Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel (14 page)

She sat up like a watered flower. “Here in Icy Strait? No. Have you?”

“Yeah, once, in Crystal Bay.”

By now Hugh was standing at the bow and pulling on the anchor line. He said to James, “Put it in gear and give me some slack. We have to go.” It was time to get the cohos back to Old Keb for the big celebration. Lots of food. Lots of people. Lots to do.

“No, wait,” the whale woman said. “You guys want some coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“It’s Kona coffee, good stuff.”

“No, thanks.” James motored into the current as Hugh pulled up the anchor with cold water dripping off his hands.

“Where in Crystal Bay did you hear them sing?” the woman asked.

“See you later, lady ranger.” James waved as he turned the skiff toward Jinkaat.

“I’m not a ranger,” she yelled, “I’m a biologist.”

James looked back to see her recede into the fog, suddenly distant in the roar of the outboard, every sound drowned.

TOMMY GANT WAS supposed to be in jail, wasn’t he?

Old Keb couldn’t remember. He tried to focus. Tried to think. Days like this he felt as if he’d been old since he was young. His mind slowly closed around the vague notion that Tommy was supposed to be in jail, or on the run from state troopers and Stuart Ewing and everybody else, hiding somewhere, hunkered down wet and cold in a culvert under a logging road, eating slugs and shrews and toads.

But here he was, Tommy Gant, standing over Old Keb on the front step of Keb’s carving shed, free as a wolverine, sodden and scruffy, arms fish-belly white, a guitar in one hand, a big baseball bat in the other. How strange was that? Louisville Slugger. Breakfast of Champions. Oyyee . . .

“Hey, Keb,” Tommy said, “you got Little Mac in there?”

“What?” Keb looked up from his porch chair.

“Mackenzie Chen. Little Mac. I need to talk to her.”

Keb blinked. Everything seemed to fall away into the distance. The fog, that was it. Tommy had come out of the woods and the fog. Keb’s carving shed was in a clearing on the edge of town, far away from everything else, exactly where somebody could emerge unseen. A desperado and his sidekick. Tommy’s buddy stood with him. Keb couldn’t remember his name. When you deal with guys like this, you remember faces more than names. Brickman, that was it. Pete Brickman. More brick than man. Gracie and Little Mac were in the shed all right, whipping up a big feast for the noon potluck when lots of people would arrive from everywhere to steam open the canoe. Helen had opened up the Rumor Mill Café and enlisted half a dozen women to help her bake pies.

James and Kid Hugh were out catching
l’ook
for the grill. Coho salmon. Just thinking about it made Keb’s mouth water, though right now his mouth had
gone dry. Blame it on Tommy, who handed the Louisville Slugger to Pete, pulled the guitar over his shoulder, and stood there like a minstrel tuning it up. He began to play. Keb had to admit it sounded good; Tommy’s hands moved like hummingbirds. People said he was the best musician in town, even after he clipped a finger on a table saw.

“Hey, Mackenzie,” Tommy yelled. “I learned a new song I want to show you. Come on out. I know you’re in there.”

“Go away, Tommy,” came Little Mac’s voice.

“C’mon.”

“Go away. I’m busy.”

Tommy kept playing. Keb had questions for Tommy about what happened on Pepper Mountain, questions he wanted to ask and didn’t want to ask, answers he wanted to hear and didn’t want to hear. Pete took a couple swings with the Louisville Slugger, whiffing the air. His arms were bigger than most people’s legs. Was he drunk? Yes, he was drunk. Tommy too, by Keb’s estimation. Keb watched Pete walk over to Gracie’s truck and swing the bat with great ferocity, missing the sideview mirror by inches.

Facing the front porch of the shed, his back to Pete, Tommy began to sing in a beautiful tenor voice.

Keb climbed to his feet. He had to think. Gracie had no more fight in her. She was sick and refused to go to the clinic. Little Mac had spunk, but in physical strength amounted to a
k
aatoowú
, a chickadee. Tommy and Pete must know about the canoe, the steaming, the big feast. Pete took another crazy swing. Not good. Keb had a shotgun inside, an old one, like him, but couldn’t remember where. He had a pellet gun, too, somewhere near the bed, a real zinger when you hit your mark. Worked good for shooing bears out of the garden.

He hesitated at the door.

Tommy stopped singing and yelled, “C’mon, Mackenzie, you gotta hear this. I wrote it just for you.”

Pete leaned against the truck and lit a cigarette.

Keb went inside and let the door slam behind him. It took a minute for his one good eye to adjust. He saw Kevin in the corner, whittling knife in his hands, fear on his face. The two women stood near the kitchen table, under the bare light. Little Mac had the pellet gun, a Crosman Pumpmaster.

“Pops,” Gracie said quietly, “where’s the shotgun?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s happening out there?”

“They’re drunk. Pete’s got a big baseball bat.”

“Is this thing loaded?” Little Mac asked.

“I think so. You have to pump it.”

“Mackenzie!” Tommy yelled.

“Go away,” she yelled back.

“Pete and I are coming in there.”

“Go away.”

Somebody laughed—not Tommy. Must have been Pete, Keb guessed. But the laugh died quickly, the voice changed. “Hey boy, back off—”

Keb opened the door to see Tommy and Pete backed against the truck by the menacing approach of Steve the Lizard Dog stalking them with forty sharp teeth and a menacing growl. Pete raised the Louisville Slugger. “Tell this damn dog to back off.”

“He’s not my dog,” Keb said.

“Tell him to back off or I’ll beat the pulp out of him,” Pete said. “I swear I will.” The cigarette, tight in his mouth, bobbed up and down as he spoke.

At that, Little Mac stepped onto the porch, pumped the pellet gun, and aimed it square at Pete’s head. Keb could see the bat sweaty in his hands.

Steve held his ground, ratty hair and all, a stubby tail that he’d chewed off himself. Mitch said he must have chased his own butt until one day he caught it. His owners worked at Greentop and often forgot to chain him up. So Steve roamed about town like he owned the place, and got into nasty fights with other stray dogs. It fell to Old Keb, who made a project out of petting a dog, to discover Steve’s soft side and take him in. One day each year any stray dog in Jinkaat could be shot on sight, by town ordinance. Imagine the betting pools that rode on the demise of Steve the Lizard Dog. Were it not for Old Keb, he would have been shot dead years ago.

Tommy looked at Little Mac forlornly. “I just wanted to show you a new song.”

“Some other time,” Little Mac said, her aim true.

“Let’s go,” Tommy said to Pete.

Gracie pulled out her little phone. Deputy Sheriff-in-Training Stuart Ewing would arrive in minutes. Keb found himself feeling sorry for Tommy, who eyed the dog, Little Mac, and the dog again.

Pete took a threatening step toward Steve, the bat held high. Steve erupted into barking more ferocious than before. Keb pulled his hands to his ears.

“C’mon, Pete,” Tommy yelled.

Pete didn’t move.

“What happened on Pepper Mountain?” Keb heard Gracie yell at Tommy.

Tommy shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve told everybody . . . I DON’T KNOW. Something broke.”

Pete laughed a crazy laugh.

Little Mac shot a BB past his ear.

“Jesus Christ, woman, you almost hit me.”

“Go,” she said. She quickly pumped the gun.

Slowly the two men backed away, stalked by Steve. At the far edge of the clearing they hesitated, then slipped into the forest. The dog let them go but stayed put, ears up, listening.

“I think my James is in danger,” Gracie said. “I have to figure out a way to get him out of town.”

“I already have,” Keb said.

A MILLION PEOPLE showed up for the steaming and potluck. That’s how it seemed to Old Keb. Maybe two million, two hundred anyway, all in the clearing between the carving shed and Ruby’s house. When he saw all the food—salmon, halibut, black cod, crab, venison, moose, dozens of pies and cakes and ten large plates of brownies—Keb’s one good eye nearly fell out of his head. He had expected two dozen people, maybe three. But now it seemed as if the whole town was here, and more: the whole nation, universe, old friends and clan members from near and far, lots of people he knew and didn’t know and others he didn’t know if he knew and still others he didn’t know if they knew he didn’t know. But they all seemed to know him. So many handshakes and hugs and gestures of deep appreciation, people admiring the canoe, running their hands down its gunwales and flanks, a twenty-five-footer, not half as big as a great Tlingit war canoe but impressive still, a real beauty, pitched and smoothed with dogfish oil from Nathan Red Otter. Keb imagined his canoe culture as it once had been, reaching far back to when canoes made his people who they were, a liquid people with means to travel and trade and fish and hunt, before white men arrived with machines and words and poverty and wealth and tight shoes and quarterly earnings and Jesus on the cross. The canoe culture died, like Jesus. But could also be resurrected, like Jesus. Keb grinned. So many people happy to see each other and saying so.
A
x
tòowoo sigóo ee
x
wsatèenee
. It felt like a potlatch from the long-ago time that Uncle Austin used to talk about, a heritage community—family, clan, nation, earth—when places had spirits, and those spirits adopted humans as newcomers and showed them how to hunt seal and catch salmon, and humans belonged to the land instead of the land belonging to humans; when canoes arrived from far away to mark a wedding, a birth, a passing into the great beyond.

James and Kid Hugh got the bonfire going and raked aside a large bed of coals for grilling salmon, halibut, black cod, venison ribs, and the four large moose flanks contributed by Oddmund and Dag. Floyd Bonner brought more than a thousand pounds of lava rocks from Mount Edgecumbe, a volcano near Sitka, to use in steaming open the canoe. He brought his mother, too, Galley Sally, an unsuccessful seafood chef who had no sense of smell and no clientele. Mitch said her peanut butter cookies made good roofing tiles. With her restaurant closed, Sally had time to help Floyd load the rocks into his seiner and make the two-day run up the outside coasts of Baranof and Chichagof Islands, a risky affair in bad weather.

Coach Nicks and the ballplayers met them in the boat harbor, loaded the rocks into trucks, and hauled them up to the festival. Everybody stacked the rocks around the fire to get them hot. Next, they poured seawater into the canoe. The parking area filled so quickly that people had to leave their rigs on the hog-backed road and walk into the clearing as if into a dream. Bonfire blazing. Dancers beating drums and moving about in their colorful regalia, wooden raven hats on their heads,
naaxein
about their shoulders. Chilkat blankets. Laughter and song and storytelling.

Keb loved it, and moved through the crowd in a happy daze, forgetting about Tommy and Pete as he licked pie juice off his fingers. He received warm greetings from people who said how good it was to have a beautiful new cedar canoe in Jinkaat. How long had it been? Nobody could remember. Daisy Robinson shed tears of joy and wasn’t even Tlingit. She was Irish-Polish, from Boston. The whole thing was so wonderful, she said. She gave Keb a sloppy kiss that put cherry-red lipstick on his cheek. Carmen told him his horrorscope was looking good, then burst out, “My God, Keb, this is like so frickin’ cool. All these people and that canoe, because of you. You rock. You totally rock. I love you so much.” She kissed him too. Little kids ran around the clearing, and in and out of Keb’s shed; bigger kids played Frisbee. Ty and Ronnie Morris thanked Keb for being so good to their dog, Steve. Looking back, Keb didn’t remember when he didn’t like dogs. Besides, things went both ways between him and Steve, as they did now, the old man slipping Steve bits of smoked coho and nagoonberry pie. Truman congratulated Keb and told him he was working on his screenplay, remember? The one he’d written years ago, the comedy mystery that his literary agent said was missing two key ingredients: comedy and mystery. He didn’t stop talking until Brad Freer came by, green-gilled and lantern-jawed, looking for James. Not far away, Porter Danes, a Catholic, cruised the buffet table to pocket barbecued ribs and brownies. Reverend Billings watched him, straight-backed and judgmental,
until he drank too much boxed wine and could be heard saying, “Praise the Lord and pass the potato salad.” A dark-featured Latvian seine fisherman—Keb couldn’t remember his name—came up to Keb and said, “If a thousand beliefs are destroyed in our march to the truth, we must still march on.”

MITCH ARRIVED WITH his flatbed truck and front-end loader, ready to haul the canoe down to shore after the steaming. Keb saw him talking with James, Brad Freer, and Kid Hugh, all four sucking down cigarettes. Kid Hugh had that same lean and hungry look, as if he hadn’t eaten in a while.

Too tired to work anymore, Gracie handed off her kitchen duties to Little Mac and Galley Sally and a hundred other women who chattered and laughed into the night.

When it came time for the steaming, a large crowd gathered. Nathan Red Otter, an old Haida from the Queen Charlotte Islands, a dear friend of Keb’s from the time of Uncle Austin, was supposed to direct things. But Nathan was late or not coming or maybe dead, and Old Keb anguished. Only Nathan could tell the proper story—the history—of this canoe. The red cedar tree with its beautiful straight grain had come from his home, long ago, and been gifted to Keb. Nathan’s uncle had selected it. Now the going-to-sea blessing belonged to Nathan, who was an old carver like Keb. Where was he? He was traveling with a granddaughter who had one of those little phones but wasn’t answering.

A Tlingit master carver named Warren talked it over with Keb and James and Keb’s good friend, Father Mikal, a Russian Orthodox priest. Warren came from Haines, north of Crystal Bay, and was the eldest son of Giff Taylor, the best friend of Keb’s eldest son, both deceased. After a big discussion, Keb gave Warren a nod and directed him to climb high onto Mitch’s front-end loader.