The Big Both Ways (17 page)

But now that he stood on the dock looking up at the steel bluff of the
Admiral Rodman’s
hull, his suitcase and leather grip sitting at his feet, it was dawning on him that there was no way he could ever be ready for such a trip. Alaska was just too strange and too far.

But he was going to go. He would telegraph his sister later, maybe in one of the towns along the way.

The
Admiral Rodman
carried cargo and passengers from Seattle up the Inside Passage to Skagway and returned home with cargo from the north country. From the dock, George watched a crane loading a stripped-down commercial truck into the hold. Then there were netloads of cement bags, slings of kiln-dried lumber. There were crates and pallets of flour, men yelling while the winch engine strained at the loads. There were the sounds of passengers rattling up the gangway. There was a light rain falling from dark clouds. All the activity seemed to lift him up the gangplank and onto the ship.

George had never left Washington State in his life. He had only ventured east of the Cascade Mountains to satisfy Emily’s filial loyalty. To him the sheltered world of the Sound, with its blackberries and rhododendrons, moist ground and dripping cedar trees, was his reality. The world and everything to the north was hard and distant. Alaska was virtually empty on his imaginative map. There were gold mines and fishermen, brown bears that could fill a room in his small house, and now there were two adults and one kid who could tell him about the murder of at least two men.

George settled into the closet-sized stateroom, which became very warm after the ship got under way. George took off his overcoat and jacket and hung them up on pegs behind the door. He lay down on top of his blankets and stared at the painted pipes and ducts that crisscrossed the ceiling. All during the packing for the trip, George had to suppress his urge to ask Emily,
Three pairs of pants or two? Would she like two adjoining rooms so Benny could have a room of his own?
The questions would push through his foggy brain and almost bubble up out of his throat before they dissolved when he opened his mouth to speak. He reached out to her now in ways that he never recognized before. He didn’t feel so much lonely or sad, but sleepy, as if he were just dozing through this part of his life. Soon enough he would wake up in the house on the crest of the hill, and the air coming through the open window
would be full of a boy’s shenanigans and the smell of a pie Emily had made from their good friend’s berries.

The hull shimmied as the engines gained speed, and the inside of the ship clattered with the activity of people stowing their gear. His stateroom must have been near the galley because he could hear the echoing of pots being moved about. Soon the air began to smell like turnips and coffee.

George closed his eyes but he did not dream. He thought of Ben Avery and how he died. He thought of three people leaving Seattle in a small boat. He had asked around, and apparently it was not uncommon for fishermen to row small dories to the fishing grounds in Alaska. They were mostly Norwegians or Finns and they would meet up in early spring when the worst of the winter storms were over but the prevailing winds were still from the south. They would group up in fleets of twenty or thirty boats and would row their small dories up the eight-hundred miles or so of Inside Passage. Sometimes they would set their sails and get a few days of sailing in, but mostly it was hand-pulling some twelve to fifteen hours a day. They would certainly be in shape to hand-line for salmon or cod in Alaskan waters after their six-week trip.

But these fishermen were tough. Their hands were as dark and as hard as polished oak. They could sleep under a tarp in the rain as well as most people could sleep in a featherbed. The logger, this Jack Wilson, might be tough, but probably not tough enough to haul all the three of them eight-hundred miles. He would come into port with bleeding hands and probably at least one less passenger than he started out with. The
Admiral Rodman
made stops at every little port of call on the Inside Passage. The stops were only long enough to unload and load passengers and cargo, but there would be enough time for George to ask around about a bedraggled-looking bunch coming in off the water, with an injured man, a fast-looking woman who flashed her legs, a bookish little girl, and a yellow bird in a round wire cage. Even five minutes on the docks would be enough time to find out about a group like that. They
would stick out like the Second Coming in any of the villages up the coast.

Deep within the interior of the
Admiral Rodman
and well below the waterline, three men were being shown to a storage locker by a nervous oiler who knew he was risking his job.

“There’s a barrel of water and a bucket for your toilet. I’m the one who keeps the key and I’m the only one should be coming in and out. Each night you can go out on the crew deck for some air. Only one other person onboard is in on this with me. The others won’t know you. If anyone sees you walking around, don’t talk to them. Just come back here. They’ll think you’re new. Just don’t talk to nobody. You get me?”

The three men nodded. Each carried a duffle bag. Each of them looked warily at the opening to the small storage locker while the oiler sorted through his keys. “It’s going to be tight but there’s a vent. You’ll be all right.”

“We appreciate this,” William Pierce said to the man.

“I’m only doing this because I liked Dave Kept. He shouldn’t have got it like he did.” The oiler unlocked the door and swung it back to show the small space beneath a tangle of pipes.

“He was a good man,” McCauley Conner said as he slid his bag into the tight space. “We won’t screw this up.”

“Will it be a rough trip?” Raymond Cobb asked.

“Not for a while. Puke in the bucket if you have to, but don’t make a big deal of it. Someone hears you in here, they’ll make me open up for sure.”

“How rough?” the little fireplug of a man asked. His face was pale and a prickly sweat dotted his forehead.

“Don’t worry about it,” the oiler said, helping Cobb through the door. “It won’t get bad for a few days.” Then he closed the door, leaving the three men in a crawl space with a barrel, a bucket, and just enough room to lie down.

“How bad?” Raymond Cobb asked the darkness.

George didn’t remember going to sleep until he jerked awake at the sound of a man walking up and down the companionway ringing a chime and telling the passengers that the first seating for luncheon was available in the dining room.

George found the clattering dining hall and sat at a table with a pastor and his wife. After grace they sat in silence and slowly ate the watery soup the waiters brought around in shallow bowls. George waited to see if he was expected to make conversation with his tablemates. When the reverend took out a Bible and began reading silently to himself, George took out an old packet of letters and a telegram from his coat pocket. All of the correspondence was from his sister, and the telegram had just been delivered before he left his house.

George’s sister was named Rebecca. She worked at a mission school in Sitka, Alaska. George had corresponded with her over the years. But in the last twelve months, except for one letter after Benny’s death pleading with George to come and visit, there had been no letters from Alaska. As children, the siblings had played in the brambles together and had made forts within the hedgerow of scotch broom running alongside a neighbor’s yard. When Rebecca was sent away to live with an aunt and attend a Presbyterian school, George became the sole and silent audience for their father’s rambling lectures on the injustices of the world.

He opened the envelope and read her telegram.

George—Have started making plans for you.—Love, Rebecca
.

His stomach tightened. He folded the telegram on top of the older packet of letters from her that he had saved over the years. He didn’t know why he had saved them all, each letter having only been read once.

“Why didn’t we just buy a ticket?” Ray Cobb asked the others. “I can already feel myself getting seasick.”

“Will you shut up about being sick,” Pierce said. He laid out a blanket on the greasy steel deck.

“We been through this, Ray. We don’t want to show up on the ship’s manifest or on any customs forms. We’re just going to slip up there and bring her back, and no one’s the wiser.” McCauley Conner dipped out a cup of water from the barrel and handed it to Cobb in the dark.

“How the fuck are we going to find her?” Cobb said before taking a drink.

“We go to Ketchikan and wait. It’s the first big city in Alaska they’ll come to,” Pierce said.

“What if they stay in Canada, or cut inland?” Cobb handed the cup back.

Pierce flopped down on his blanket and crossed his hands behind his head. “They might stay in Canada for a while, and if they do, we just work our way south. They won’t go inland because the country’s too rough and too desolate. Some Canadian cop’s going to notice them and start asking questions for sure. They’re in a boat. They’ll stick to the coast. Bet dollars to doughnuts they’ll go through Ketchikan on their way to Juneau.”

“Why Juneau?” Cobb started laying out his blanket.

“Cause they’ve got a messy mine strike happening up in Juneau. She’ll have Party members there, and plenty of buyers if she wants to stand on a soapbox. It’s made for Ellie Hobbes.”

“Why don’t we just fucking kill her and be done with it,” Cobb said. He rubbed the knot growing out of his scalp and swallowed hard just to keep the contents of his stomach in place.

Annabelle was sleeping on a pad on the floor of the forward compartment. It was the space where the curved walls of the hull met at the bow. Her head was two feet from the tip of the hull, and beyond that the anchor chain ran from the winch down through six fathoms of 43-degree water to the anchor buried in the muddy bottom. She could smell the pine tar and hemp calking in the
planks as she lay in her new bed. The boat was a menagerie of sounds: the ticking of the galley clock and the flame in the oil stove rumbling through the darkness on leathery wings. At times a gust of wind shrieked through the rigging while the anchor popped in the bow roller and the boat swung to face into the wind.

As sleep came on she felt herself melting into the floor of the boat. But something clawing against the outside of the hull drew her up. She felt warm and light with worry now, imagining something clawing against the hull of the boat, trying to lift itself out of the icy water. She stumbled up the stairs and found herself on the deck looking out over the dark anchorage.

A cold wind needled through her jacket and nightgown. Her bare feet ached on the sticky decking. She hunched her shoulders and found thin pockets of warmth under her clothes. It was a night for seeing ghosts. But Annabelle was a serious girl and did not believe in ghosts. Even when she wished them to come.

The anchor light on top of the mast cast a pale glow over the water. She could see that down close to the hull there was a mat of seaweed with sticks laced through the rubbery fronds. As the boat swung on the anchor chain the mat pushed against the hull, and the pieces of wood, which were as varied in size as human bones, rattled against the hull.

“What you doing out here, girl?” Johnny asked from behind her.

She jumped and spun around. The rigging cut tangled shadows across his body but he was smiling and he had his hands out to her as if he were coming to take her someplace safe.

“I thought I heard something,” she said.

“I did, too,” Johnny said. He took her hand to take her back inside. “I heard you out here. Do me a favor, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I don’t want you coming out here by yourself.”

“No. I won’t,” she said. She padded down the stairs to her bed on the floor of the forward compartment. Slip and Ellie were breathing deep and steady breaths. Dead to the world.

ELEVEN
 

No one else was awake when Johnny started the engine and the anchor chain began to rattle in the locker next to the crew quarters. Annabelle scrambled up the steep steps to see what was going on. Slip and Ellie were slow to roll over in their bunks. The sunlight was just slanting in over the anchorage. The
Pacific Pride
was cupped in the crescent of a cobbled beach that was flaring gray and green as the thin new daylight washed across it. Annabelle padded up silently behind Johnny on deck at the anchor winch.