Gone Alaska
Page 14
I nodded again.
There was a long pause, and then Swanson said:
“This is what I think, Adam. In the end—in the grand scheme of things-- ol’ Mother Earth will shake us off her like a tick off a dog’s back.” And, after another pause, he smiled and added:
“The trick, kid, is in how you ride the bitch.”
Chapter Seventeen
Departure
I was rescued by Miss Sue Ann Bonnet and her husband, George Peterson, the next day.
After delivering our catch at HARRY’S, we headed 20 miles south to Cape Spencer. Swanson was continuing on to Sitka, but said I could catch a ride all the way back to Juneau with George and Sue Ann.
“Hello, sailor!” Sue Ann called out, waiting on deck of the Mighty Mert as our two prows played paddleball with the waves. “You and Phil giving up on the married life?”
“Hell, yes!” I said, shrugging my shoulders.
It was good to see Sue Ann again.
It was a brilliant blue September-like morning. The winds had followed us all the way down Cape Spencer: the seas white-capped, but the swells running few and far between. Sue Ann was dressed for the weather in a bright blue stocking cap and a heavy wool shirt.
When our prows got as close as they were going to get, I leaped aboard the Mighty Mert, Sue Ann grabbing me as I touched down. When she saw that I would not resist, she gave me a hug.
“Thanks, Sue Ann!” I said.
We watched as Swanson and the Western World pulled away.
“Get any dough out of the old tightwad?” Sue Ann asked—out the side of her mouth.
“A little,” I said. “But not without a hassle. He wanted to send me off with two salmon!”
Sue Ann shook her head and grinned.
George Peterson came out to meet me—the Mighty Mert’s engine puttering in neutral. George Peterson was a big as Old Judge Peterson, only much quieter, and gentler. He wore bottle thick reading glasses and had a Russian Orthodox-style beard. He smiled big and easy like a farmer.
“Nice to meet you, Adam,” George said, shaking my hand. There was not a trace of jealousy or suspicion in his voice. I smiled back: thinking, even though George looked like the Jolly Green Giant next to Sue Ann, in a funny way, they were a perfect match. Sue Ann saw me thinking this and smiled back in appreciation.
Inside the Mighty Mert’s wheelhouse, Sue Ann had fried up a batch of apple-fritters to go with our lunch of deep-fried halibut and freshly ground coffee. Looking around the inside of the Mighty Mert, I thought how refreshingly different it was than inside the Western World. It was wonderfully light and airy: George’s shelf of Field Guide books on Alaska plants and animals and marine life; Sue Ann’s Indian Art pieces, raven and eagle feathers, shells and beads, whale bone vertebrae, roots and dried flowers; Old Judge Peterson’s handcrafted cribbage board made out of whale baleen, and a picture of Judge circa 1958 (Judge Peterson looking like a young Ted Williams, the baseball player). When I asked where Old Judge Peterson was, George and Sue Ann simultaneously held fingers to their lips and motioned towards the hull.
“Sleeping...”
While Sue Ann and George discussed some private matters at the wheel... I slipped out back with my plate of hot fritters and halibut. Taking a seat on a milk crate against the wall of the wheelhouse, I was overcome by the beauty and interconnectedness of the world rolling round me: these watery fjords, these fantastically forested islands and these distant glacial mountain peaks all part of the great chain of life I was only then beginning to understand. And I was filled with a great sadness too, knowing even then, at just eighteen years old, I would never see a world as wondrous as this again.
I watched the Western World trail away behind us in the opposite direction. I saw Philip come out on deck—the hitch of his shoulder obvious even from this distance. He was lighting his pipe and looking in my direction. Who really knew what he was trolling for out here? The next Adam? Perhaps his greater purpose was to teach fools like me a deeper lesson about the good and evil that exists in the soul of all of us: our task to know the difference and not let the dark, the weak and the base gain the upper hand.
Who knows!
And I remembered Swanson’s quip about shaking a tick off a dog’s back, and knew that when she shook he’d be the last tick off that bitch’s back.
Swanson: the Master of Denial, keeping constant vigil on any disturbing notions or thoughts by knocking them back with pot and booze and old-fashioned All-American stubborn-headedness. I raised an arm and waved at him. Swanson did not wave back. Throwing something overboard, he retreated to the wheelhouse; taking the wheel as the Western World came out on the first open ocean troughs, the trawler shifting side to side like an overburdened mule.
Acknowledgments
Excerpts from GONE ALASKA have appeared in the following journals (sometimes in slightly different form): Adelaide Literary Magazine, Birds Piled Loosely, Chroma, Cirque, Cowboy Jamboree, The Gambler, Gravel, KGB Bar Lit, Lampeter Review, Linden Avenue Review, The MacGuffin, Mad Swirl, No Extra Words (Podcast/Episode 85), revista Literaria CentroAmericana, Salfront, Scarlet Leaf Review, Toad Suck Review, The Vignette Review, Vine Leaves, Worker’s Write!, Wilderness House and Watershed Review.
About the Author
Dave Barrett lives and writes out of Missoula, Montana. His fiction has appeared most recently in Hobart, Midwestern Gothic, Quarter After Eight and Whiskey Island. He teaches writing at Missoula College and is at work on a new novel.