Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel (29 page)

“I’m coming with you, if that’s okay, in your boat.” Stuart smiled at her.

Just then a big Bayliner came by, the
No Way
, riding low, which made no sense to Anne, given the appearance of its two skinny occupants, one at the wheel, the other on the stern, brothers built like fence posts with hawk noses and ponderous eyes loose in dark sockets. She recognized the man on the stern from the television report the night Old Keb left Portage Cove. “We’re leaving,” the man shouted to Stuart.

“For where, Oddmund? Where you going?”

“North.”

“North to where?”

“Crystal Bay, I guess . . . Keb’s boyhood home.”

“Wait for the others. Everybody should travel together and—”

“You the ranger lady?” Oddmund asked Anne. “We were worried about you, especially Stuart here. He didn’t sleep all night.”

“Hey, Stuart,” said Dag, a cell phone stuck to his ear. “You got your phone on? Mitch is trying to reach you. He’s in his truck with Irene and Vic and heading this way and says it’s important. He says it’s about Old Keb and a plane out near Cross Sound.”

Sure enough, Mitch roared up in his Chevy one-ton. He climbed out and stormed down the ramp, a bowling ball of a man accompanied by a guy whose eyes devoured the scene. Stuart told Anne it was Vic Lehan, the town barber, a real talker. Behind them came Irene, her hair in curlers, in the rain. Plume-faced and breathless, Mitch didn’t stop until he got nose-to-nose with Stuart. “Have you heard?”

“What?”

“Keb and the others stole a plane, a Cessna 207 on floats.”

“A plane? What are they doing with a plane?”

“Not much, because they let it go.”

“Let it go? Where?”

“Out in Cross Sound, near the Inians. They were on a yacht for three days, and when they left they took the yacht’s plane.”

“The yacht has a plane?”

“It did.”

“This doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m just telling you what Harald told me and Ruby told him. It’s on the news in Juneau. Stealing a plane is a serious offense. You need to get a handle on what’s going on around here, Stu. The whole damn town is packing up to leave, some in vessels that hardly float and can’t make it across Port Thomas let alone Icy Strait. Most of these people don’t even know where they’re going. Somebody’s going to get halfway across Icy Strait and drown.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Work on it harder,” said Irene, her voice as charming as a chop saw.

“You want a receipt?” the teenager asked Anne.

Mitch’s cell phone rang. He whipped it out, spoke for a minute, and passed it on to Stuart with a roll of his eyes. “It’s Ruby.”

Anne heard Stuart’s end: “Hello Ruby . . . Yep, you bet . . . yep, of course, the rangers are aware. Nope . . . yep, for his own safety. I’m on my way now, by boat, with the NMRS here in Jinkaat . . . Yep, that’s her. Nope. They can’t travel that far in one night and they can’t haul it up a beach either. It’s too heavy. I expect there’s a fixed-wing aircraft out there already . . . Fog? I don’t think so. Yep, okay then . . . yep, you bet. Thanks Ruby, you bet . . . yep, bye.” He hung up looking exhausted, and handed the phone back to Mitch.

“I guess Gracie’s real sick and close to dying,” Mitch said.

“Close to dying?” Stuart said. “How can she be close to dying?”

“Because she’s real sick,” Irene said, her eyes filling with tears. “She’s in the hospital in Seattle and wants to see James and Old Keb.”

Anne watched Stuart take the news hard, his face drawn and gray. She liked the depth of his sympathy, the rhythm of his kindness.

More people filled the dock, double the number that had been there twenty minutes before. Everybody loading up. So much chatter and excitement. They wanted to help Old Keb, yes, if he needed it. Mostly they wanted to be witnesses to his dream, participants in some way to how it used to be, when everybody traveled by tides and winds, one paddle stroke at a time, sharing, caring, warring, raiding, trading, fishing and hunting as Eagle and Raven, a proud and
paradoxical people who faced danger and in so doing were robustly alive, alert, aware. Anne could see it, feel it. It wasn’t the soulless chaos of modern living. It was something simple yet profound, a million little acts of affirmation, an awakening, an endless dance of creation.

A line of boats idled off the fuel station, waiting for service, each filled with anxious skippers and their crews of family and friends, eager to do something, to be part of something larger than themselves—a real community.

Is this why we’re here, to come together like this, separate yet one?

It made Anne smile, though she could see the pressure on Stuart was immense. She longed to whisk him away.

Mitch yelled at a heavy-set man skippering a twenty-foot Lund. “For crying out loud, Parker. What are you gonna do with that shotgun?”

“Go fishing.”

The others laughed.

A woman shouted, “C’mon, Mitch. You can’t miss this. Keb’s your best friend.”

“Do you have any idea where you’re going, Carmen?” Mitch called back.

“No, but we’ll talk by radio, we’ll listen and camp out and figure it out.”

“Keb’s going to the glacier,” shouted a man with a black goatee, ponytail, and wire-rim glasses. “The glacier that shaped Crystal Bay.”

“You’re probably right,” Mitch said. Anne could see the conflict on his face; he wanted to go but Irene wanted him to stay.

“Hey, Truman, you got a camera?”

“Yep.”

“C’mon, Mitch,” Carmen said. “It’s gonna be a big party.”

“The rangers will stop you, you know?” Irene said. “Only so many boats are allowed into Crystal Bay each day.”

“They can’t stop us all,” Truman said.

“We’ll sneak in at night.”

“Break the blockade.”

“Storm the Alamo.”

“Go home, all of you,” Irene said. “Before somebody gets hurt.”

Nobody went home.

THE SEPTEMBER SUN offered little warmth as dozens of boats made their way across Icy Strait toward Crystal Bay, many in good repair, others barely afloat. And more yet to leave Jinkaat. Such a flotilla. It reminded Anne of the makeshift boats she’d read about—laundry tubs, fruit boxes, old Buicks—used by people setting off from Cuba to reach freedom in Florida. Most sinking without a trace. Three Jinkaat kids were crossing Icy Strait on jet skis, riding the gentle swell in the aftermath of the storm. Did they wear life vests? Stuart said they were basketball kids who’d played with James. They probably had deer rifles over their shoulders and pockets filled with Snickers bars. “Cheating death,” Stuart said. “It’s a pastime in Alaska.”

Anne suppressed those images and ran the
Firn
a little off open throttle to leave the flotilla behind. Only a couple fast skiffs were up ahead. Where to go? West of Point Carolus, probably. She didn’t know. Did anybody? She was supposed to radio into Bartlett Cove every morning and evening. She’d missed three calls now. Soon they’d be searching for
her
.

By late afternoon, she was near the entrance to Crystal Bay, off Point Carolus. Stuart had climbed onto Anne’s bunk and fallen asleep. She looked at him constantly: the shape of his nose, the texture of his hair; his delicate fingers and beautiful hands. Adrift now, a great fatigue came over her. She killed the engine, turned down the radio, and quietly climbed onto the bunk next to him, curling her body into his.

Some minutes later—hours later?—she awoke with a start and bounded to her feet to check her drift. Stuart stirred awake. “Everything okay?” he asked.

“Yes, fine.” Anne struggled to gather her bearings. “I fell asleep.”

“So did I, apparently, in your bunk. Sorry about that.”

“No need to apologize.”
You can sleep in my bed anytime
. “You hungry?”

“I think I probably am. Where are we?”

“Off Carolus, about a mile, drifting west on an ebbing tide.”

Anne found a mother humpback whale and her calf and followed them at a distance while Stuart sifted through papers and checked his handheld GPS. The soft light of dusk leaked through bruised clouds stacked against hard mountains. The sea mimicked the sky, dressed in gray. Anne heard gulls chattering up the last act of summer, diving for small fish, and beyond that, a small search plane beating a path between Bartlett Cove and George Island, scouring Icy Strait for Old Keb. Poor guy. She remembered Gracie’s bent frame and musical voice: “Why can’t they just let him go?”

Anne killed the engine again and drifted. For how long she couldn’t say. Stuart had fallen asleep again, this time sitting up, his chin on his chest. Time passed strangely. Then a presence arrived. Before she turned, she knew it. Bird and shadow in one, a spirit, a moment. Raven. Corvus the Contrarian, black talons tapping the white deck. Practically strutting. Anne looked right at it and could see the bird disliked this, so she lowered her eyes. The raven paced, then flew away, circled back and flew away again in the same direction, west. Around its neck, Anne could see a faint collar of white, the feathers of old age.

“Did you see that?” she asked Stuart.

“What?” He snapped awake.

“That raven?”

“No.”

“I think it was leading us in the direction of Old Keb, crazy as that sounds.”

Stuart wore an inscrutable smile.

“What?” Anne said. “What’s up?”

“I know where he is. I know where the canoe is.”

“You do?”

He held up the direction finder. It wasn’t a GPS, it was an ELT, an emergency location transmitter. “The night they left Portage Cove, I was there. I walked down and touched the canoe as they were preparing to leave.”

“And you put a silent beacon on it?”

“Under the thwart, the middle seat, a small one.”

“You’ve known this entire time?”

“Yes and no. For days it gave me no signal. I don’t know why. But now the signal is strong. I’m thinking the canoe must have been in a sea cave, or under a cliff.”

Anne stared at him, then threw her head back and laughed harder than she’d laughed in a long time. It felt sensational, like great sex. “That’s brilliant,” she said. “You’ve known this whole time and told nobody?”

“Yep.”

“You want him to be free, don’t you? You want him to die wild?”

“I don’t know about that. Part of me never wants him to die. I just want him to get to wherever it is he wants to go.”

“So do I, Stuart. So do I. Is that wrong?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Yes . . . like everything else.”

“I think you were right, what you said back in Jinkaat, about Keb’s journey bringing people together. People deserve to be a part of this.”

“The Marine Reserve Service task force won’t allow it. They won’t allow all these boats into Crystal Bay.”

Stuart shrugged. “What can they do? I’ve heard there are boats headed this way from Juneau, Haines, and Sitka. What can the Marine Reserve Service do? Arrest everybody? Stop everybody? Impossible.”

Anne laughed again.

“I put one of these on Charlie Gant’s boat, too, before it disappeared from Jinkaat, but it’s given me no signal. It makes me think he and Tommy found it, or it fell off, or the battery died. I was in a hurry and probably didn’t attach it as well as I should have.”

“Do you know where Old Keb is now?”

“I think so. But I need to tell you, there’s a downside. What I’ve done is illegal. Affixing a tracker of any kind to a car or a boat or a plane without a warrant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure.”

Anne found herself biting her lip. Stuart added, “I wanted to be able to find him in case he ended up cold and starving. I didn’t want him to die slowly, and in pain, that’s all. Sometimes you have to break the rules. You know . . . for the greater good.”

That was it. Anne dug out the satellite phone from deep in her duffel, and dialed Paul Beals. According to her message log, he’d called her three times in the last two days. After several rings it beeped. “Hi, Paul, this is Anne. It’s Monday, late afternoon, almost evening. I’m on the
Firn
with Deputy Ewing from the Jinkaat Sheriff’s office. We’re in Icy Strait looking for Keb Wisting, like everybody else. We’ll probably stay out and anchor up somewhere. I’ll call in the morning, if I can.”

If I feel like it
.

She hung up and imagined Paul taking the news poorly. And Ranger Ron? He too would not be happy, pacing in his Kevlar vest. She called Director Kate Johnson. What time was it back in Washington? After several rings a woman said, “Hello.”

“Kate Johnson?”

“Yes.”

“This is Anne Bellestraude, in Alaska. I’m the whale biologist you visited in Crystal Bay in June.”

“Yes, Anne. Paul’s been trying to reach you. Where have you been?”

“I’m on my boat in Icy Strait. If you recall, you said I could call you anytime if I had any information, or needed anything.”

“Yes, of course. What is it?”

“I’m part of the task force searching for—”

“Keb Wisting, yes. He was up the outer coast on a French yacht and is now suspected of being somewhere near Dundas Bay in his canoe, probably traveling at night. I speak with Paul daily. Have you found him, found Keb?”

“No, but I know where he is.”

“You do?”

“It’s a little complicated. What I want to tell you so that you know before anybody else is that I’m going to help him, if I can.”

“Help him?”

“Yes, Old Keb. I’m going to help him.”

“In what way? What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know, exactly. I’m figuring this out as I go. I think I’m going to help him go wherever he needs to.”

“And where’s that?”

“I don’t know, but he will. He’ll know. He’s an old man who knows these waters better than anybody. All he wants is to be left alone so he can travel the way he used to through wild country when he was a boy, and things were quieter and less complicated.”

“Anne, I know you’ve got good intentions. So does Paul and his task force. Have you spoken to Paul?”

“I left him a message.”

“He wants to do the right thing too; he needs your help. You’re a smart woman and this is a sensitive matter that needs to be stopped before it gets out of hand. You can stop it, and give it a happy ending. You can bring Keb Wisting home safely. If he enters Crystal Bay and goes up to the glacier, PacAlaska will use the stunt to its advantage.”