The Big Both Ways (10 page)

Slip rowed through the rain for an hour and a half. They were around the first point, the clouds began to lift, and the rain tailed off to a light mist. By noon they could see distant mountains to the west and east. Puget Sound felt as if it were a broad river valley flowing north. He rowed in silence. Ellie sat in the stern wrapped in a tarp. Annabelle spun her umbrella and the yellow bird ruffled his feathers and squawked as if to register his disgust at the progress they were making.

George walked down the marble steps toward the morgue. His footsteps made a lonely echoing sound. The air smelled like iodine. Outside he could hear the rattle of a trolley rolling down the hill toward the water.

“When did he come in?” George asked. The attendant flipped through the sheets on his clipboard.

“I dunno, I guess a couple of hours ago,” he said.

“Who brought him?”

“Ambulance from Edmonds.”

“Edmonds? Why’d they bring him all the way down here?”

The attendant was a kid, maybe twenty, with his hair slicked back and a single spit curl in the center of his forehead. This kid was some kind of sheikh who only wanted to be done with work so he could get into his good clothes and dance down at Parker’s Dance Hall. He had listened to only a few, but already he was growing tired of George’s questions.

“You wanna just look through the paperwork yourself?” he said peevishly.

“Yeah, thanks,” George said, and grabbed the kid’s clipboard.

“Is this some kind of joke?” he asked the sheikh, who now had his attention on the inside story of a
Police Gazette
.

“What? I dunno,” he offered.

“They’ve got this guy Dave Kept listed as an accident victim?”

“I dunno, why?” the kid said without looking up.

“They found his body in the trunk of a car sunk in a slough.”

“Sounds like a
bad
accident,” the kid said.

Looking at the last page, George saw the signature line where Tom Delaney had signed off on the transport for the stiff.

Without asking, George walked back into the cooler where two bodies were laid out on metal tables with a two-inch lip around the edges. One was uncovered. The dead man’s mouth was wide open as if he were trying to gulp the harsh white light spraying down on him from above. The toe tag said it was David Kept, accident victim, the man from the trunk of the Lincoln found about a mile from the northern end of the interurban.

Dave Kept had been beaten with something heavy and fairly soft. There were the beginnings of large bruises across the side of his face and jaw. There were bruises on the hands and forearms. It looked like his wrists were broken and the thumb on his right hand was dislocated. Dave Kept had put up a good fight up until the last few moments when someone stepped up close to him and put a bullet through his brain. The entry wound was discreet and not big enough to collapse the skull or move a lot of meat around. The bullet was a fairly small caliber, probably a .38. The halo of powder
stippling around the dark hole told George that the shooter had been standing close. The shooter had gotten everything he or she needed out of Kept before he was put down like a dog.

George made some notes and pulled back the sheet from the second body. Ben Avery’s eyes were shut and his mouth was closed. Someone had cleaned the mud off of him from the dump site. Ben had a small hole in his right hand and another just below his rib cage. George took his pencil and worked the point into the entry wound below the ribs. The flesh was cold and stiff as clay so it took a bit of doing to get the pencil in, but it told him the small-caliber bullet had traveled upward through the body and that Ben had probably had his hand over the barrel when the shot came.

He flapped down the sheet so that it settled slowly over the features of the corpse, the accumulated air gradually escaping, the harsh light making the floating shroud almost transparent. The compressors for the coolers buzzed and rattled, and George threw his pencil away.

“Hey!” the kid at the desk yelled from behind him. “You got to get out of here. I’m locking up. Don’t you guys have nowhere to go at night?”

“No,” George said. He bent down to grab his pencil after changing his mind about needing it. “Goodnight,” he said, and walked through the dirty swinging door.

The sun was going down behind the western mountains. The gray water of Puget Sound pulsed for a few moments with streaks of silver before a cool shadow eased toward the east. A brisk wind pushed the waves and the dory along. Everyone but Slip was asleep, curled on the floor of the boat and covered up with whatever they could find. Ellie was wrapped in the canvas tarp. Annabelle had pulled her umbrella down over the triangular seat in the bow and wrapped herself around the bird’s cage.

Slip pulled on the oars. His hands were bleeding now and his neck ached from craning around to look where he was
going. After several hours, he stopped looking forward and only scanned the water to the stern. He kept the dory’s stern at right angles to the direction of the waves. If the wind shifted, so too would his course, but it didn’t matter to him. They were making headway, putting distance between themselves and the muddy riverbank in White Center.

Slip took off his damp wool mackinaw and laid it over his knees, hoping to let it dry out a bit. While he did this, he set the oars inside and the dory drifted in the waves. He pulled his tool kit closer so that he could wedge his feet against it and the boat as he pulled against the oars.

“You don’t like to get too far from your tool kit,” Ellie said with a sleepy voice. She sat up in the stern, pulling the green canvas tarp around her as if it were a mink stole.

“Nope,” Slip said.

Ellie’s hair was tousled and her eyes seemed to take on the gray of the sky. She took a long breath and formulated a question. Then she stopped and leaned back against the stern of the boat.

“I’m sorry for getting you mixed up in this,” she said. “But you know, you asked for a ride.”

“Let’s just get up the coast a bit and then we can go our separate ways,” Slip said.

“All right,” she said, and she wiped rainwater from her face.

“So who is this girl?” Slip nodded over his shoulder to the umbrella in the bow. “I can’t figure you for a mother.”

“I thought I told you. I had sister. She was sickly all her life. Then she got healthy and married an upstanding man, a minister in a country church. Then as goddamn luck would have it she and her husband died in a fire and Annabelle came to me.”

“Quite a family,” he muttered.

“Thank you,” she said, still smiling.

Ellie and her sister Beth had grown up on the northern Idaho border. Their mother had thrown her first husband out after he could
not give up drink. Their stepfather was a sober man who raised horses and mules for the government firefighters and the army. As soon as she could sit astride a horse, Ellie had begun breaking stock. She went with the men to move the winter herd in from the lowland range and helped cull them out in the spring. Beth had spent summers hanging on fence rails and handing her father his shoeing tools when he was bent under a workhorse with feet the size of dinner plates. The sisters had waded in the shallows of the nearby stream catching frogs in their hands and had built a swing that was long enough to carry them out over the deepest pool. The girls had not gone to elementary school, but their mother had managed their education by teaching them math while doing carpentry and memorizing poems from one of the leather-bound books she kept near the fireplace. Before she was ten, Ellie had been able to recite most of the first book of the
Odyssey
as well as the poems “Crossing the Bar” and “Hiawatha.” Their mother taught them some Latin and Greek even while they learned their letters in English.

Newspapers made it out to the farmstead in weekly packets and the parents read them by the light of guttering candles at the table. The world was changing so fast around them that they couldn’t imagine being able to keep their girls isolated on the shrinking island of their farm. They gradually came to the realization that the girls would have to go to school in town. They could be schoolteachers or nurses until they found husbands.

The two sisters reacted differently to the world beyond the farm. While Beth re-created the pastoral universe of her childhood by canning peaches for her timid husband’s flock, Ellie scandalized her family by openly smoking cigarettes and using slang. Ellie had heard Helen Flynn give a speech in Spokane and had stood with her mother as the dour suffragettes marched in rank down the middle of the main street, their sashes proclaiming a woman’s right to vote. She listened to the speeches and wasn’t moved by the ideas,
for the ideas seemed plain and self-evident, but she was moved by the tone and the posture of the women who spoke.

By the time Ellie was seventeen she had run away with the barnstormer to an airfield in Spokane, and when the barnstormer moved on, Ellie’s mother had turned her wild girl out. Beth married the upstanding preacher and moved to Montana. Ellie rode a clattering freight train to the coast, looking for her biological father she had never met.

They were about two miles offshore. Waves humped up from the fifteen-knot wind and sizzled white as they crested near the boat. The air around the skiff was a rumble of wind and hissing waves. Slip was too tired to be afraid. He leaned against the oars, letting the weather fill the hollow of his skull. Three gulls with yellow legs flew upwind to meet the dory, landed in its wake, then dove for something unseen beneath the surface. Occasionally, small fish would slap the surface, drawing the gulls’ attention. After a few dives the gulls pulled up into the air and rode downwind into the distance. Slip kept rowing. He shipped his oars just once to double-check his tobacco tin in his shirt pocket. Ellie had given him back his money and he wasn’t going to lose track of it now.

The night came on suddenly. The day was a gray twilight one moment, then the lights of Seattle were glittering like constellations in the dark. The whitecaps glowed in the darkness and their hissing seemed more pronounced. With the darkness coming on, the wind began to build, and soon the waves were breaking over the side of the dory. The seawater stung their skin with a burning kind of cold.

“We got to go to the beach,” Ellie said from the floor of the boat. She was shivering now. “Pull us to the right.”

“Starboard,” Annabelle piped up from under her umbrella. The bird squawked as if in agreement.

“Starboard.” Ellie stood corrected.

“I see a light on that black section of the beach. It looks like a fire.” Ellie was up now, looking over the bow.

Slip didn’t speak. His hands and back ached. He pulled on his portside oar and the wind cut across the stern quarter. Every third wave dumped water into the boat. Ellie bailed with the bucket, while Annabelle cupped her hands and heaved icy pearls of water over the side.

The dory ground onto the rounded stones of an exposed beach. Waves sizzled up the rocks and dumped into the dory. All of them were shivering now.

“What do you say if I look for a path to the fire? We can go up there together,” Slip said, and without waiting he began stumbling toward the trees. He walked in a wide arc around the bow of the boat until he found what looked like a deer trail up into the beach fringe. “Let’s go,” he said.

Ellie tucked the girl into a wool blanket and a tarp in the bow of the boat, then walked through the beach fringe over slippery gray rocks clattering underfoot. Fir trees swayed in the darkness, their trunks creaking like a ship’s mast in a blow. Up an embankment was a railroad bed with a single set of tracks running down the middle.

Soon voices boomed out through the dark, and they both saw the shimmer of a campfire painting golden lines on the underside of the trees. The roadbed ended at a small trestle bridge across a ravine, and beneath the bridge was an encampment of about ten men around a campfire. The flames lit up the unshaven faces of the men, who were squatting on their haunches and passing a bottle slowly around the circle. A shabby man with a game leg was breaking up a freight pallet with a hammer, feeding the wood into the fire. Sparks twisted up into the air and the fire made a popping sound.

They all turned their heads as Ellie and Slip walked toward the light. Two men stepped back into the shadows. One took off running. The others stared up at the couple in their wet clothes without speaking or offering any help.

“You got anybody chasing you?” the woodchopper asked in a monotone.

“We were in a boat. We saw your fire and pulled into the beach,” Slip said.

“Got wet, did you?” the same man asked.

“Yes sir, we did. Mind if we share your fire for a bit?” Ellie said, stepping forward into the bubble of firelight.

The woodchopper paused and looked her over for a moment. “As long as you ain’t bringing the bulls down on us, I suppose it would be all right. Got any smokes?”

Ellie reached into her coat pocket for her soggy tailor-mades. She didn’t smoke cigarettes that often any more but she always carried them as a way to strike up a conversation with men on picket lines or in the alley behind a sweatshop.

“Got some but they’re soaked through.”

“We’ll take care of that.” A skinny man with a scarecrow hat reached across and took the pack, plopped it into a frying pan, and picked at it with a stick. “Papers might be ruined but we can come up with something,” he said, looking hungrily down into the pan as he held it over the flames.

“You headed fishing?” the big man grunted.

“No, not really,” Ellie said, running her fingers through her hair to dry it by the fire.

“I’m sorry we don’t have much in the way of accommodations for you, ma’am,” the little man said.

“This fire is more than enough right now.” She caught his eyes and smiled.

“We’ve got some gear and one more person in our party. We’ve got some food in the boat we’d be happy to throw into some mulligan if you figure on cooking some up.” Slip pointed with his thumb back toward the beach.

“Sounds fine with me,” Jake said. “He got a big appetite, this other fella traveling with you?”