Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel (10 page)

Every man should take an epic journey, Uncle Austin used to say. Paddle into his terror, the secret language of storms, back to a time before television and the chaos of too much stuff, too many things, too many gadgetgizmos, back before basketball, when we slept on the ground and the full moon needled us awake, when wintertime was story time and even the sky listened, when we belonged to no banner or monarch or team, only the kingdom of trees, a kingdom without a king. Remember
yakwtlénx’
? Big red cedar canoes. You could travel blue water in them. Steer by the stars until the stars made no sense and the senses made new maps and the maps made a new you, a you that feared to forget until you forgot to fear. Follow gray whales to the Arctic. Bring back stories of
hintak xóodzi
, the polar bear, and
kooléi
x
’waa
, the underwater brown bear, or walrus. You could define yourself by your canoe; see it as a living thing, a steady companion.

Remember those first couple swings of the adz? For days afterward Old Keb couldn’t lift his arms over his head. His elbows hurt day and night. He couldn’t sleep or feel his thumbs. “Bursitis,” Nurse Byers told him. “Why are you building this canoe?”

“For my grandson . . . to make him believe.”

“Believe in what?”

“Himself.”
And in me, the journey I need to take
.

Keb could have used the raven feather, but James had taken it with him to Seattle for more surgery. Such darkness filled the boy these days, his mother, too, her health failing. Twenty years of Coke, and now diabetes. Keb worried that no matter how old he got, Gracie would still be his daughter, and James his grandson, their pain seeping into him like January rain. For long days James would disappear. Ask him where he’d been and he’d give you a look like the flat edge of a knife. How is it that young people most need our love when they least deserve it?

It was now late July, nearly three months since the accident on Pepper Mountain. These last couple weeks, James had worked on the canoe with great inconsistency, some days handling the adz well, other days swinging it with such brute indiscretion that Old Keb had to send him away.

It brought to mind a word from Old Keb’s Norwegian side, one he had learned at fifteen when he moved to Petersburg, a fishing town south of Juneau, and lived there for two years with his cousins. Uncle Austin had told Keb it would be good to leave Jinkaat and taste the Scandinavian side of himself, catch fish as Petersburg boys do, by troller, seiner, gillnetter, and grit, back in the heyday of salmon, before the big crash and any fancy talk of sustainability. Men would get angry, their tempers afire over the dying bounty. They always blamed the other guy. But there was another kind of anger, one described by the Norse word
angr
, that described not a short temper but a deeply felt grief at what had gone wrong with the world.

That was James. A prisoner of
angr
.

AGAIN, OLD KEB heard the motorcycle before he saw it. It caught air coming up the hog-backed road and skidded to a stop near the carving shed. Kid Hugh climbed off and came loping over, wearing that same Lakers jersey and ball cap backwards on his long-haired head, a tool belt on his waist, hammer tapping his
thigh. He nodded at Kevin, who sat on a stump, carving another alder spoon. “I got news,” he said. “Taff Neumayer fired Charlie Gant this morning.”

Oyyee . . . that was news. Charlie had been Taff’s foreman for years. He’d done a good job by all accounts. But everybody said he was in trouble for what he did on Pepper Mountain, skidding the logs upslope instead of high-leading them. Had this contributed to James getting hurt? The trooper investigation was ongoing.

“That’s not all,” Kid Hugh said. “Tommy Gant got mad and went into Taff’s office and cut his big hemlock desk in half with a chain saw.”

Keb got his mouth working and said, “Where’s Tommy now?”

“Nobody knows. He took off with Pete Brickman and could be anywhere.” A million miles of old logging roads ran out of Jinkaat all over the place. Roads to nowhere. Hundreds of hideouts. “Stuart is out looking for them. Coach Nicks says two troopers are flying out from Juneau. Do you know where James is?”

“No.”

Kid Hugh had just come from Helen’s Rumor Mill Café where he heard Daisy say that Truman said that Taff must have decided it was no accident that James got hurt with Charlie on the yarder. “So he fired Charlie, and Tommy got pissed, and Tommy’s saying that James lied to Taff in his report, for revenge.”

Revenge. Not a pretty word. Keb felt a chill. Kid Hugh was talking so fast that he made a train wreck of his words and left Old Keb lying on the tracks feeling run over.

“Anyway,” Kid Hugh said, “I think James is in danger.”

Danger. Did that word have a Norse root too? Old Keb put his weathered hands on the canoe. He thought about his time as a boy hunting deer with Uncle Austin, holding so still he had to remind himself to breathe. Now again, he reminded himself. . . . If James died, Gracie would too. Die in a way that left her walking around but seeing nothing. Keb reached into his lungs. Drawing on his fine command of language, he said nothing. He ached and felt small, pinned to the ground by the knowing of it all. He saw Kevin watching him, lower lip between his teeth; Kid Hugh watching him too, those arctic eyes. He remembered how Uncle Austin talked about bears having hands, not paws, and how to catch a coho you had to put a smile on the face of the herring, the baitfish. Not the same as hunting and gathering at Fred Meyer and Costco, stalking the crafty canned vegetable or the fleet-footed packaged hamburger. He could pray, but he wasn’t good at it, not like other people who spent all their time angling in this life for a better deal in the next life. Damn, he missed so much. Too much. He
thought: the Russians killed us and the Americans incorporated us, but we are still here. After all you’ve done to us, we are still here.

After a minute he picked up the heavy adz and was about to strike the canoe when Kid Hugh raised an arm and took the adz. “Let me,” he said.

Everybody used those words: “Let me.”

No one person would carve this canoe. No single master carver and his young spirit helper in time-honored Tlingit tradition. Keb was too old to do it himself, too brittle and bent over. Everybody knew it. So they arrived in their oil-stained work gloves and boots, and followed his instructions, a dozen hands swinging the adz. No ordinary adz either, but the one Keb gave to James, made from a leaf spring from one of Mitch’s old junkyard trucks, some forty years ago. First Coach Nicks, then Big Terry McNamee, the air-taxi pilot and chief of the Jinkaat Volunteer Fire Department. What they lacked in precision they made up for in power. Soon other carvers brought more adzes, and the canoe began to take shape. Watching Big Terry bite into it you’d have thought he was made from parts of Mitch’s truck, too—pistons for forearms, exhaust manifold for a face, hot sweat dripping off his nose. He would have blown a gasket had Little Mac not rescued him with lemonade. Oddmund skipped a day of fishing to help. Dag too. And Truman. The basketball team showed up. Even Deputy Sheriff-in-Training Stuart Ewing managed a few good swings. Now Kid Hugh removed his tool belt, pulled on his gloves, set his feet apart, and lit into the red cedar with strike after strike, all accurate.

Keb sat down, certain of the coming conflict. Charlie and Tommy unemployed. People talking. Angr rising. Uncle Austin used to say that when men set out to destroy each other, the first victim was always the same: truth.

THIRTY MILES TO the northwest, in the heart of Icy Strait, James Hunter Wisting hobbled down a mountain, hauling a head-shot Sitka black-tailed deer, a small buck with a rope around its neck. Before dragging it down through mosses, sedges, and small twin flowers—plants the deer had eaten all its life—he’d taken a sharp knife to the belly, opened it and found a fragrance, the moist smell of Earth, something Gramps had spoken of. He had said that when it happens, when the deer gives itself to you this way, it’s a gift the hunter must accept with gratitude. That was asking a lot these days. James was sick of thankfulness and the same old pep talks from his mother and from Coach Nicks and his everything-will-work-out-for-the-best bullshit on what’s right and wrong and what lies in between. Sick of himself. Mostly himself, and the boneheaded idea that one day he’d stumble into somebody he could be. James liked Ruby
because she said none of this. “You got robbed, nephew,” she’d said instead. “You shouldn’t have gone logging up on Pepper Mountain. You know that now. Pull yourself together and land on your feet because it’s better than landing on your head.”

James had laughed when she said that, and she laughed too. Then they hugged.

The day had begun early for James, before dawn, when he went down to the Jinkaat Boat Harbor and stole the
Lumpsucker
, Oddmund Nystad’s aluminum skiff. Oddmund always kept the skiff tied abeam of his forty-foot Bayliner, the
Norway
, where the
r
kept falling off. Every time Oddmund replaced the
r
, it’d fall off again, or a raven would take it. So the
Norway
became the
No Way
. James figured that he hadn’t really stolen the
Lumpsucker
; he’d just borrowed it, since Oddmund had said he could use it anytime he wanted, so long as he asked.

He just forgot to ask.

Yes, he could have taken the
No Way
and made a nice meal in the big galley, taken a hot shower, and lived like a king. But the
No Way
had a top speed of eleven knots. That might be fine for Oddmund and Dag. But James wanted something fast, a rocket, a skiff fast enough to outrun any NMRS ranger boat.

He had told Taff Neumayer the truth about the Gants, how Charlie had skidded the logs that day, and Tommy was jealous of him dating Little Mac.

“Tommy and Little Mac don’t concern me,” Taff said. “I want to know about the skidding operation. Write down everything you remember, then sign this statement.”

James hung the deer from a sturdy spruce just inside the alder fringe, a good place, as Lemesurier Island had no bears or wolves. Gramps had explained that the island had no large predators because of strong currents in Icy Strait. Mainland bears and wolves couldn’t make the swim. But how did the deer get here? Long ago, when the glacier filled Crystal Bay and reached across Icy Strait, ice might have bridged the mainland to the island. Hungry deer could have crossed over the ice, looking for food, and found a new home. When the great glacier retreated far back into Crystal Bay, a small population of deer would have remained on Lemesurier Island.

What would it have been like to live back then, when stories colored the world and even the sky listened? When Tlingit people stood thigh-deep in cold rivers, naked; caught wild salmon with handmade nets and spears, and ate with the people they loved, and everybody pitched in, and nobody complained? When people spent so much time on the water, in the water, they became water themselves,
liquid people. They didn’t bemoan their way of life or say it was hard. It was the only life they knew. They didn’t say, “We’re going hunting.” It sounded arrogant. According to Gramps, they said, “We’re just going out to have a look around.” That way, the animals came to them.

Awhile back, Gramps had told James to start bathing in the ocean, to get ready, get tough.

“To become a warrior?” James asked.

“No, the world has too many warriors. You’ll be a peacekeeper, a healer.”

JAMES MADE QUICK work of skinning the deer. When he finished, he felt calm. Gramps was right, working with your hands was a good thing. He sat on the cobble beach and pulled out his sharpening stone. He missed Little Mac and considered that he liked himself best in her company. She sometimes got upset with him, and when she did he knew she was right. She had told him to stop feeling sorry for himself, to start looking beyond his accident.

“It wasn’t an accident,” he had said.

“You don’t know that.”

“You don’t know what I don’t know.” What a stupid thing to say. Why did words always get in the way? He could always think more clearly out here, outside, as if he could hear himself better and arrive at conclusions he couldn’t otherwise find.

Aunt Ruby had high expectations of him, as she had of her own sons: Josh the investment banker, and Robert the Coca-Cola executive. Their dad, Günter, a German engineer and businessman, had opened the first Audi dealership in Juneau. Everybody said he would lose his shirt, but the dealership boomed, and Uncle Günter and Aunt Ruby took expensive vacations to Europe.

Meanwhile, his mom worked as a teacher’s aide and lived like a pauper. Looking back, James couldn’t remember one tender moment between his mom and father. Eight years ago, when he was only ten, James flew down to Denver to surprise him. “You’re such a little guy and the plane is so big,” Mom had said in the Juneau Airport departure lounge. “I’ll be okay,” James told her, trying to be a man. Mom said, “He’s going to disappoint you, but you need to learn that for yourself.” James came home early, his face wet with tears, and never talked about his father after that.

THE TIDE WAS rising. James hobbled down the beach, pushed off the skiff, and started the outboard. He pulled out his iPod, plugged himself in, and opened the throttle. It was like flying: the boat skimming over a flat sea, music
drumming in his ears, wind sweeping back his long hair. He motored north to Point Carolus, just inside Crystal Bay. By doing this, he added a second violation to his first: he shot a deer out of season, and entered a national marine reserve in a motorized vessel without a permit. The rangers would ticket him if they caught him.

Let them try.

He bow-landed on the flooding tide and ran his anchor line up the beach. It was late afternoon. He could not stay long. He sat on the rocks and ate and worried about his mom, how she looked lately—not well. He reached into his big coat pocket for a cigarette and found the raven feather. Had he put it there? He pulled it out and watched it catch the sun, the blue iridescence. He saw a vision of a woman in a boat; no, a woman in rough seas next to a boat, her face stricken, her hand reaching for his. It startled him. The rifle suddenly felt heavy across his lap. He tore his eyes away and looked north to the distant mountains dressed in snow, wintry despite the July sun. Would those mountains gather enough ice one day to rebuild the glaciers and reclaim the entire bay? Gramps had Tlingit names for those mountains and glaciers. Names for every cove, river, and meadow, every plant and animal, and stories behind the names.