Killing Grounds (4 page)

Although even that was better than lying awake worrying about the boy on Meany's boat, or the expression on Auntie Joy's face as she looked at Meany, to which Kate could still put no name.

She woke next morning to sunshine and the smell of coffee. Old Sam was gone, but he'd left the pot on the stove. Mutt was stretched out on the focsle, basking in the morning sun, the remains of what looked like the knee joint of a humpback whale lying next to her. With some trepidation, Kate sidled up to the starboard galley door and eased it open a crack to peek around the jamb. No halibut heart, and the gunnel was scoured clean. Old Sam must have taken it uptown with him for show-and-tell over the bar. Immensely relieved, Kate closed the galley door firmly behind her.

It was a long, narrow room the width of the beam of the ship, less the deck space between bulkhead and gunnel on both sides. A bench ran along the forward bulkhead, with a table bolted to the deck in front of it. The opposite bulkhead was lined with sink, cupboards, stove and refrigerator, this last a modern-day concession to the finicky habits of Old Sam's sissy deckhands (this said with a choleric eye rolled in Kate's direction). He still grumped about missing the cooler that had hung next to the starboard-side door, the one he had used for thirty years, and the cupboard and counter space usurped by the refrigerator. Rectangular windows lined the forward bulkhead sill to sill, letting in a lot of light and satisfying Old Sam's inquisitive eye with a 180-degree view of his surroundings.

The immaculate room was trimmed with wood varnished to a deep chestnut glow. An old oil stove, polished to a dull black shine, put out a steady wave of heat and caused the kettle sitting on top to give a low, comforting whistle. Kate poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down with her feet up on the seat to take advantage of Old Sam's view.

The harbor was still and quiet in the early-morning hours, the fishermen sleeping off the last period. Boats were rafted two and three together, leaving barely a skiffs width of water between the slips. Transient parking was, as usual, empty of so much as a kayak, nine hundred feet of vacant slip space. This while the rest of the harbor was jammed to the breakwater and the fishing fleet jostled for moorage.

Kate detected the fell hand of Shitting Seagull.

She looked up. The harbormaster's office, a small, neat house sitting on the edge of the fill just before the dock and ramp that led down to the harbor, seemed deserted.

But then maybe Gull was only luring potential offenders into a self-incriminating complacency.

Behind the small boat harbor was the town of Cordova. Perched at about one o'clock on the curve where Prince William Sound met the Alaska coastline, it was a stair-step settlement built of wooden clapboard houses, many of them on pilings pounded into the sheer side of the steep coastline. Cordova had once been the southern terminus of the Kanuyaq River & Northwestern Railroad, a hundred-mile track that carried copper ore from the fabulous Strike It Rich lode in the Teglliq Foothills from 1911 until 1936, and many of the buildings looked like they dated from that time.

The town's tiers culminated in the twenty-two-hundred-foot peak of Mount Eyak, a sharp point that contrasted with the rounded peak of Mount Eccles, a whole hundred feet higher. Between them the peaks guarded a narrow strip of land linking Orca Inlet, Cordova's access to Prince William Sound, and Eyak Lake, a glacier-fed body of water whose opaque, gray-blue tint changed only when it froze a hard, unforgiving white. East of Eyak Lake began the thirty-mile-wide Kanuyaq River delta, a vast expanse of rushing, silty water interrupted by migrant sandbars the size of Manhattan. Between the rapid current and the glacial silt, a bowpicker averaged one impeller per summer. Kate wondered sometimes if it was worth it. She would have bet most fishermen did, too.

It was a big town, as far as Alaskan towns went, supporting a population of three thousand. Access was by boat or plane; the only road out had been under construction when the 1964 Alaskan earthquake hit. The project was abandoned, although a recent governor had made a stab at restarting it from the other end, only to have his Cats halted in their tracks by the Environmental Protection Agencybut not before the Cats had gleefully bulldozed the spawning grounds of entire schools of red salmon.

The town was half-asleep in winter and wide awake in summer when Outsiders from Anacortes and Bellingham and Seattle flooded Cordova in drifters and seiners. A few married locally and took their brides south for the winter. Fewer still stayed the winter to fish for king crab, to build homes and raise families and become sourdoughs instead of lowly cheechakos, a distinction they took smug pride in pointing out to their fair-weather colleagues. The competition to be high boat was fierce and enthusiastic, and pitched battles were fought at sea and refought on shore, fights over corking and short counts by tenderssomething the fishermen were always accusing the tendermen of doing and the tendermen were always denying in duels of honor at local bars.

North of Cordova many glaciers funneled around the peaks of the Chugach Mountains; from the south the Mother of Storms took her best shots. In spite of both, the area had a temperate climate, which meant it rained a lot.

But not today.

An insistent growl made itself evident low down in Kate's belly. She drained the last of her coffee, roused Mutt and went out in search of breakfast.

The Coho Cafe was a shoebox-shaped room with booths down one side, kitchen and counter down the other, and half a dozen tables jammed between. A grimy bank of windows stretched across the far wall, overlooking the harbor, from this angle nothing but a forest of masts. Other than a signed, matted and framed picture of Susan Butcher and Granite on the wall behind the cash register, the decor was utilitarian, Early American Greasy Spoonbleached-out tan Formica on the counter and tabletops, faded blue linoleum underfoot, the latest coat of white enamel paint on walls and ceiling already yellowing beneath an accumulating layer of yellow grease. There wasn't a matching set of chairs at any table, and the counter stools were flaking chrome from their legs. Coffee the color and consistency of diesel fuel was served in thick white porcelain mugs, food on thick white porcelain plates, and the silverware was plain stainless steel worn so thin you could cut your tongue if you were unwise enough to lick your spoon.

The cafe was packed, people rafted at tables the way boats were rafted to slips in the harbor. The swinging doors between kitchen and counter were constantly in motion and the jeans-and-T-shirt-clad waitresses rattled around the room like pin-balls, lighting up one table of raucous, raunchy men after another. "Order up!" blared through the pass-through every thirty seconds.

A heaping plate of eggs scrambled soft with ham and home fries whisked beneath Kate's nose, followed by what had to be the world's largest cinnamon roll, and her stomach growled again. There wasn't an empty chair in the place, and she was debating whether to wait for a stool at the counter or to move on down the street to try her chances at The Empty Mug, when she heard her name called. Looking around, she saw an arm waving at her from a corner booth next to the windows. "Kate! Kate! Over here!"

She didn't recognize the voice, and she couldn't make out who it was against the light from the window, but her stomach made up her mind for her and she threaded her way through the tables and chairs and wildly gesticulating hands.

Arriving at the booth, she discovered Lamar Rousch. He was occupying his entire booth in isolated splendor, probably because he wore the brown uniform of the fish hawk, by any other name smelling as sweet as a state trooper.

"How are you, Kate?" Lamar said, pumping her hand. "I just ordered. Sit down, take a load off."

"Sure." Kate slid in opposite him. Terry Nicolo scowled at her for consorting with the enemy.

Kate returned a bland smile, which widened into something more genuine when the waitress arrived. A cheerful, gum-popping teenage heartthrob with long blond hair tied back in a ponytail, she looked maybe one day out of her cheerleader's uniform. She plunked down a plate of eggs over easy, link sausage, home fries, two slices of wholewheat toast and a side order of French toast.

"Hey, Kate." The heartthrob wrestled an order pad from a rear pocket that was extremely reluctant to give it up. All activity in the restaurant paused until the extraction was complete. The pad slid free and up went a collective sigh at the resulting wiggle as the jeans slipped back into place. "What can I get you for?"

"Everything," Kate said comprehensively.

The heartthrob cocked her head. "Three scrambled soft, bacon crisp, home fries, biscuit with honey?"

"And coffee," Kate said, bowing her head in the presence of greatness. "You know me so well, Ruthie."

Ruthie flashed a grin and stuck her order pad back into her hip pocket, sliding it home with another tiny wiggle. The fisherman sitting directly behind her choked and coughed coffee all over his bacon waffle. "Just you remember to tell Dandy Mike I turned eighteen last month."

"You bet," Kate lied, and Ruthie swished off, if it was possible to swish in jeans. Judging by the whiplash her wake caused, it was. "So, Lamar," Kate said. "When's the next period, Wednesday or Friday?"

that it would make him look like an ex-Marine. It only succeeded in drawing attention to the plump pink curves of his babycakes cheeks, giving him all the authority of a cherub. He spread whipped butter over his French toast in a painfully even layer. "Give me a break, Shugak. I haven't even got the escapement numbers yet, let alone the cannery pack."

"Yeah, but I saw you coming down Calhoun Creek late yesterday afternoon. You must have some idea how many fish got up the river."

Loud voices sounded from the counter, followed by a crash of crockery. "It's Craig off the Rose," Lamar said, rising up to peer over the back of the booth. "And Les off the Deliah."

"I thought Les broke it off with Craig," Kate said, leaning to look around him, just in time to see Joe Anahonak grab both men by the scruffs of their necks, shake them like dogs and assist them ungently out the door, to the accompaniment of general applause.

"He did," Lamar said, settling back in his seat. "Looks like he started up again."

"Or not," Kate said, leaning back to look out the window. Craig and Les picked themselves up and marched off in opposite directions, one with a rapidly swelling eye and the other checking to see that he still had all his teeth. "I saw Les cork Craig's line yesterday about two minutes after the official opening."

"Ah." Lamar nodded his appreciation of the difference.

Ruthie arrived with Kate's breakfast. The eggs were perfect, the bacon crisp, the spuds done and the biscuit hot. Conversation, at their table at least, suffered a momentary lapse.

It went on nonstop around them. One table over, a burly man in a checked wool shirt and a gimme cap with a Gulf logo on it said, "I didn't do squat in herring this spring. Those goddam Japs are getting pickier about what they'll take every year."

"You're lucky you caught anything to show them," the man next to him said. His eyes were bright blue in a tanned face, lines fanning out from the corners, the result of squinting at the same horizon for thirty-five years. He was the only one at the table without a hat, which probably meant he was the only one at the table with any hair left. It was pure white and thick and combed carefully back from a broad brow. "We had five boats and a spotter plane and we barely caught enough to pay for fuel."

There was a grunt of agreement from the table next door. "There hasn't been a decent run of herring since the spill."

"It's not just the herring," someone else said. "It's the salmon. If it weren't for the hatcheries, we'd be up the creek our own selfs."

"Yeah, but because of the hatcheries we've got humpies coming out our ears and no place to sell them."

"Why don't sport fishermen have to apply for limited-entry permits?" someone else demanded. "Tell me sport guides aren't commercial fishermen, and I'll call you a liar."

"They ought to have to fill out fish tickets, same as us," someone else agreed.

"And pay the raw fish tax."

"Not to mention the enhancement tax," the first man added, "to restore the creek habitat they tear up every year with those friggin' speedboats."

"It all goes back to the spill," the first man insisted stubbornly, and there wasn't a lot of disagreement.

Watching their faces, Kate saw anger and a consistent, pervasive bitterness that would never go away. The ten-million-gallon, eight-hundred-mile-long spill of Prudhoe Bay crude was nine years old, but it might as well have been yesterday. These men had been fishing Prince William Sound since they were old enough to walk the decks of their fathers' boats. They fed their families and paid their mortgages and put their kids through school with what they wrested from the jealous grasp of the Mother of Storms.

When the TransAlaska Pipeline project had first been proposed, shortly after the discovery of nine and a half billion barrels of oil and twenty-five trillion cubic feet of natural gas seven thousand feet below the surface of Prudhoe Bay, these same fishermen, who individually had more hands-on experience of Prince William Sound than any twenty tanker captains, drunk or sober, had lobbied long and hard for an overland, transCanada route, as opposed to the all-Alaska route that would culminate in Valdez and require shipping by tanker.

Supported in their efforts by economists and environmentalists alike, they were roundly defeated by a coalition of local and state businessmen frankly drooling at the prospect of opening up to development an eight-hundred-mile corridor of Alaskan wilderness. The fishermen freely prophesied disaster, and the grounding of the RPetCo Anchorage on Bligh Reef sixteen years later was a Pyrrhic victory for their viewpoint.

There is no worse triumph, Kate thought, than the one that results only in saying, "I told you so."

She leaned forward, fork momentarily suspended, the better to look at the faded T-shirt worn by a fisherman a few tables down. Don't Shoot, it read, I'm Not Denton Harvey!