The Big Both Ways (21 page)

Ellie’s thin arm shot out and she said, “There … I think. There.”

Slip sat up and he was fairly certain he saw the
Pacific Pride
coming around the point of the islands to the north. There was the black hull and the large white wheelhouse. The big boat rolled through the water and a small cascade of foam angled out from the bow.

Ellie untied the dory from the tangle of kelp and Slip took the oars. Instead of trying to row directly for the boat, he followed the current and aimed for a course he hoped would bring them together. Ellie waved her arms and Slip pulled hard on the oars. Slip stared toward the pilothouse, and after a few minutes he said, “Something’s not right.”

The big boat was closing the distance between them but was not correcting its course to come close to the dory. The
Pacific Pride
was heading on a course far to their port side. Slip pulled harder but there was no way he could catch up with the
Pride
. Johnny was not slowing down and Slip could not come close. The
Pride
 … and Annabelle … were passing them by.

Slip bore into the oars with so much of his weight that he felt the muscles knotting up under his shoulder blade. He wanted to lift the boat out of the water but the little dory just slid along.

“Slip … Slip …” Ellie said, her voice rising in panic, “he’s not slowing down. Slip?” She was standing up in the dory now, waving her arms and whistling. The big boat was some fifty yards away from them now and was pulling away.

“There. What’s that?” Slip said and pointed.

On the back deck they saw the door to the pilothouse open. Then there was a flash of movement: Annabelle was standing on the rail with her umbrella in one hand and the birdcage in the other.

“Don’t do it,” Slip said.

“No … Honey …” Ellie said softly. She held her arms out helplessly as the girl jumped off the rail and into the foamy wake hissing on top of the green water.

Slip pulled until he thought all his joints were going to give way. Ellie stripped off her shoes and was about to go over the side of the dory.

“We’re going faster than you can swim in this water. It will only slow us down,” he yelled.

The girl pumped her legs and flailed in the wake. She let the
umbrella go and used both hands to try to support the cage. The
Pride
did not slow down, for Johnny was at the wheel and he assumed Annabelle was sleeping in the forward bunk where he had left her. The big boat rolled over the wake of another ship and the water was a crisscross of currents spouting up around the girl as she struggled. The cage sank into the water and the yellow bird screamed as he crowded to the top. The girl lay on her side with her mouth near the surface, trying to lift the cage up into the air, but the move only made her sink. She threw her bundle out in front of her and then she disappeared.

“Jesus, Slip,” Ellie sobbed, and the logger pulled toward the girl.

“Point to her. Point to her,” he wheezed, for he could not see her clearly now.

Ellie’s arms were shaking as she pointed straight over the bow. They could not see her but were watching the small garland of bubbles that appeared just under the top three inches of the birdcage that cleared the water.

They were a hundred feet from her when Annabelle came to the surface, struggling to open the cage. She rolled on her back and, lifting the cage on her chest, reached up and opened the door.

The bird flew out of the cage like a flutter of dry leaves, his high voice piercing the air with a shrill whistle. His yellow feathers were vivid and out of place in this gray-green world.

Annabelle clung to the cage, then kicked ahead, retrieved her bundle and jammed it through the cage’s open door. Her breath was blasting hard from her nose and she kicked with her legs like a panicked dog. With his back to the dory’s bow Slip could hear her clearly now, her lungs loudly pumping air, each rattling breath ending with a high-pitched grunt.

She swam toward the dory and Ellie kept both arms pointing straight at her.

“Tell me when I’m close,” Slip said.

Ellie said, “Thirty feet, maybe forty. Don’t stop now.”

Slip pulled five more strokes, and when he turned to see for himself, the girl was sputtering and coughing. She had sucked cold water into her lungs and wasn’t swimming forward anymore but was flailing at the water as if she were trying to pull herself out of a hole.

Slip turned in the boat and jumped over the side. The water was stunningly cold and all of his muscles seemed to cramp at once. He curled into a ball and could not swim.

The world slowed down and he felt nothing but numbness and needles of pain. He rolled so that his face was barely out of the water. He knew he had something to say, but his mind had gone slushy. “Can’t do it,” was all he managed.

There was a splash behind him and then he felt the blade of an oar tapping against his chest. He was able to uncurl his arms and clamp them around the oar.

Ellie was swimming back to the dory with Annabelle sputtering in her arms. Ellie held on to the dory’s stern with one hand and was able to get the girl and the cage up into the boat with her other. Then both Ellie and Slip were able to steady the dory and clamber in.

The
Pacific Pride
motored down toward Dodd Narrows as all the rest of the boats began to funnel through the tight passage at the beginning of slack tide. Slip lay cramped up on the bottom of the dory. Ellie wrapped Annabelle in a wool blanket and tried to rub her dry.

Above them Buddy flew in wide arcs around the dory like a yellow meteorite enjoying his first full moments of freedom.

TWELVE
 

Slip’s teeth chattered uncontrollably as he rowed the dory out of the current. Ellie and Annabelle clung together under a wool blanket. The
Pacific Pride
continued through Dodd Narrows, the skipper apparently oblivious of his missing passenger. Once through the narrows, unless he found her missing within an hour he would have to wait for the next slack to double back.

The yellow bird circled the dory, chirping and calling out as he worked his wings through the damp air hard enough for everyone in the boat to hear the pushing of the air in his feathers.

“Buddy,” Annabelle called, and she lifted an arm out from under the blanket. “Come here, Buddy.”

Slip scanned the islands to the east for an opening. The current was fair for them close to shore in the swirl, so he pulled toward the islands to the east, bumping and hopping along the changeable currents. His ribs and arms ached with each stroke but the familiar effort at the oars began to warm him.

Annabelle was shivering uncontrollably, her teeth clattering together and wet tendrils of her hair swinging back and forth in front of her eyes. Ellie dug out two dry undershirts from the bag stowed in the stern as well as her black coat. Then she held the
blanket in front of Annabelle so she could change out of her wet clothes without embarrassment. But even through her shivering, the little girl only watched the yellow bird circling the dory.

Buddy was a strange flicker of yellow flame in the light gray sky. Slip pulled on the oars and looked over his shoulder as the bird rattled and whistled around. He shipped the oars and changed out of his shirt, putting on his scratchy wool jacket over his bare skin. Ellie watched and rubbed an edge of the blanket against Annabelle’s wet hair. But the girl’s eyes bore out into the air and tried to ensnare the bird.

They didn’t speak as the current changed direction and the water flowed against them. They didn’t speak of Johnny or the
Pacific Pride
as the sun began to slip behind the western islands.

Once the parade of boats had gone through the narrows on the tide, they saw no one else. The darkness eased around the dory, and in the twilight, before any moon or stars, the passageway seemed unnaturally black: no stars, no moon, no lighted ships. Only the rumble of the wind coming from the north and the hissing of the waves as they slapped the side of the dory, lifting it up like a runner jogging in place. Slip pulled with his arms but he could not bear his full weight into the oars. Finally Ellie sat next to him and, taking one oar, they rowed together, awkwardly at first, but eventually they pulled alongside De Courcy Island. As a sliver of a moon rose above the island, they were able to see a narrow beach just past the end of De Courcy where the water lay flat in the lee of the sloping side of Rink Island. They pulled hard against the current and the wind. The progress of the dory was agonizingly slow, but eventually they slid onto the calm water and the commotion of wind and waves hushed.

Slip leaned back and lay in the bottom of the boat, winded and aching from rowing against the current. Annabelle was wrapped in a tarp near the bow. While Ellie stood in her dark wool coat and tried to find a fair beach to land, the wind pushed
high clouds past the scythe of a moon. A light flickered on the far corner of the beach.

“Hallooooo.” It was a woman’s voice sliding over the water and Slip heard it first, not sure if he could trust his senses.

“Hallooooo.” The voice warbled like a loon’s. Slip sat up and looked over in the anchorage that was just coming into view, where a fire blazed on the beach and a lone figure stood in outline against the flames.

“You’ve just about made it. Over here.”

The dark form appeared to be wearing a long coat. Fire illuminated the back and shoulders while the face remained in darkness. The firelight dazzled across the water and cast a strange shadow on the surface, where it looked like the mast and rigging of a sizeable yacht stuck up at an odd angle from the sea. A raven perched on the end of the mast that slanted out over the light-smeared ripples.

“You’ve just a few more feet to go. Come on.” The figure raised its thin arm and gestured “come,” so Ellie picked up the oars and pulled the boat toward the firelight.

Annabelle stood up in the boat and hopped out just as the dory pushed into the gravelly beach. An old woman in a long wool coat came hurriedly to the shore and took hold of the bow, being careful not to step into the water.

“Looks like you were having a time of it,” she said. “You must be the people who took the lamb from Carl’s flock down on South Pender.”

Ellie put the oars back in the water and turned to look at Slip, who had his hands in his pockets and didn’t say a word to the old woman on the beach.

“Come on, child, come ashore. Don’t have to worry. I never cared for Carl or his sheep neither. Just some talk off the mail boat. No one’s after you. Come on ashore. You look like you all could use a cup of warm soup.”

She said her name was Mary B. and she had a pot of fish stew
sitting on a flat rock next to the fire. Slip and Annabelle pulled the dory up the beach and tied it off to a tree growing out of one of the steep bluffs that bordered the little anchorage. By the time Slip reached the fire, Annabelle had cantered up to Ellie and they both were sitting on a log hunched over their bowls, steam rising around their faces.

“Here,” Mary said, offering Slip a bowl of soup. Looking up in the woods, Slip saw the dark forms of buildings that looked partially fallen in, the windows broken out and supporting timbers sprung through the walls like ugly compound fractures.

“This is the right place,” Mary said. She watched Slip’s eyes take in the scene. “You’ve come to the right place. Don’t you worry.” Then she put a big spoon in the bowl. “He will be returning. You needn’t worry.”

She was an old woman though sometimes in the firelight you could see her as a child again. She was waiting there in the desolate anchorage, waiting for the return of her savior, a man she called the Brother Twelve.

She looked around at the refugees the sea had brought her. The girl was shivering as she ate her soup. Firelight painted their faces and each of them moved as close as they could to the flames. “Let me tell you about the first time I laid eyes on him,” the old woman said, and Slip wanted to leave the second she said it but there was nowhere to go in the cold, unfamiliar night.

She had been a college student when she first saw the Brother speak in a hall in Seattle. Her parents were both dead and she had inherited the money they had made from wheat over near Walla Walla. The executor had told her to go to college and she had been obedient.

“But when the Brother Twelve walked onto the stage, I knew, I just knew I had been saved.”

In the darkness the raven on the mast of the sunken yacht tipped forward and flew to a branch above the fire. He rattled and called down at the humans as if he were demanding some
of the stew, and in fact the old woman dug the dipper into the pot and flipped a piece of salmon and two small potatoes into the darkness behind the fire. The black bird leaped from the high branch and curved into the darkness as the old woman continued her story.

The Brother was a tall man, well over six feet, dark complexioned, with wide intense brown eyes that others described as “burning embers” but Mary described as “pools of wisdom.” He had been the son of an English philosopher and an Indian princess. He had studied with swamis and saints and with brothers of wisdom in Italy, where he was accepted into their midst as a true seer and the twelfth brother in the Order of Wisdom. The Brother Twelve had received direction from God to build his following on the remote islands of British Columbia. There, he and his followers were living according to God’s plan and waiting for their induction into Nirvana.