by Dave Barrett
The Inn itself was in process of renovation. Yards of plastic wrap hung along part of the ceiling and the far wall where I figured they’d stopped sheet rocking over the old plywood paneling. A separating wall, which I guessed had once divided the room, had been knocked out. Along the ceiling, a thick razor-like slash outlined the shape of the former section. In a far corner, shoved against the wall, was what I imagined to be a piano: a gray top covering it now. A small, twelve-by-twelve bandstand/dance floor was still standing, but they’d already begun to remove the mirrors fixed on the walls behind it.
My only guess was they hadn’t gotten round to fixing the rooms upstairs yet. On my way back downstairs after a quick shave and change of clothes, I’d poked my head through a cracked door of one of the boarding rooms. The room was merely big enough for a double bed, a urinal and washbasin (at the same level as the urinal). The walls were made of cheap plywood so I imagine you’d hear the guy next door snoring as if he was in the room with you. There were no windows and no pictures hung from the walls. On the ceiling over the bed, a mirror covered a would-be boarder from head to foot. Strangest, and perhaps most revealing of all, the room came equipped with a small wall-sized jukebox: the sleazy neon glow from the box sending me hurrying back downstairs, wondering.
Ms. and Mr. Gloria and Harvey Boswell-Myers were an urban professional couple who’d come up to Elfin Cove in the spring from Washington, D.C. The State of Alaska had closed the previous management down last winter and couple had picked up the mortgage payments and would close the deal that coming fall. They’d come across the advertisement for the Inn in the back pages of the Atlantic Monthly magazine. Although still in a formative stage, a little hand-written note taped to the café window revealed the manifest intentions of the new management:
“THE IVORY INN’S JULY GRAND OPENING SPECIAL!!! TWO NIGHTS LODGING FOR THE PRICE OF ONE!!! MEALS INCLUDED IN PACKAGE!!! *PLUS* ONE FREE DEEP SEA FISHING EXCURSION ALLOWED EACH GUEST ABOARD THE IVORY INN’S OWN PRIVATE VESSEL—THE SEA WOLF!!!”
The proprietors fed all this to us along with breakfast. I took it the fishermen had heard it before by the way they rushed through their meals and dismissed themselves from the Inn without further salutation.
“Are you just visiting Elfin Cove?” the proprietors asked me, after the others had cleared the room.
All the dirtied dishes had been cleared from the counter, stacked in the dishwasher, and were running through the wash. The counter had been wiped clean so not a crumb was left to prove that the fishermen had ever been there. The Breakfast Special had been erased and day’s Lunch Special chalked up: a cheeseburger with fries for $9.50.
Mr. Proprietor had asked the questions and I instantly realized how much more I resembled Mr. Proprietor, with his frail white Yale graduate hands cleaning the coffee dispenser, than I did the fishermen staying at the Inn. Not one of them had said a word to me the entire time I’d been here.
“Well, in a way I am,” I said, wondering if they’d noticed the shiner I’d taken pains to conceal by sitting at the far right end of the counter.
This was the summer before my freshmen year at the U of Idaho, in Moscow, and I was feeling that famous freshman itch to experience the “real world.” When a high-school friend, Brian Connelly, asked if I’d want to spend the summer living out of his sister and brother-in-law’s garage in Juneau, I had my bags packed and an Alaska map out before Connelly returned from his college placement exam. Anything to get out of another drab summer shuffling items up and down the dark dusty shelves of my father’s hardware store back in Coeur d’Alene!
“Where from?” Mr. Proprietor asked, sitting down for the first time now to smoke on a stool behind the counter. The cigarette was one of those unfiltered ones from Amsterdam so popular with the liberal crowd at college coffeehouses. He smoked it now with his legs crossed European-style, careful not to exhale smoke in my direction.
“Excuse me?” I said.
The truth was I’d been staring at his wife. She sat in a little corner booth by the window now, reading a fashion magazine. The red and white picnic cloth curtains were drawn so every ounce of sunshine could squeeze in through the Windex-clear cafe windows. She looked up from her article as her husband repeated his question.
“Oh,” I said, smiling sheepishly. “Idaho. Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The northern part of the state—“
“Oh, I know where it is,” he interrupted, smiling through his exhale. Then, to his wife, he added, “Hun,” yes, he called her, hun! “Isn’t that the little place with that magnificent hotel on that glorious lake?”
The Hotel Coeur d’Alene:
Once upon a time, there was a pretty little town on the north shore of one of the most beautiful lakes in the world. Each year thousands of tundra swans and hundreds of bald eagles came to roost on the lake’s east end. There were black bear and mountain lion, elk and moose. There were salmon in the lake: trapped here decades ago when dams were built on the connecting Spokane and Columbia River waterways. Summers were the best time of year. The pungent smell of pine drifting through your open bedroom window on hot August nights. Cliff diving off Tubbs Hill into the lake in July. Lying down with your sweetheart on a bed of wild mountain strawberries on Mineral Ridge in June.
A wonderful place for a kid to grow up.
Then, a terrible secret was leaked, putting an end to all these childhood things.
Heavy-metals.
Lead.
Mercury.
Cadmium.
You name it.
The Silver Valley, east of my hometown and stretching all the way across the Idaho panhandle to the Montana border, had been one of the most heavily mined areas on the planet.
The EPA was telling us that 72 million tons of mining waste had entered rivers and creeks feeding directly into our beloved lake.
Those orange, yellow, and blue lake banks were not natural wonders, but the result of different metals and contaminants in the water.
Shock.
Denial.
Grief.
Enter Duane Hagedon and the great Hotel Coeur d’Alene makeover:
Hagedon, a Chicago real-estate developer, with enough money to buy a town.
And this is exactly what he did.
First, the pulp mill, our town’s largest employer; then, the town newspaper. Suddenly, the key word here was no longer HEAVY METALS but IMAGE. Coeur d’Alene, Hagedon told us, would become the Lake Tahoe of the Pacific Northwest. He built this twenty-story, 450-room colossus next to the City Park and Beach: the Hotel Coeur d’Alene rising Deus Ex Machina on the beach-head like Poseidon to save (or destroy?) our town. The Hotel had all the makings of a medieval castle: a nine-hole golf course and “nature preserve” attached to its west end; a freshwater dock touted as the “largest west of the Mississippi” surrounding it like a moat; and, if this wasn’t enough, an elaborate series of skywalks that reached out like tentacles from the Hotel to the downtown businesses.
He’d obtained highway funds from state legislators to widen all roads leading to Coeur d’Alene.
The Greyhound Dog Track on the Idaho/Washington border was fully operational.
Now all he needed to put Coeur d’Alene and his Tahoe of the Northwest into the 21st century was a few more legislators.
The lobby of his Hotel Coeur d’Alene eerily awaiting that day... electrical outlets already built into the walls at a distance of every two feet. “Well... ” Mr. Proprietor continued, stubbing his cigarette in the tiny ashtray in his lap. “I’m impressed.” Then, getting to the quick of it, asked,
“Then what brings you here to our humble cove?”
I swear, he said that.
Now his wife was staring at me. Her dark Italian eyes crawled over my thighs and hips, past my ribs, shoulders, neck, and, finally, face with a disturbingly measured gaze. I noticed she was smoking one of those unfiltered cigarettes herself now.
“Actually,” I began, blushing stupidly in spite of myself. “I’m here to fin
d work. On a boat. A fishing boat. A salmon trawler... ”
There was an awkward stillness as husband and wife looked at each other and then back at me, unable to say a thing.
By near imperceptible degrees, I was aware that the sights of their eyes had lowered to the shiner on my right cheekbone, probably just now coming into what would soon become a full and purple bloom. I realized that they must have mistaken me of a potential long-term boarder: perhaps a rich college kid out here to study whales and climb glaciers and what-have-you!
Realizing I’d done something wrong, but for the life of me unable to think of a fitting response, I raised my empty cup off the tile counter.
The wife got up, motioning her husband to move aside. She lifted the coffee pot off the burner and refilled my cup.
I took a few complimentary sips. Then, slinging my backpack over my shoulder, I left the cafe through a side door; letting the screen door slam shut behind me.
Chapter Four
Philip Swanson
It was near noon and the crisp, sea-refrigerated air had evaporated from the Cove. The sun was hot, straight up, hovering above the inland ridge of mountains. I was on the rear deck of a trawler, down to my T-shirt. In my sweaty sunburnt hands was an electric drill, plugged into a portable generator on deck. Wiggling the drill bit back into its groove, I rammed it home through three inches of steel bar. I’d been cutting on this steel bar for the last hour.
The fishermen I found on the docks this morning were of a different spirit than the ones at the Ivory Inn. Like school children released onto a playground at recess, they jumped, hollered, cursed, and laughed while performing their tasks. The floating dock beside each trawler was piled high with odds and ends from their cabin’s interiors: tin pots and pans, last year’s dirty dishes, blood-stiff dishtowels, water warped rolls of toilet paper, coffee tins filled with rusted nuts and bolts and screws. Alongside these more domestic items, spread out in neat orderly rows, laid new spools of nylon fishing lines; rubber snubbers; different lengths of gaffs line out like sawed-off baseball bats; steel clothespins; black nylon stopper balls, flashers—and, of course, lures. Lures as shiny as new coins off the mint; detailed with day-glo florescent paints; with gaudy feathers and tassels and jewelry; even one custom jobber with a pornographic photo of a woman on it; anything and everything that might conceivably lure the eyes of those fabled sixty-pound Kings all were after.
Descending upon the docks fresh after breakfast, I felt as though I’d been spliced into a frame of old World War II newsreel footage. The fishermen moved in double-time around me. They’d paid me as much mind as they did the village dogs sniffing about (the dogs yelping and cowering as they were booted out of the path of a frenzied fisherman). All attention was drawn to the tasks at hand. There were poles to patch! ropes to splice! Even above, along the boardwalk, non-fishing village folk had been drawn outside the doors of their shops to behold the activity below. It soon became evident—after I’d been jolted a few times by a stiff shoulder or elbow—that the only way I was going to keep out of the icy harbor waters (that I was already so well acquainted with) was to join in with the seemingly frantic dance of these men as they bobbed and leaped from boat to dock and boat again.
More than once, as I’d tentatively approached skippers or trawlers to inquire about work, I’d been issue a command before I’d even a chance to blurt out my reason for being there:
“Just don’t stand there with your thumb up your ass, boy! Toss me that line! Swing that dolly round here and help me with this crate! Quick! Turn off that faucet before we flood the forecastle! Goddang it, son! Move!”
And when I’d finally get around to announcing my reason for being there:
“Gosh damn, son. Damn it, I’m sorry. I figured... ”
And down the line I’d go... running through the same routine on the next trawler.
Now that I’d finished the drill job, the skipper of this particular trawler I’d been working on magically resurfaced.
I could smell the whiskey on his jowly face as he reboarded. Motioning me aside, he wet the side of his thumb on his tongue and inspected the hole in the steel bar with it.
“Virgin, eh?” he said, smiling as he tasted the metal shavings.
“We do our best,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.
Earlier, this skipper had hinted that there might be an opening aboard. As a matter of fact, he had restated, after taking a second look at me and praising me for my size and my youth—there was a damn good chance I could get on. Of course, first he’d have to check around town for his regular puller. In the meantime, there was this little drilling...
“Got some bad news,” he continued, taking a nip off the strip of beef jerky he’d been gnawing on. “Looks like my man finally came in after all.”
He offered me a nip of jerky.
I politely declined.
“Yep. Found the bum at Clancy’s just now.”
Clancy’s! I thought, as I gathered my things on deck. My backpack felt as though its contents had been replaced with nuts and bolts. The drilling had corrugated the muscles of my upper back, shoulders and arms into what felt like one great anvil.
“Clancy’s!” I thought again, this time aloud as I jumped down to the dock, my legs shaking beneath me.
Sure!
Why not?
This was the best lead I’d had all day.
And it was just in this state, as I trudged back towards the boardwalk and the village, that I, Adam Porter, caught sight of Philip Swanson and his salmon trawler, the Western World.
“Got a match?” was the first thing Swanson said to me.
I found Swanson sitting at the wheel of the Western World, almost Buddha-like with his feet propped up in semi-lotus position on the dashboard, fitting a joint he’d been smoking onto a roach clip. In spite of the 70 degree heat, he was wearing a copper-paint flecked sweatshirt overtop of a flannel shirt. Scattered across the wheelhouse floor were a dozen burnt matchsticks. He hadn’t answered my first call from the docks, so I’d taken the liberty of climbing aboard.
“Light?” Swanson restated, politely enough.
From a side pocket of my backpack, I produced my Bic Lighter. I lowered the flame, and held it out as Swanson leaned forward to relight his joint.
Philip Swanson was not an easy man to look at. There was something unhuman to his appearance. His face had that granite quality which indicated he could be anywhere from thirty to fifty years of age. His skin was weathered as wood on an old boat; his eyes like two blue marbles that have been sanded so all that’s left is a chalky pale blue core. His hands were stiff and white and always around his face: holding an earlobe or stroking his lips or his short beaky nose. His lips were thin and drawn tight at the mouth—as when two flaps of skin are held together with stitches on a cut. Because of this tightness of mouth, it was often hard to tell whether Philip Swanson was experiencing pain or pleasure whenever he smiled or laughed. But perhaps his most discriminating peculiarity was that one of Swanson’s shoulders was set higher than the other. Later, I would learn that this was because of an accident from his early childhood. While aboard his father’s trawler, they’d been caught in a sudden offshore storm during a run and, before his father had been able to draw in the lines, the gear had snagged onto a reef. Usually, when this happens, all it does is strip the expensive gear. But, in this case, it had snagged just so that it slipped one of the large trolling poles right out of its fitting. Young Philip had been cleaning the last of the catch on deck and had not been able dodge the falling timber in time. The wound had healed, and would not keep him from his work, but it had left him with a slight hitch in his walk. This too had added to the unhuman quality of the man. For, from a distance, one might easily imagine Swanson a puppet tied to strings from the riggings as moved about on deck.
“So,” Swanson said, exhaling his smoke. “Where’s the rifle?”
“Rifle?” I answered.
Grinning, shaking his head, Swanson
leaned forward threateningly and said:
“The gun, dumb ass. The one my wife gave to you in Juneau. You remember my wife, don’t you?”
I was completely taken aback.
“No,” I said, shaking my head; realizing, by now, that he’d mistaken me for someone else. “You’re wife never gave me your gun. I’ve never even met your wife. I think—“
But those two mentions of his “wife” must have done it for me. Next thing I knew my head was pinned up against a corner wall: facing a Pin-Up calendar of a topless dairy maid in the straw on all fours; playing the part of a cow, I suppose.
“Ss-stop it. Idiot—“ I choked, trying to loosen Swanson’s boney fingers from my neck. But it was no go. His hands were just too powerful for me. When I started to kick, he simply shoved his knee into my groin and held it there.
“I’m not him! Wrong guy!” I finally managed to say. “You got the wrong guy! Porter. My name’s Adam Porter.”
“Porter?” Swanson said, loosening his grip an nth of a degree. “You ain’t from the agency?”
“No!”
Swanson let go of me so suddenly that I fell to the floor like a framed-picture slipping off a nail. Standing, nearly stumbling to the floor a second time over my famous backpack, I didn’t know what was worse: the fact that I’d been attacked or that I’d been completely overpowered by this little man at least 30 pounds lighter than me but with a grip like a pit bull dog.