The Big Both Ways (26 page)

“Excuse me,” Ellie called out with a singsongy tone that Slip had never heard before. “Have you seen the super?”

The man with the rounding hammer wiped his nose and then wiped his hand on his leather apron. “You try his office?”

“Oh, of course, but I was wondering if he was around here now.” She smiled and took a half step in, leading with her hip and curling one arm behind her back almost as if she were going to ask the man to dance.

“Christ, I hope not,” the big man said. “You seen the super around here, Clyde?” he turned and yelled over his shoulder. Back behind some gray humming piece of machinery, a greasy-looking man squinted up from a shower of sparks.

“What, are you crazy? He don’t come around here. Go back to the office.”

“You two do all this work around here?” she said round-eyed and gesturing into the room. She stumbled over a pile of sprockets and a rusted pair of pliers, then stopped to pick them up.

“You’re looking at it. Both shifts, if needs be. The bastards.”

“Well, you must be good at it,” she said, and looked at them both in a kind of sex-infused wonder as if she were deciding which one of them she wanted to eat. “Thank you,” she whispered, then backed out and closed the door.

“You know what you are?” Ellie said, looking straight at Slip.

“No,” he said.

“You’re a goddamn machinist’s assistant.”

He rolled his eyes and walked on. They found a door to the outside and turned toward the loading dock at the front of the cannery. Johnny was moving the
Pacific Pride
from the float over to the main pier to unload his box wood from the hold. Annabelle stood on the bow holding a line. Annabelle saw the two of them standing at the bull rail of the wharf, and she jumped up and down waving.

A surly man with a black watch cap and a leather windbreaker stood by the davit winch. From there he could lower a hook and some chokers into the hold of the boat and lift the flats of lumber up onto several steel carts. As Johnny eased up to the wharf the man rolled a cigarette and lit it.

“So, you bring your family on vacation then?” he said with a thick French Canadian accent. “Bunch of yachtsmen, I suppose.”

“We just hitched a ride. Who do we talk to about a job around here anyway?” Slip asked.

“That’d be Charlie, up at the office. But don’t get too excited ’cause he ain’t been hiring in weeks. Unless you’re a crooked bookkeeper, I doubt he could use you.” Then he spit into the water, just barely missing the bow of the
Pacific Pride
as it eased up against the pilings some twelve feet below where they were standing.

Slip and Ellie turned and walked up the outside stairs to the office that had big windows overlooking the operation. The French Canadian yelled down at Johnny and Annabelle, telling them how to tie the boat while he unloaded her. Ellie went in after Slip and closed the door on the commotion. Slip asked to see the boss. He didn’t say that he wanted a job but when the woman at the counter asked his business he started stammering. Ellie eased around his shoulder and said they had a proposition she was sure Charlie would want to hear.

Inside the office the walls were painted green four feet up from the floor and white all the way up to the ten-foot ceiling. The front-facing wall had three large windows and a windowsill with several
pairs of binoculars resting on it. The other walls were dotted with ephemera from the fishing fleet: calendar photos of boats in foreign ports and snapshots of fine-looking boats unloading their catch at the cannery. There were pictures of schooners and dories. There were a couple of shots of massive halibut hanging from hooks with men in their oilskins smiling next to them.

Finally Charlie Hayes walked out of his office. He wore a vest and his tie was unknotted. Both of his sleeves were rolled up.

“I’m sorry,” he said loudly, and he gestured toward the big front windows. “We’re just not taking anybody on.” He started to put on a wool coat and walk out the door but Ellie stopped him.

“My man’s a machinist’s assistant. A good one. I can help him. You got a mess down there in the machine shop and we’ll fix it up for you in a couple of days. You give us food and a cabin for a week and we’ll work for free. If you don’t like what we do then you can send us down the road.” And when she came to the end of her sentence she smiled sweetly and crossed her ankles so she teetered there in front of him.

Charlie Hayes stared at her for a moment as if he were judging a show horse. Then he said, “Hell with it. Check with housing. The machine shop’s a fright. No pay for now but food and a bed.” Then he turned and walked back out the door.

The French Canadian winch man was unloading the wood from the hold. Johnny was down in the boat rigging the pallets and Annabelle was the go-between signal for the winch man.

“Up just a teensy bit,” she called up to him.

“Is that a teensy bit or a teensy-weensy bit?” he called down in his gruff tone.

The girl squinted down into the hold and looked back up, shifted her glasses back up her nose, and held her fingers about an inch apart. “Just a teensy bit will do, thank you.”

“Don’t mention it at all, miss,” the winch man said, popping the handle back on the winch for half a second.

Ellie and Slip helped with unloading the wood. Then they loaded their personal gear into the dory and talked the winch operator into hauling it up onto the dock and onto a dolly. The dock boss let them wheel the dory over to a far corner of the dock where they let boats that delivered fish store their gear. Ellie, Slip, and Annabelle took their gear out of the dory, including the cage with the defiant yellow bird sitting on top, and went in search of the housing manager.

Within half an hour they were walking down a row of cabins along a boardwalk back where the mountain shouldered against the cannery. It didn’t feel like the sun ever shone down where the cabins lay. Six kids ran across the soggy ground and up onto the boardwalk.

“Is that your bird?” a towheaded boy asked.

“Yes,” Annabelle replied, unable to conceal her pride.

“You gonna eat him?” another blurted out.

“No!” she said, and walked away from the group of children with her head held high.

The cabin was about twelve by sixteen. Two walls had wooden bunk beds. The bottom bunk by the back wall had been modified to be a double bed. There was an electric heater, a table, and four straight-back chairs. Nails were driven into the walls where it appeared people hung their clothes. The room smelled of boiled vegetables, tobacco, and mildew. Buddy flew up from his cage and came to rest on a two-by-four rafter.

The housing manager told Ellie to keep the wet clothes well away from the coils of the electric heater and that they could eat their meals in the dining hall. There was no smoking in bed, and he pointed his index finger at each of them, even Annabelle, as he said, “And don’t let me catch anyone drinking spirits in camp.”

Before he left, the housing manager stopped by the open door and said, “I’d keep your girl here pretty much to this part of camp. Not really safe around the Indians or the Chinks. Filipinos won’t hurt her but it would still be best if she stayed in this part of camp.”
Then he was gone and Annabelle looked up at Ellie and Slip with round eyes.

“Ellie, is he a management stooge?”

Slip shook his head and set his bedroll down on the double bunk. Ellie fiddled with the electric heater, then motioned the girl to come close.

“You know, honey, we’ve got a pretty good setup here for a bit. It wouldn’t do for you to talk that way around here for a while.”

“You’re not going to try and unite the workers?”

Slip looked back over his shoulder at Ellie, and she brushed him off. “Well, not straight off. I got to get them listening to me, and you know … liking me first. Otherwise we’ll just get run out of here and nothing happens. So we take it slow. Try and make friends. Okay?”

“My Lord!” Slip jumped back as the prongs of the cord sparked in the socket and the exposed coils of the heater began to glow.

“Okay, then,” Ellie clapped her hands together and stood up. She didn’t look at Slip, who was spreading blankets out on the bottom bunk. Annabelle climbed up onto the top bunk. She was able to hang Buddy’s cage on a nail in the rafter just above her feet. The yellow bird walked over and hopped onto the cage and pecked in through the bars for a few seeds. The little cabin began to warm to the heater’s glow.

Out on the boardwalk they could hear people walking back from the cannery buildings. The housing manager had told them that because there were no boats with big loads due in, they were running just one ten-hour shift. Later when the big runs started coming in, they would stretch that out to a sixteen-hour shift. If the boats backed up at the dock they might work straight through.

The sound of footsteps thudded to a slow rhythm, tired men and women coming home to clean up for supper. Ellie opened the door to their cabin and greeted some of the folks walking back. They still had their aprons on, and they nodded but didn’t stop to talk. White folks and Filipinos, Indian and Chinese walking
together. The whites’ quarters were closest to the plant. Then the Filipino and the Chinese. The Indians had built their own village back up by a small tributary of the main stream. The Filipinos and Chinese each had their own kitchens and communal dining halls. The Indians fended for themselves, with each family cooking for itself. Sometimes a grandmother stayed home to cook the wild food they put up themselves or to open a can of stew they bought at the company store. Ellie nodded to them all and said hello to the ones who had the energy to look up at her and smile.

She turned back inside the cabin and looked over at Annabelle. “Nice setup,” she said.

Slip nodded, walked over to a bunk, and wound his watch. He bent over and tied his shoes. There were four bunks, two upper and two lower. Annabelle had already claimed the bunk above Ellie’s. Slip had thrown his bindle on the opposite top bunk. He watched as Ellie rigged a curtain around her bottom bunk, and when she saw him looking at her she smiled in a way that made him stop breathing.

Ellie tucked in the corner of the curtain, smoothed out the shirt she was wearing, ran a comb three times through her hair, and walked to the door. Slip watched her as if by studying the way she moved he could discern some distant part of his own emotions.

For weeks now, when he lay down to sleep he thought of the bower on the beach south of Edmonds. That world of Puget Sound seemed distant and vague to him now. But the memory of her body had invaded his mind and everything that came after seemed more sharply in focus, even if it were more dangerous. She was reckless and bad luck, but still, when she walked out the door ahead of him, he followed. And he felt better about things when she turned to make sure he was coming along into this new and glittering world that seemed to widen out in her wake.

FIFTEEN
 

No one asked for their last names. That first night they ate rice and boiled fish with buttered turnips and slices of white bread. The men and women sitting at the plank table didn’t ask questions, and if they responded at all to Ellie’s or Annabelle’s questions they did so with single words. The smell of the boiled fish wound its way around the whites’ dining hall. They chewed their food in big mouthfuls, washing it down with mugs of cold water.

Johnny came in and sat with a big Norwegian in the corner. After trying to engage him in some cheerful conversation he gave up and ate his food in silence. As they carried their tin plates to the counter by the kitchen, Johnny waved at Annabelle and the little girl waved back and ran out the door ahead of her aunt.

Annabelle roamed the boardwalk in front of her cabin, looking for the wild boys who had been running loose when they had arrived. She passed her cabin, and when the grownups went through the door, Ellie said something to her about not going too far, but the girl didn’t hear her instructions.

Annabelle skipped down the boardwalk, her leather shoes slippery on the damp wood. She skated around corners and fell off into the soft damp moss on either side. Beyond the whites’ bunkhouse
and through an arbor of young alder trees stood the Filipino bunkhouse, which smelled like cooking oil and celery. Music came from the open door where a dark-skinned woman wearing a broad apron was drying her hands. Annabelle waved as she skipped and the woman waved in return. She ran past the Chinese camp, where a long line of men stood out on the porch with towels draped over their shoulders. Some of them had long braids and she wanted to stare but she didn’t. She ran past a dilapidated building she would learn later was an opium den.

Eventually Annabelle came to the rocky beach. The calm water from the bay slid up and down on the gravel. Three boys were skipping rocks. Half a dozen cabins with chimneys pumping white smoke sat just under the canopy of trees. This was the Indian village where the company provided nothing but a muddy path up to the cannery. The boys smiled and laughed and spoke English quite well. They invited her up to the dump with them. There they climbed a tree to watch a black bear sow gnaw on the discarded skull of one of the dairy cows that had fallen sick and had to be put down.