The Big Both Ways (14 page)

He looked down at the bower. His head throbbed under the bandages that Ellie had tied. His ribs seared with each breath. He could only take three steps before having to stop to let the pain subside. The woods ahead were a dense tangle of blackberries and alder scrub. His hands and arms were freshly scratched and the cuts on his chest were open and bleeding again. He looked back toward the dory.
Maybe just a few more days
, he thought to himself, and he turned back down the hill.

As the sun was going down on the fifth day, Slip started loading the dory. The wind was calm. Ellie had done a good job keeping Slip’s injuries clean but he bled every time she peeled the bandages off. Slip sat on the sand as Ellie and the girl pulled the dory out of the brush and eased its stern into the water. Ellie helped Slip climb in. Annabelle, who hadn’t said a word to either of the adults for almost two days, brought Buddy out of the brush and got into the bow of the boat. Ellie pushed off and settled in the stern, facing the logger as he started to row.

The new night was warmer than the others. Slip’s hands were stiff and his shoulders still hurt. His old cut from the nail in the warehouse had scabbed over but opened up when he started to pull on the oars. His head was full of bees. He rowed north as the sky above Puget Sound turned from silver to black with a flare of red over the Olympic Mountains. He rowed until his hands started bleeding again and he kept rowing as the girl and Ellie fell asleep. He pulled and the water mumbled something he couldn’t quite make out. He pulled and the wind whispered something just out of reach and soon he too was asleep.

George Hanson had little left to go on. He had asked his men to keep shaking down the Floodwater ops who patrolled the train lines. He drove to every small port north of the hobo jungle to see if anyone had seen an injured man and a woman in a small boat. He even asked a pal of his with a fishing boat to cruise up and down the shore and let him know if he saw anything. George called the navy and the customs patrol boats, but he had gotten nowhere. He put the squeeze on Fatty but the fat man played cute. He had a pile of evidence, but his case was going cold.

He reviewed the Everett case files and wanted to reinterview the union boys from Everett to see where the nervous Raymond Cobb might have gone. The Everett cops shook them all down except two, Pierce and Conner, who had quit the country apparently, because no one would say where they were. George had
opened a file on each of these new missing men. Each file had a name and a photograph and very little else.

He spent as little time at home as he could manage. Emily stayed to herself in her room. When he tried to get her to come down and speak with him she always promised that she would, but hours passed and the door never opened. He cooked her a pot roast on the weekend but it remained uneaten. One night he sat on the porch as the darkness came on. Kids were running down the sidewalk in the soft spring air. All he wanted was for her to come down from her room. The moths bumped against the screen door. A chill rode on the air from down the street. George turned off the lights and slept on the couch.

The horn blast shattered Slip’s sleep. He sat up abruptly and held his hand to his forehead to shield his eyes. The sail hung limply at the front of the dory and the sun was just beginning to warm their clothes. A large black boat was bearing down on the dory. The sizzle of its bow wake was close enough to sound like a mountain stream.

Slip lifted the little girl and set her down gently on the stern seat. He stood up and waved his arms overhead. A man in a navy pea coat and watch cap stood on the flying bridge on top of the boat. He cranked the wheel hard over and the boat swung parallel about thirty feet from the dory. A gentle wake rolled under the two boats.

“I thought I had me an abandoned dory,” the skipper of the boat called across the distance. “You need some help?”

Ellie was just waking up on the floor of the boat. She looked up at Slip, who was struggling to stand.

“We’re doing okay. We were just taking a nap,” Slip said.

“You got some fishing gear set out?” the driver asked, and he idled the big boat’s engine down.

“No,” Slip said, knowing that it wasn’t enough. The boats rolled on the easy waves. A handful of gulls hovered above the stern of the black boat.

“You sure you’re okay? It’s kind of crazy you being out here like this.”

“Naw, we’re fine. Just … traveling north. Had the wind last night and thought we’d make up some time.”

“Where you headed?” the driver asked, and he climbed down the ladder to the main deck.

Slip looked around Puget Sound. The mountains to the west seemed closer than before. The mountains to the east were hanging back in the distance. It was a mild day and only a few clouds were running south to north above them.

Slip couldn’t think of anything to say. The man in the pea coat stared at him, passing a coil of line from one hand to another.

Ellie stood up suddenly in the dory and yelled across to the black boat. “We’re headed to Alaska. Juneau, Alaska,” she said in a firm voice. “We got work in the mine up there.”

Slip glared at her as if she had suddenly burst into flame. “What?” he mouthed.

“Long ways north,” the skipper said, looking at Slip’s bleeding hands. He walked to the stern of the black boat and picked up a stern line. “I’m going north. I can tow you a ways if you want.”

Slip started to shake his head when Annabelle stood up beside him. “Can I bring my bird on board?” she yelled.

“Well …” said the skipper, making a show of looking around his old wooden boat, “Seeing as how I left the cat at home, I don’t see why not.” He threw a line across the distance to Slip and began pulling the small boat closer.

She was an old wooden fishing boat with a great squared-off stern and a boxy house built on three-quarters of the deck space. Her hull was made of massive oak ribs with cedar planking. All the lines on deck were coiled neatly and she looked to be freshly painted. She was called the
Pacific Pride
and her skipper was Johnny Desmond.

Johnny was headed north to a cannery up a fjord in British Columbia to deliver some lumber for making shipping crates.
He had gotten this job through a cousin who knew the cannery manager. Johnny’s house in Tacoma had become overrun with his wife’s relatives, who had gone bust in Texas. Johnny had told her he was doing this one job and would be back in two months but the truth was he was scouting out a new place to live.

He had heard of a new town being built on the Alaska coast to the west of Juneau. A new town built for the fishing industry. It was called Cold Storage. He had heard about it from a Swedish fisherman in a Chinese restaurant near the Tacoma docks. A brand-new town, without in-laws in a place where freeloading Texans would not follow. Johnny wanted to go and see it for himself.

The
Pacific Pride
had left Tacoma two days before and Johnny had been hoping to pick up a crew in Seattle. His regular crew had taken off for jobs on a bigger, more profitable boat, and Johnny had not liked the looks of any of the men who were wandering the docks in Seattle. He had been planning to hire a deckhand somewhere up the coast, and when he saw Slip in the dory he figured he was a hand-line fisherman who might want to work his way north.

But when he looked down into the dory and saw the battered man, a blonde woman, and a little girl with a caged bird, Johnny sucked in his breath and considered cutting them loose. But he didn’t like the idea of leaving that girl out there in the middle of the Sound.

“You need a doctor for that man?” Johnny called down to Ellie.

“I don’t think so. I think he just needs to heal up.”

“Can he walk?” Johnny asked, thinking more about asking whether he was going to live through the day.

Annabelle was the first to clamber up over the side. She smiled, said “hello” and shook Johnny’s hand, then leaned over and asked Ellie to hand the birdcage up to her.

Ellie helped Slip on his feet. He whispered, “Juneau, Alaska? Why didn’t you tell him we were going to the North Pole?”

Ellie narrowed her eyes at him. “Shush. It’s fine.”

Slip closed his eyes and tried to pull himself up the side of the
Pacific Pride
. With the first motion the pain from his ribs jolted down through to his legs and he buckled, so Johnny grabbed his arms and pulled him up over the side and laid him on the deck. Ellie climbed up and tried to get Slip back on his feet.

“He gonna die?” Johnny asked Ellie.

“Certainly not,” she said, and waved dismissively. “We got jumped by some guys on a beach a ways back. He took a bit of a beating, but he’ll be all right.”

“Jumped you? Who?” Johnny asked.

“Just some boys camped out by the railroad tracks. They wanted our boat and whatever … you know. They were drinking.” She said the word “drinking” as if it were turning sour in her mouth.

“We could put in up here a bit and you could talk to the police. Wanna do that?”

“No. Please, we don’t want to cause a delay.” The blonde waved her hand again. “It’s over now. They didn’t get anything. We pulled out fast enough. Police won’t make anybody heal up any faster.”

“Okay …” Johnny looked over at Slip and let his voice trail away. Then he looked over at the little dory floating next to them.

“How long you had the dory?”

“Just got her,” Slip grunted from the deck, wanting to save some face. “Friend of mine won her in a card game and he let me have her cheap. I heard there was work up north and the first thing I knew, I had company for the trip.”

“I know how that happens,” Johnny chuckled.

“Thank you for stopping,” Slip said, holding his hand out for an awkward moment until the skipper reached out his own and pulled him to his feet. The men shook hands quickly and a silence slipped between them.

“She’ll be right then,” Johnny said abruptly, as he took the dory’s bow line from Annabelle’s hand and tied a much longer line to the end. “She was made to trail behind a boat like this. Just give her what she wants when we get under way and make sure to shorten up whenever we slow down. Sound good?” Johnny smiled, and showed the girl where to attach the line to the big boat’s stern. She smiled in full agreement even though she had no idea what the man meant.

“All right. North it is.” And he went into the wheelhouse, put power to the engine, and cranked the wheel back around. Annabelle handed the line to Slip and ran into the warm wheelhouse.

Slip and Ellie walked unsteadily to the stern rail. Ellie leaned into him and asked, “Can you run a boat like this by yourself if you need to?”

Slip didn’t answer. He didn’t even respond with a look. He just let out the line until the dory trailed some sixty feet behind the
Pacific Pride
, then tied it off to a heavy cleat. He turned around to answer her but she was already inside standing by the oil stove.

It was late by the time George got back to his desk. It was long after dinnertime and he was afraid that he was going to have to stand for an ass chewing from the captain. He read through his messages. To his relief the captain had gone home earlier in the day.

He started logging his evidence into his locked file drawer, and was about to pick up the phone to call home when dispatch rang a call through to the anvil-shaped black phone on his desk.

“Did you go to the party up by the railroad tracks?” It was the voice of the same young man who had called him with the tip early in the morning.

“Yeah, I got there. Thanks for the help. You want me to get your name and address if there is any reward offered?” It was a feeble attempt to get the boy’s name but feebler things had worked in the past.

“Goodness is its own reward,” the voice said. George could hear music in the background. Scratchy jazz on a Victrola, maybe.

“I suppose that’s true,” George said, and tried to make out any other background sounds before the person hung up on him. “Listen, it’s been a few days since I heard from you. Can you tell me what happened to those people in the small boat that pushed off from the hobo jungle?”

“I don’t know nothin’ about that. They went up in smoke I guess.”

George listened to the voice. There was something about it that pestered his memory.

“I do know something though.” He paused. “The papers they got from the woman … the papers she got out of the car before she dumped it …” The voice paused again, maybe for dramatic effect, or maybe to make sure that George was still listening. “They weren’t all there.”

The voice was funny. Nasal or something, and it was like he wasn’t sure what to say next. He might have been reading from a script but he couldn’t read very well.

“How do you know they weren’t all there?” George asked.

“The papers were notes of informant interviews. Ben Avery’s informants. But the most important page was missing.”

The young man’s voice kept bothering George. He pushed too much air through his nose like he had a cold or something.

“Don’t you want to ask me what was missing?” the kid asked petulantly.

“Yes, tell me. What was the missing piece of paper?”

“It was the informant key. You know what that is?”

The record in the background hit a scratch and started to skip: a clarinet trilled up from a backbeat, over and over again.

“Yes, I think so,” George said. “When your agents gather information from informants on the street, they give the informants numbers or code names to protect them. The informant key has the name and profile of the informants themselves.”

“Paid informants.” The voice had a childish kind of emphasis. “Paid,” he said again.

“That’s right,” George said, as if talking to a toddler. “Paid informants.” George listened while someone in the background bumped the record player needle and the song continued. “So you’re saying that David Kept had some Floodwater informant notes?” he asked into the phone, which suddenly seemed much heavier.

“Paid for their services. Just imagine that,” the kid brayed and hung up quickly.

As he was driving up Madison, George was thinking about the day, images just rising up: the blood on the granite rock, the look of Tom Delaney as he turned and walked away, the tracks and drag marks walking into the water, and the good feeling he had when standing in the cool sunlight on the edge of those trees.