

  244 Fifth Ave. Suite D27

  New York, NY, 10001

  ISBN-10: 1-951214-36-6

  ISBN-13: 978-1-951214-36-4

  This book is dedicated to my sons, Conor and Samuel.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One: The Door Trick Game

  Chapter Two: Arrival

  Chapter Three: The Ivory Inn

  Chapter Four: Philip Swanson

  Chapter Five: Red of 10,000 Years—Cheesehead Pirates!

  Chapter Six: First Morning

  Chapter Seven: $4 Dollars a Pound

  Chapter Eight: Miss Sue Ann Bonnet

  Chapter Nine: Pelican, U.S.A.: Part One

  Chapter Ten: Pelican, U.S.A.: Part Two

  Chapter Eleven: Exchange at Sea

  Chapter Twelve: China Harry’s Fish Buyer

  Chapter Thirteen: Little Red Meat

  Chapter Fourteen: The Beast Below

  Chapter Fifteen: A Close Call

  Chapter Sixteen: How You Ride It!

  Chapter Seventeen: Departure

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The Door Trick Game

  In my hometown of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, “going to Alaska” was an expression you heard often growing up. Alaska was where you could always go when things weren’t working stateside. It was what the man or woman meant when they said, “The hell with it! The job... the wife... the husband... the kids... I’m cashing in my chips and going to Alaska!”

  It seemed every family had someone who’d “gone Alaska” in their youth. In ours, it was my mother’s brother, Uncle John. John was what the more righteous side of the family referred to as a no good drunken bum and, our more compassionate side, as a giant fun loving clown with a little drinking problem. Because children are generally better of heart than adults are, we only knew John as our favorite Uncle.

  There was a Door-Trick game John played on us that I credit as planting the seed of some of these Alaska imaginings of my own—since I can remember him playing this game as far back as I can go. My younger brothers, sisters, cousins, and I would all be sleeping in the same room over at Uncle John and Aunt Carol’s house. The older people would be having a party in the living room and John would wander in around ten or eleven o’clock to say goodnight to us “pups,” as he liked to call us.

  “Hey, pups! Ya’ haven’t fallen asleep on me yet, have ya’?” John would whisper, loud enough to startle any of us that might be leaning in that direction.

  “Uncle John! Uncle John!” a little chorus of our voices would whisper back from the dark.

  John entered the room, all six foot seven of him silhouetted against a shaft of yellow light spilling in behind him from the hallway. Then, just as suddenly as he’d entered, the door would shut behind him.

  “John? John? Are you there, John?” our little chorus would cry out.

  No answer. Could it be that John had vanished? Perhaps he’d been sent to check if we were still awake and we had only imagined him entering our room?

  But always, just before the hush of the room had driven us to complete hysteria, one of the little ones, for instance, would brave that ocean of dark hardwood floor and tug on John’s knee, and whisper,

  “John. I gotta go pee.”

  And the whole room would burst into laughter: John louder than all us kids combined.

  After all the pillow tossings, ghost calls and who-pinched-who’s had quieted, John would treat us to a long poem or story about the early trappers, prospectors and frontiersmen of the Yukon and Alaskan territories.

  “Now just one mind you,” John began, once a second hush had settled over the room.

  My eyes would have adjusted to the dark by now. John would still be standing there—just inside the doorframe—perhaps cradling one of the smaller children in his hairy, bulky arms. His yesterday’s clothes would be covered with sawdust and glue—the smell of the sawdust and glue and the whiskey on his breath permeating each dark molecule of air in the room. Years later, after John had once and for all been laid-off from Hoskin’s Lumberyard, I remember this same John working as a clerk at my father’s hardware store. I remember him standing behind the cash register, the bewilderment in his eyes—his big clumsy hands fumbling with the keys, dropping coins on the floor—and, finally at the end of that one and only horrendous week, socking the cash register, tearing off his apron and telling my father to take the damages out of his week’s pay; John living off unemployment and Aunt Carol’s nickel and dime tips at the HUSKY TRUCK STOP until his death of prostate cancer a year and a half later. Although some, such as my father, had looked on this as a failure on John’s part, I had never seen it as such. To me, John had remained a hero: tarnished, but a man who’s put his pride before pennies. Though I loved and respected my own father, when I was a child, I’d secretly wished I was one of John’s kids.

  “There are strange things done

  In the midnight sun

  By the men would moil for gold;

  The Artic trails have their secret tales

  That would make you blood run cold... ”

  He would be speaking in that deep sing-song voice of his now. We would huddle closer: the smaller children shuffling across the hardwood floor in their sleeper pajamas with the padded feet... asking an older brother or sister to zip up their fronts... then conning them into sharing their sleeping bag. I, being one of the oldest, was often stuck with quieting a squirrelly younger sister or cousin: covering their small mouths with the palm of my hand; putting up with their wiggling, pinching, and drooling tricks so John could continue.

  “The Northern Lights have known queer sights

  But the queerest they ever did see

  Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

  I cremated Sam McGee... ”

  “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert Service was my favorite. Standing there, his huge frame reeling, his head up somewhere above the doorframe, John would “fill us in” on how he and Sam McGee were partners. Sam McGee was from Tennessee, and like John, had been lured to the Yukon and Alaska in search of gold. The only thing about Sam McGee was that he always complained about the cold. One particularly blizzardy night, Sam made John promise to cremate his last remains if he should die along the trail. Sure enough, next morning, ol’ Sam was dead. Not wanting to break his promise, John lugged the frozen corpse of his friend across half the Yukon... until he came to the marge of Lake Lebarge. There, he happened upon an abandoned fishing boat:

  “Some planks I tore from the cabin floor

  And I lit the boiler fire;

  Some coal I found that was lying around,

  And I heaped the fuel higher;

  The flames just soared, and the

  Furnace roared...

  ... And I burrowed a hole

&
nbsp; In the glowing coal,

  And I stuffed in Sam McGee.”

  John would purposively stop here, tuck the last of us into his or her sleeping bag and make for the door as if to exit. But always, just before he’d left the room, we’d demand to know what happened to Sam after John had stuffed him in the coals.

  “WELL...” John continued, in his deepest bass yet. “I ain’t quite sure I’ve figured that out myself yet.” “Besides,” he’d go on, checking over his shoulder as though someone was sneaking up on him, “I probably shouldn’t tell you anymore--“

  “Tell us, John! Tell us!”

  “WELL... ” the bass again. John would poke his head out the door; check up and down the hall, then, quietly closing the door behind him, tiptoe towards us with a finger to his lips, sshing us.

  By this point, we were so riveted to John’s story that I could often release the child I was holding. I can still see our eyes: wide and glittering in the dark: like a litter of wolf pups bunched together at the bottom of our den. Taking his regular stance, John explained he’d gone off for a walk, not wanting to hear the body of Sam McGee sizzling over the coals. Returning to the fire, he’d figured:

  “I’ll just take a peep inside.

  I guess he’s cooked, and it’s time I looked.

  Then the door I opened wide.

  And there sat Sam. Looking cool and calm

  in the heat of the furnace roar;

  And he wore a smile you could see a mile,

  and he said, “Please close that door.

  It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear

  you’ll let in the cold and storm—

  Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee,

  It’s the first time I’ve been warm!”

  Story over, we were free to let the cork off the bottle: screaming in unison at the top of our lungs. John fanned the flame by feigning to exit, opening and closing the bedroom door, then letting out his “grizzly bear roar” to let us know he was still with us. Our noise would overtake the noise from the party in the living room and, within moments, Aunt Carol or my mother would enter, reprimanding John for disturbing us kids with his “childish fool stories.” And it was then, as I watched John exit, often playfully dragged out of the room on one of his big ears, that I knew I too would someday go north.

  Chapter Two

  Arrival

  Elfin Cove, Alaska.

  The Southeast Coast.

  One month past my eighteenth birthday and I was standing at the forepeak, poised to leap, when the skipper of the purse seiner I’d hitched a ride on from Juneau motioned me back down.

  “Adam!” the old fisherman yelled, leaving his position at the wheel and coming out on deck. “Your pack! You forgot your backpack!”

  With the same haste I’d ascended the forepeak, I descended—grabbing my old external frame pack where I’d left it leaning against the wall of the wheelhouse. Grinning and shaking his head, Pete, the purse seiner’s skipper, helped loop the back around my shoulders.

  “Remember what I say. The Ivory Inn. Just as you get to the village. Can’t miss it. Big white two story house with a white picket fence around it. You stop there first and get yourself a square meal... and a hot shower and shave in the rooms upstairs. Ain’t no hurry, Adam. Nothing much going on till morning. This Elfin fleet ain’t going nowhere ‘till King season opens two days from now. Turn down that idle of yours a notch or two, kid.”

  Pack on, I grabbed Pete’s hand and shook it briskly.

  “Got it, Pete. The Ivory Inn. First picket fence after you get off the Interstate. Big breakfast. Then shit, shower and shave—not necessarily in that order.”

  “Get out of here, kid!” Pete said, clobbering me over the head with his baseball cap.

  I climbed back up on the forepeak.

  “And don’t ever forget,” Pete said, shouting over the road of the diesel motor. “It’s you that’s doing them the favor?”

  “Favor? What favor?”

  Pete just smiled and shook his head. He pulled his deerhorn pipe out of a pocket of his windbreaker and lit up. A good old guy, this Pete! I remembered the trouble he’d expressed not being able to sign me on back in Juneau. But he already had a full crew waiting for him in Bristol Bay. It was only out of the goodness of his heart that he’d gone these ten miles off course to get me to this little village. Even now, I often wonder how differently things might have turned out had I got on with Pete and his Bristol Bay bunch.

  “Never mind, Adam!” said Pete. “Big strapping kid like you—you’ll do fine!”

  Pete turned his short stocky frame around, and like a turtle standing on its hind legs, waddled his way back to the wheel.

  “Elfin Cove!” I thought aloud.

  The name could not have been perfect.

  The village had been hidden from plain view, tucked deep inside this wandering bay at the northern tip of Chicagof Island on the west coast of Southeast Alaska. Now, as we swung around this last point, it came into full and sudden view. The entire village was strung along a single green-pained boardwalk that ran atop a narrow landing jutting up from the rocky shoreline, horseshoeing around the tiny cove like a railroad track upon the embankment of a river. Along the boardwalk stood a dozen odd shacks, a half-dozen supply stores, a laundry/shower shack, and one U.S. Post Office: like props from a child’s train set. Moss, mushroom and lichen bloomed everywhere: upon the shorelines rocks and boulders; atop the boardwalk railing; even up the sides of many of the buildings. Ferns of varying size and shape and shade of green sprung from every corner. And surrounding it all, spring out of the soil of the village’s very backyard, trees—mountains of them—Red and Yellow Cedars, Sitka Spruce and Douglas Fir; rising in a steep green cone; separating Elfin Cove and all that entered here from the rest of the world. Straight out of the Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson books I’d read as a child...

  “BROOOM! OOOM!”

  Pete startled me with the horn, signaling me to jump. I could feel the seiner drop into low gear as I knelt beside the anchor windlass and regained my composure. Slowly, I stood up, and forced myself to smile back at Pete. My heart hammered in my chest and there was a strange wild taste of seawater in my mouth. The approaching land mass seemed at once to rush towards me and pull away. Grinning, I realized this was it. No running back to the Juneau construction job I’d worked for one month to get the necessary funds to make my way here. In my exuberance, I fancied this simple dock a kind of red carpet, rolled out at my feet.

  Giving Pete a hardy thumbs up, I turned back around, and, staring straight in the face of destiny, jumped, realizing, of course, I shouldn’t have the moment I had.

  WHAM! I don’t know if I blacked out or what, but the first thing I remember after the stars was the taste and actual feel of real salt water in my mouth and that half my face was underwater pasted against a board. Sputtering, I scrambled to my feet. The front of me was wringing wet. The dock had sunk underfoot the moment I touched down. Worse—it was sinking now—in front of me as well as behind! Goose bumps raced up the skin of my legs as I took several stone leaping strides for the ladder leading up to the boardwalk—icy fingers grabbing at my heels, spurring me on each step of the way. I didn’t know what was worse: the dock swaying this way and that or my backpack swaying the same. It was like trying to run on a long balloon. The last plank snapped underfoot just as I grabbed hold of the first rung of the ladder. I climbed, praying that the rungs of this ancient ladder not break under my weight. Finally, gasping like a fish out of water, I landed myself on top of the boardwalk.

  Loosening the cinches on my shoulder straps, I wrestled my way out of my overstuffed pack, booting it as I staggered to my feet.

  “What the hell!” I yelled to Pete.

  Looking down at the half-submerged dock, I wondered why Pete or I hadn’t noticed the rotted-away quality of its boards. Hell—some of its boards were even missing! Back out to sea, I could just make out the bobbing figure of Pete waving goodbye.
Probably pissing himself over how ridiculous I must have looked!

  I waved back in spite of myself.

  Grabbing a rock from beside the walkway, I winged it at a lone bald eagle perched atop a rusted gas drum across the way: the sole witness, outside of Pete and myself, of my botched-up stage entrance. The rock pinged off the drum’s steel-casing, making the eagle jump.

  I checked my mouth for loose teeth, my face for blood or splinters. Nothing. Everything intact. But there was a big bruise where my right cheekbone had kissed the wood.

  I’d be taking a souvenir with me.

  Chapter Three

  The Ivory Inn

  “The Lumberjack Special,” I said, leaning forward and under my breath so the men seated around me couldn’t hear. The Ivory Inn had no handout menus—just a single item breakfast written up on a chalkboard beside an old-fashioned milkshake blender: two eggs, two strips of bacon, hash browns, toast and coffee—for $8.00.

  Ms. and Mr. Gloria and Harvey Boswell-Myers were the new proprietors of the Ivory Inn Hotel and Restaurant. They had me, and all the other customers, strung out along the counter like old-timers at the Veteran’s Hall for Saturday Night Bingo. Ms. Proprietor was flying back and forth behind the counter calling out for refills of coffee while Mr. Proprietor ducked in and out of her armpit to whisk away their dishes the moment they’d gobbled down that last strip of bacon, running the dishes through the wash behind the grill, then charging back out to turn the potatoes, eggs and bacon on the skillet. All the customers, with the exception of me, were fishermen. Most were dressed in raingear and rubber boots. Their beards were unkempt; their faces pockmarked, the skin greasy on the surface but dry and weathered beneath. They sat hunched over their plates, shoveling their food, absently glancing at the television game show at a far end of the counter (coming through via the 12-foot satellite dish outside the Inn). Not many attempted to raise their voices above the brassy blare. They mumbled empty, fragmented statements to each other, leaving no doors open for response. I heard none of the boisterous, brawling vernacular I’d always associated with roughneck fishermen types.