The Big Both Ways

ALSO BY JOHN STRALEY

The Woman Who Married a Bear

The Curious Eat Themselves

The Music of What Happens

Death and the Language of Happiness

The Angels Will Not Care

Cold Water Burning

The Rising and the Rain

Cold Storage, Alaska

The Big Both Ways
is a tall tale, meant to be told around the fire. There are some historical figures and events included here, but mostly this book is a product of my sometimes feverish imagination. All mistakes or possible screwy interpretations in the text rest with me and not the many people who inspired and assisted in the writing of it.

My heartfelt thanks to:

Robert DeArmond, who rowed a dory from Sitka to Tacoma in order to get to college in 1931. He made the trip alone and some sixty years later wrote the tale in his fine book
Voyage in a Dory
(Arrowhead Press, Sitka, Alaska). One of Alaska’s preeminent historians, Robert’s advice was indispensable to me.

Olga Klietzing, Bill Hills, Fred Matson, Emmett Watson, Curtis Morrison, John McClelland, Ken Dola, Rosemary Ahern, Sara Juday, and Ellen Wheat, for their help, advice, and wisdom.

Curtis Edwards and Hugh Straley for giving me the writing tools.

Ray Troll and Karen Lybrand for the extraordinary cover art.

Gary Gouker of Gouker Custom Machine Shop for giving me a job during the lean years of writing this book. No writer ever had a better patron.

Finally, to Jan Morrison Straley and Finn McHattie Straley, who listened to all my doubts and gave me back more confidence than I could ever muster by myself. Thanks are not enough. I can only take comfort in my belief that their love is a big river and it flows both ways.

ONE
 

Even though she had never traded sex for money, she was nothing now but a whore with a bloody nose. It was a hard fact to accept … but there it was.

She looked at the man curled in the trunk of the car, blood oiling over his white shirt. She had his broken watch in her hand, its intricate guts at a standstill, the second hand trembling between two painted tick marks on the face. It was only then that she started to cry. Her sobs leaked between her bloody fingers as she tried to stifle the sound. A mile to the west a car hissed over the pavement, and somewhere in the woods a screen door slammed.

She stepped toward him then. Tears flecked off her chin as she lifted the cold arm to place the watch back around his wrist. She was thinking that he might as well keep it, for however stupid it seemed, even in a world gone mad a broken watch could still be right twice a day.

It was May 1935. In April, Amelia Earhart had set a speed record on a solo flight from Los Angeles to Mexico City, and when she took off again she set another from Mexico City to New York. In the American southwest, a blizzard of dust scoured the tired farmland
and the Roosevelt administration began relocating dust bowlers to communal farms in the Territory of Alaska. In August, Will Rogers and Wiley Post were to set off in their Lockheed Orion for Point Barrow, and on June 24, the miners of the Alaska-Juneau gold mine would riot when scabs started marching up the street to the hiring hall. All of these things would take on a new meaning to Slippery Wilson in the months to come, but just then he was looking halfway up a big-butted Douglas fir tree listening to his bull buck tell him something through a wad of chew.

His given name was Jack, but his parents had called him Slippery. Like many people during the Depression he wanted to be hopeful. Others had told him that life was hard but he had not seen it that way. He had always been stubborn in his optimism. But now he was beginning to wonder.

“Well, I guess you better scamper up there and cut him down,” the bull buck said as he spit out a stream of tobacco juice onto the duff. They were standing in the northern woods of the Skagit River drainage, in Washington State. The wind was sour with the smell of pitch. Seventy feet up in a broken tree, Jud White was slumped dead from his climbing rope, where a partially rotten limb from the fir he was topping had hit him square in the chest. High up in the tree, Jud’s torso was at a sickening angle to his waist, his axe swinging from its lanyard attached to his belt.

“You better get up there and cut him down,” the bull buck repeated.

It was just after sunrise and the tired men around him had stopped rattling through the brush. Gray jays flitted in the slash of tangled branches. The hook tenders, who had already oiled up their bones with the first hard half hour of clambering down the cut, stood watching him, their faces toward the sun, like flowers in their round hard hats. “No, I’m sorry,” he said to the bull buck, who was standing flat-footed amongst a tangle
of rigging cable. “I’m going to draw my pay.” And he started walking out of the woods.

It had been three years since Slip had left the failing ranch in eastern Washington. Roosevelt had promised reclamation and electrification. The high desert country east of the Cascades would be a new Eden. Slip had watched the men hitchhiking with cardboard suitcases to the dam sites. He had picked apples, put up hay, and milked his family’s cows for his entire life, but when his father died and the bank took it all, he decided to follow those men up the river. As if to show him the rightness of his choice, the old cow kicked him one last time while he loaded her into the buyer’s truck, and even then he thought only of the thick, sweet milk she had given.

He sold his logging boots for five bucks to a cowhand with a cleft palate who had been killing himself working on the rigging crew in his slick leather boots. Slip rolled his two changes of work clothes and a black suit he had used for funerals into a burlap bag that he tied off with a hank of rope. He pulled on his red mackinaw, grabbed his cap, and slung his bindle of clothes around his back. The last thing he did before walking out to the highway was to pull up the loose floorboard near his bunk. Tucked between the joists, Slip had hidden his tool kit. It was a long, open box with a few of the tools he had gotten from the farm before the men from the bank had come for their inventory. There was a fine Swedish handsaw, a brace, an assortment of bits, and a set of chisels that had never been abused. He had a square and a plumb line, a long-handled framing hammer, and a smaller claw hammer for finer work. He had a trim saw and a folding rule. There was an assortment of punches and nail sets and a carpenter’s level. He had a handmade knife with his initials stamped into the leather sheath. The box had a strong leather sling and a canvas cover so he could travel easily without fear of spilling his tools on the ground.

He dug into his toolbox for a tobacco tin. He opened the tin
and put two twenty dollar bills inside. This forty dollars represented his pay for the last two weeks, minus the money the company took out for their trouble. With that forty dollars he had well over two thousand dollars saved, and two thousand dollars could buy a future, with any extra going toward happiness.

Jud White had loved logging and was eager for Slip to love it too. Jud believed in it, he loved the bunkhouse and the tools. He loved the sweat and the smell of it. The rest of the boys worked for their wages and to build something somewhere else. Jud had been right square in the middle of his life. He woke up each morning exactly where he was supposed to be. He had been fully alive cutting trees, right up until the second that one killed him.

Slip shouldered his way past the men crowding toward the foreman’s shed. Already word had gotten round about two jobs that might open up. The skinny men drifted out of the brush like scarecrows come to life. They had been tenting off in the woods or in dry sections of culvert waiting for just this: someone to die or someone to quit. They didn’t care. They needed the work.

He grabbed some letters for friends in the bunkhouse, promising to post them when he got to a mailbox. He shook hands with the Filipino cooks and bent down to shake the hands of the truck mechanics in the grease pit. He wished them all good luck, then he walked south and stuck out his thumb. The saws on the landing were rattling in the cut as a crew lowered Jud White’s body down from the tree.