Authors: Paulette Jiles
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ar away to the east a great landmass called Siberia was throwing weather at Lighthouse Island and the northwest coast at velocities that were beyond description. Creeping acres of debris rose up on the waves and glistened with bodies, propane tanks, truck tires, barrels. Cliffs collapsed into the surf. The waves piled up to thirty and forty feet, streaming with foam, and struck the stone-bound coast in a haze of spray, and the atmosphere was dense and gray. Lethal surprises awaited them every mile.
The
Bargage Maru
flew north six points off the wind with a sail like metal, hard, full of hurricane. Captain Gandy and a redheaded man whose face looked as if it had been boiled were seized on the wheel. Their feet skidded on the wheelhouse decking. Gandy was glad of the storms. He and his crew could live through them and Primary Cruisers could not. Primary's charts were outdated but Gandy knew his way from shoal to cape and far beyond, and far beyond. They climbed up the striped waves living out the fearsome grammar of the sea with sliding, creaking cargo.
Something came over the side riding a wave and struck the cookhouse and washed off the port side.
What? Gandy shouted.
Barrel!
The sixty-foot schooner was a traveling junk yard, a floating thrift shop that sailed up and down the coast carrying anything Gandy could make a profit on, to all the little settlements both hidden and disclosed. Gandy had kinky blond hair and an earring made of woven gold wire. He was short. He had an underbite that made a fence of his lower teeth shining out of his beard. His hair sprang out of his head in corkscrews as if it had been wound up inside and then released. He would buy and sell almost anything and so on the deck of the
Bargage Maru
crates of stolen hair dye, twists of hard tobacco from the far south, expired pharmaceuticals and engine parts surged against their straps in the storms. A pile of scrap metal shrieked rust on rust and steel on steel. In the hold crates of stale rations and rope, bales of used clothing, illegal fish, and a contraband crate of rifle and shotgun parts slid and smashed at their bindings.
The schooner tore north at ten knots, sank with the dropping motion of a boat in a following sea, and then she began to rise again. Wet men appeared out of the rolling white water, along with the engine parts, the stolen hair dye, the expired pharmaceuticals, and so on.
The smell of fuel-pellet smoke; Gandy signaled another crewman to take his place and lifted his binoculars. They slid past the lighthouse on the small island. Gandy saw a man struggling along the elevated walkway in a blowing coat and his head down. He was pushing what looked like a wheelchair with a load of something. The man lifted his head; his face in the binoculars' wallowing lenses was lean and the eyes deep shaded. Gandy thought he saw a figure moving about in the glassed-in cupola of the light tower. And then the
Bargage Maru
slid past and Lighthouse Island and its two sinister occupants disappeared in the tearing rain.
How long have they been there? the mate shouted.
Saw them last time, Gandy cried. There's a directional antenna on top of the light tower.
I know it, the mate yelled. Been there forever.
They're going to starve if they aren't being resupplied.
Inspectors for Primary. Spies.
Maybe.
They left the lighthouse behind and after an hour they passed the ruins of Left Hand Bay. Only the black chimneys were left standing on the gentle slope of a delta, running cascades of ashy water into the sea. A Primary gunship had shelled the place for noncompliance and assaults on inspectors two years past; ten dead, many injured. The men stared at it and one of them lifted his streaming watch cap and held it briefly to his heart and then put it back on.
Another scrapper ship was coming past to windward on the opposite tack, a triangle of jib and a shortened mainsail. She trembled and sprayed and slid along on her side. Light flashed from her bow. It was the
Closed Third,
under Captain Britt Contreras. She signaled:
Primary processor xx'd up on Goat Shoals R there people on Lighthouse Island?
Confirm primary processor claim salvage Yes people on L.I.
Cruise ship grounded Barkley Sound, per overland news, take it
.
Will not chance the graveyard. Light up at Sat Inlet. B.v.
B.v.
Bon voyage.
Gandy went below and sat with Sparks at the VHF marine radio. Hot tea rolled out of their cups and scalded their knuckles. They drank it down like molten amber. Gandy dried his hands on a bunk blanket and rolled a cigarette. The air in the cabin was thick as a fabric with smoke and cooker fumes and wet hair.
Did you pick up Primary?
I think their dispatch station is washed out.
Okay, then turn that off, said Gandy and Sparks reached for the FM dial where Big Radio was playing. Female Voice One was announcing the end of December's Christmas Week with Charles Dickens.
And so we move through the year to the short days of January,
she said, and behind her voice was the sound of gulls and a murmuring. Another voice.
What? Gandy grabbed Sparks's hand. Listen.
Sparks stared at the FM. What is that?
It's changed. Is there another voice in the background?
They listened but the ship was noisy with wind and water. Gandy put his scarred hands into his armpits to warm them. The voice said,
Now I see you. I see your boat. Not yet in peril on the sea.
It sounded like Female Voice One but it was speaking
behind
Female Voice One.
The bastards have grabbed Big Radio, Gandy said. They are breaking it up. Some other station is breaking in.
Where's the uplink? said Sparks. I thought it was down in the south of the world.
You wonder, eh? You wonder.
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S
aturday Inlet was a dwindling settlement of ten cinder-block houses. At the shoreline trash seethed and lifted in the wash of the sea. The houses, lined up at the water's edge, held on to their roofs as if by the hat brims. They were the color of smoke and jittering light poured out of the small windows from television screens. Wind chargers spun in the hurricane winds, driftwood knocked with timid sounds at the ruined dock.
Up on the steep sides of Saturday Inlet waterfalls spouted and roared and the streams ran around the cinder-block houses sweeping away oily liquid refuse. Nearly all the people had been moved here ten years ago from somewhere in the endless city to work on the dock but Primary Resources had misplaced the paperwork; the repair supplies never came and the foreman never arrived, so no one worked at repairing the dock. The people lived like lost domestic animals, slow and indifferent. They sat all day and watched scenes of hygienic people in designer interiors pour down refreshing drinks, somewhere far away in the great city and now the unbelievable new program where they executed criminals on live TV. It made them understand something deep and primitive about the agencies. Their paralysis grew.
They survived on supplies delivered once every two weeks by truck. They regarded the landscape as alien, incomprehensible, treacherous. The mountains rose straight up all around them in a still and silent wrath, hackled with dead fern.
It was said that once a woman walked up the mountainside and had met her double and was led away, and her body was not found for two years. A man had set an illegal net without applying for net privileges but when he pulled it from the water something charged out of it and took his leg off at the knee. So they heard from the truck driver. They stayed in their houses, close to shore. From time to time children shouted over the water at the far cliffs to hear the echoes, they climbed out on the collapsing dock, they set fire to the schoolhouse as if to make themselves a childhood out of charred boards, floating trash, broken metal; stories to tell in years to come, wild escapades. In the end the children went back inside and shut the door. The abandoned echoes called and called.
Sometimes at night the people heard the voices of the great horned owls that sounded like a soft, otherworldly jeering. Steller's jays shot like blue rockets down the inlet screaming and a river fell into the far end of the inlet in a series of furious, white cascades. Seals like silkies rose and stared at the lights onshore and sank again and when they were underwater they became magical beings. Fish both big and little and squid with wormy arms went creeping about the sea. A blacktail deer up in the mountains strolled among rusted and abandoned skidders with all the vanished rain forest shining in her eyes.
N
ow great storms had arrived. They melted the soil, and rocks came tumbling down through thick stands of ferns, gorse, the whins and stubby alders, like rolling heads. The wind ripped off parts of the roofs and water drained into their beds. The truck had not come in for a month and hunger stared in their windows.
And so the Five Companions met together to decide what was to be done.
Colin the Radio Guy ran into the storehouse. Inside three others shifted from foot to foot to press water from their rubber shoes. The storage bins were empty and the tools gone except for a carpenter's level and a come-along.
What's that you got, Colin? Hey, hey, Colin?
Colin wiped rain from his glasses. It's, um, a bannock.
Where'd you get the flour?
From that barrel in the battery shed.
The inspector classified that as spoiled last trip.
Well, we've got to eat something, you know. The road is out.
I don't believe you.
Colin stepped to the doorsill to run out into the cold rain, out of this dank storehouse with hungry people running spoons along the floor of the bins to scrape up grains of quinoa and grits. Septic tanks had overflowed in their sodden graves and blue sewage with fibrous wavering tissues slid in sheets among the houses.
Nobody believes me, said Colin.
Why do you meet up there? a woman said. You're going to get us in trouble. She splashed from foot to foot. Why don't you fix the door so the rain don't come in? You Five Companions. What a stupid name. Do something besides give yourselves stupid names.
Fix it yourself, said Colin.
With what, said the man. All the tools traded off to Gandy. He's a hard man. I wouldn't have taken a place's only tools.
But you traded them, didn't you.
Well, I wish we hadn't. And you up there messing with a radio. This place is going to get a reputation. We're going to end up in reports, here. Then the man shifted his padded coat collar closer around his neck. His damp white breath poured out. God, God, God, what are we going to do?
You could get fish, then, said Colin. Set nets.
That was tried, said the woman. A man tried it once. She stared down into her steel bowl and its handful of semolina. So I don't know.
C
olin bolted through the rain and wind clasping the bannock under his coat. It was warm against his heart. He scrambled uphill on a path like a running stream and far above him the bottle house winked with light through alder leaves. It was a clean light shining and chased with ferns. Sweet wood smoke rolled out of the chimney and downhill under the whip of the wind. Up there were friends, there was light and talk and a hot drink. Colin, Colin, where have you been?
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T
he Five Companions had begun to meet together three years ago after the failure of the midnight Squid Fest. Each of them had been sent to Saturday Inlet from some other place except Chan. It was understood that Chan had escaped from a labor camp somewhere far inland because his hands were blocky and stiff from years of heavy work and a puckered scar ran down one forearm, and his upper lip on the right side had been deeply cut. He had appeared one morning sitting on the dock, without a ration card or an ID or work assignment papers.
People came out of their houses in the early morning and stared at him.
Fell off a processor, he said. Swam ashore. You never saw me.
Right, they said, and sat on their doorsteps for a smoke and tea and looked the other way.
W
hen Chan first arrived in Saturday Inlet he lived under a rock up on the mountain for a while. He was a broad, strong man with curling black hair frosted with gray from hard times and hunger. He hiked up the mountain and from there he saw a long white beach and beyond that an island with a lighthouse. He came back down to Saturday Inlet with a backpack load of bottles that had washed up on the white-sand beach and then went back for more. Before long he had enough to start the walls of a bottle house. The cinder-block people watched him stride off into the unknown mountains and come back alive.
Chan sang aloud and wrapped his broad head and curly black-and-gray hair in a pirate's bandanna. He traced out pig paths in the thick undergrowth. He walked up the south arm of the inlet, a jutting cape, and stood on the gleaming black of a coal seam and watched clouds in lengthy rafts skimming the sea and its foils and its shining. On the distant horizon he saw a Primary Resources heavy cruiser plowing through the rollers, throwing spray. He saw the supply truck lurching down the switchbacks at the head of the inlet with its load of supplies. Chan held out his palms to the sun.
Lord, he said. Great and powerful Lord, help me kill my enemies.
He fished without a permit and gathered driftwood. He came down through the bracken, the parchment-colored fern, through the spiny gorse, carrying a backpack of coal and cloudberries in season, traded some to Captain Gandy for an FM radio. He made pig traps and butchered what he caught; their blue guts rang with chiming flies. He roasted the piglets slowly, lovingly. He wove nets and lifted them streaming from the sea rocks. He searched the long white beach where the waves came all the way from the Sea of Okhotsk and were choked into the Aleutian Trench and then rolled into the gyre that circled the North Pacific so that net floats set sail from Japan and came to the scattered inhabitants of the northwest coast like happy rubber unbirthday presents. Many things washed up in Saturday Inlet and Chan knew how to make something useful from all of them except the Feet. For some unknown reason they were always left feet.
The people who lived at the shoreline were nervous about him and did not like him but didn't know what to do about it. And so he was called the Uncanny.
F
our people finally hiked up the hill to help build the bottle house. Colin the Radio Guy; Oli the schoolteacher in her wide flowered skirts; the Toastmaster in his top hat; Everett bald and ink-stained and anxious. Boredom and idleness had worn them down to a chronic disquiet, a pointless unresting anxiety. Each one of them felt privately that he suffered from some kind of mental disease that had to be hidden from everyone else.
So they came up the hill and helped to lay in rank after rank of sparkling vodka bottles and whiskey bottles. They became entranced by the project. It was the pointless, happy play of children. It was like playing house. Nobody was making them do it nor were they being paid in credits or coupons. They cemented a bond among themselves just as they cemented bottles layer on layer until the walls rose over their heads. They found themselves laughing together with sticky hands among the crushed ferns.
Chan taught them how to weave nets, how to dig a pig trap. So from time to time they feasted and took in the sweet smell of a driftwood fire and said this was good, the hot shower device was good, and the roof planked with mill sidings and the fireplace and the stone floor. It was all good. As they worked they listened to Chan's FM radio and the voices of Male and Female One, the immortal stories, the yearly round;
Blood and Sand,
Carton mounting to the scaffold, Akhmatova's
Requiem
.
We don't have a permit for this, said Everett.
So? Chan looked around at the bright new leaves of the alder brush and springing fern surrounding the bottle house, piles of chips, sludging cement waste, pig remains. He took up his ax to bring down saplings for the walls of a compost bin. It's done already. Who is going to tear it down?
Maybe. Well, no one.
We got to get something going here, said Chan. People down there living on food deliveries, waiting for some year Primary realizes, Oh shit! Here's the paperwork! Dock not fixed! Slap foreheads, look around, move those citizens! How many years? Let's have a bonfire, roast something. Chan's pronunciation of
f
and
r
was slightly off because of the deep scar through his upper lip. Oli, the former schoolteacher, noticed it. She found it appealing somehow.
Chan's ax flashed and he made three expert slashes, three alder saplings down.
A Squid Fest! cried Oli. She gave a half turn that made her pieced bright skirts fly around her ankles. We will boil squid and sing. I know a song . . . “Adrian's coming, over the sea . . .”
But nobody came to their Squid Fest. A clean spring night, a thin moon. But the people in the cinder-block houses were not used to the taste of shellfish and the squid looked like entrails and tasted like seawater. There was no reason to sit outside in the cold air when inside there was light and music and beautiful people and the soul-gripping new execution program. The camera shots that made them want to scream or flee but they did not.
The Five Companions with their hopeful fantasy name sat alone at the shore; Chan and Oli the schoolteacher, and Everett who longed to produce books, Colin with his homemade FM receiver and his father the Toastmaster who wore a top hat. Oli lifted her bright soprano voice in three lines of a remembered lament and then fell silent. The bonfire burned down and they were left with stars and waves in a lonely celebration by the sea.
They met again at Eastertime, when the fawn lilies bloom, and the blackberry and cloudberry are covered with minute, shattering blossoms, when the broom up on the naked mountains over the inlet is swept with yellow flowers, when
Alice in Wonderland
and segments of
Lord of the Rings
come on Big Radio, the time of fantasies and quests. From those departed voices stories flowed and ran in caverns measureless to man, beyond the sunless sea.
And so what if, there now? said Chan. A blackened kettle sat on the fire. Flamelight winked from all the bottle ends as he jammed a length of rebar in the coals, shifted a stick. What if? Look here. He held up a shining china egg in his hand. Here. Found on the long beach. Take it and speak and as long as it is in your hand, nobody will interrupt you or else. Say I. This is so your head can run loose, hey, a getaway car.
What if what? Everett wiped his balding head. You mean what if people came to a festlike gathering, a better one, something more kind of happy fun?
Affirmative. Nobody owns your head, said Chan. Nobody's eaten your brains. Who will take it? The china egg shone in his hand and the kettle grumbled and spouted.
Yes, they have eaten our brains, my dear sir, said the Toastmaster. He lay down his net shuttle. Too late, too late. Long ago human beings could make up stories. He gestured at the radio with a bony old hand like a signpost pointing to a dead past. No more. They were different, sir, and possessed different brain lobes.
No, no, said Oli. She lifted one foot and stamped it on the floor. Imagine it, it's free. Imagine a midsummer night festival and people who can sing; it would make echoes, and the bonfire light would shine on the waves. There. I just imagined it. She picked up her knitting needle and stared at her work through a slippery fall of hair come loose from its braid.
Colin the Radio Guy said, Make them up, why not? It's just voices. I hear voices all the time.
Tell us stories about China, said Oli. Chan? China, across the sea. She did not look up from her knitting. She had unraveled old torn sweaters from the clothing bales. I have looked it up in my only volume of
The World Book,
which is C.
I'm Kazakhstani, said Chan. He handed Oli the egg. Go.
She took it from his big, scarred hand slowly so that she could feel his hand on her own if only for a moment. Oli's hair was a rich, sliding brown and she was not much over thirty and her rubber shoes, squamous as they were, were laced with bright ribbons.
What if we called ourselves the Five Companions? she said. And sang every night? Well, once a week. Oh, if only we had a tuning fork! She handed the egg to Colin.
What if I asked Gandy to bring me a dog? said Colin.
My son, said the Toastmaster. You would have to hide it. It would bark. They bark.
No interrupting, said Chan. No disagreeing, because then everything turns into an argument. He got up and rolled a teacup between his battered hands and then lifted the kettle. You got to get a grip on how this works, fellow companions. We did it in labor camp. Common in labor camp, relief, hope which springs eternal in April, usually. Chan turned to see the caution in their faces. Yeah, labor camp. He reached down and took the crackled china egg. Listen, I imagine a system of justice that is just. Hearty men who rise at night to the sound of a bell to take up arms. I imagine a snowy night and a bottle of wine. Cloudberry wine. You don't think we can do it?
We can do it.
T
hey met night after night and passed the egg from one to another and it clattered on Oli's copper rings, it made a dry sound in the hands of the Toastmaster, Colin tossed it in the air and caught it again as he spoke of a new antenna and voices from other continents. Everett brooded over it before speaking, like a hen. They invented a village of people who made their own houses. They gestured from hard uncushioned chairs and said, What if there were chickens and we could get a shipment of chickens? What if we built a fish smoker? What if houses could not be entered by Primary inspectors without permission? Imagine that people came together and cleaned up the trash. What if we had a map of the interior showing where the roads go? They spoke their new thoughts and shells broke loose from their wits like the casts of nameless sediments. They imagined daring journeys and distant kingdoms, lights on the water sent out in quavering lines from midnight ships, voyages to splendid coasts, courage and bravery, people who sang.
Oli imagined people building their own houses up the mountain on seven levels and that every level had a name. That spotted dogs sat upon roofs and barked up and down at one another. That the lights that shone out of rainy windows were the golden lights of lamps. Through the umber and rust colors of alder brush and broom, in the steep up-and-down world of leafy odors and glinting rainy roofs and ochre nap of bracken, glimpses of the shining sea, people would file down the seven levels, carrying lanterns, singing, to come to a festival at the new-made dock. She imagined a schoolhouse with a mossy roof whose teacher had old books with maps that showed the polar snows and the drainage area of the Columbia River and the palms of California.
Everett dreamed of printing books. The only one he possessed was stitched together from wallpaper. He would record the stories of old people. He invented the old people. Everyone has a story they must tell, everyone has lived through events they have not chosen but they must make of these events the plots of their lives and Everett would record them all. He imagined his book in people's hands, all the people of the coast sinking down into their beds at night with candles lit and moths circling like planets and they would read and read and read.
The elderly Toastmaster had found his top hat and tuxedo among the used clothing carried in on the supply truck and had always thought of himself as a celebration arranger. Now he spoke his dreams aloud and planned spectacular Squid Fests where he would be master of ceremonies and tell jokes, convincing everyone to donate to those in need.
His son, Colin, reached for the china egg to invent technological tales of radio waves but then Colin saw them squint and brace themselves for imaginings they could not understand. Well, he said. I imagine a message board on air. Where people can radio in and say, Apples for sale. The salmon are running. A Primary gunship is on its way to Nootka. Now hear this, Nootka: Get together at the dock and chop their lines when they tie up. Tear up their applications. Set their ship on fire.
The other four Companions stared at him in shocked silence.
Where will this lead? cried Everett.
We're getting wild here, said Chan. He rolled a cigarette and lit it, took two puffs and threw it in the fire.