The Big Both Ways (34 page)

“Hang it, then you can come back. I’ll make us some coffee and I’ll take a look at that hand again.”

“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, John?”

“I do,” he said, “and I agree. But the laundry needs doing.” He turned to her with a smile. “Then I’ll change that bandage for you, comrade.” The door swung shut.

It was afternoon and a soft rain was falling. The clogged gutters continued to drip thirty feet onto the low-tide rocks of the creek bed. Ellie walked toward the front of the house, listening to the patter of rain on the boardwalk.

She was reaching for the first clothespin when a large, dirty hand reached around and covered her mouth. At first she screamed but the hand clamped down harder and pinched off her nostrils. Then she bit down hard onto the fleshy hand, which tasted like coal dust. The owner of the hand let out a hissing sound and someone slugged her in the stomach hard enough for her to black out for a moment.

“Let her breathe, Ray,” someone said, and when she opened her eyes she recognized William Pierce and McCauley Conner standing just in under the dripping eaves.

Ellie tried to kick Pierce in the crotch but whoever was behind her choked off her air again, and all she could sense were her heels hitting the top of the steps as someone dragged her off the porch.

Annabelle pulled against the big oars but they were awkward in her hands. When she did manage to get a good bit into the water with both of them, the combination of the wind and the current continued to push her down the inlet, away from Slip hanging on the tree.

Buddy sat on top of his cage, ruffling his feathers and calling out in his high irritating voice. The girl pulled on the oars and looked at the yellow bird with the bright red spots on his cheeks. She watched him and dreamed of being able to fly. The ends of the oars skittered over the top of the water and she splashed the stern of the boat. Buddy shook himself and started to fly.

She watched him fly in wide circles around the boat, dipping toward the water, and it looked as if he were mesmerized by his own reflection. He was like a bolt of tropical sunlight in this muted gray-green world. The circles got bigger and bigger around the boat.

“Buddy,” the girl called out softly, short of breath. “Hey, over here.”

But the vain yellow bird, for whatever reason, flew away. He rose up into the canopy of tall trees and disappeared like a spark.

Slip sat very still. He knew that if he fell in the water there was a good chance that he would be able to claw his way up onto the face of the rock. There were ledges, after all; some ferns grew out of the rock and somehow this tree had taken root before it had fallen over. Or he could cling to the rock so that he might not die in the cold water. But still, he would not be able to go anywhere. His only real hope was that there would be a passing boat that would see him and somehow offer help.

A kingfisher flickered up to him and settled on the snag. He looked at the bird and tried to imagine changing places. He thought of flying out over the water and into the wheelhouse of a warm boat, where there was coffee boiling over on the metal grates and the cook had bread in the oven. Slip thought of Johnny on the
Pacific Pride
and wanted nothing so much as to see its black hull push around the point and come over to him so that he could simply step off the snag and onto the front deck.

By late afternoon the wind was calm. His legs were cramping. He had decided to try to snap the log all the way off by breaking
it with his weight and twisting on the branches so that it would float free. He stared straight down where the calm water was flowing now in the opposite direction from when he first climbed up there. He began to bounce. The tree crackled and back near the fulcrum he heard a sharp popping. Just as he was about to stand up and plan his last push, he heard the girl’s voice.

“Slip? Hey, Slip, you know what?” She was rowing the dory easily now in the calm water and fair current. She was a hundred yards away.

Slip waved. “Come on,” he yelled, and she pulled against the oars.

He watched her approach, and he felt an aching love for her. Soon she floated just a few feet underneath him, and he was able to easily lower himself into the dory.

“You know what?” she asked.

“No, honey, I don’t.”

“Buddy flew off.” Her eyes were red and she looked older to him now, her frown having grown stiff.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Slip said, and his voice was broken from not having much use for most of the day.

“He just flew off,” she said.

“Well, let’s take a look around for him,” Slip said. “He’s going to be around here someplace,” Slip said. And he put his arm around the little girl, who broke into tears, sobbing into the dirty wool of his old red jacket.

John lost track of the afternoon. He worked on laundry, and then did a short carpentry job of shimming a new door for one of the girls’ rooms, which took him much longer than he expected because nothing in the sagging old whorehouse was square. He finished that job and lay down on the cot he had set up by the kitchen, took a drink of wine, and closed his eyes in gratitude for getting some rest before the night’s work.

When he woke, the sun was slanting down the back of the
building. The tide was out, so the creek was snaking between the algae-covered rocks. As he woke he remembered that he had never changed the girl’s bandage. It would be getting ripe by now and he should take care of that before Miss Yvette caught wind of it.

He went down to the kitchen, where the Chinese girl with the bad leg was stirring a large pot of stew and listening to the old Victrola she had sitting on a stool.

“Where is Ellie at?” the black man asked.

“No, sir, don’t know,” the girl said, without raising her eyes from the pot. “Whores mad, though.”

“Why’s that?” John asked as he sat in a straight-backed chair by the big table.

“Did not hang clothes.”

John looked at the girl. “What do you mean? What’d she do with them?” John shot back.

“Just leave basket of wet clothes on porch. Now some are saying they’ll be wearing dirty unders tonight. That make Miss Yvette angry and it ain’t their fault.”

“Where’d she leave the basket?”

“Just out there by the door. Left the basket and walked off. But I take care. I take care.”

“How?”

“I find the basket out there and I hang clothes. Girls will have clean unders.”

“Well, that’s good. Thanks for that,” he said, but his voice was drifting off with some indescribable concern for the girl with the mangled hand.

“I’m wondering where she went. You have any idea?”

“No, I don’t.”

John stood up and went out on the porch. The clothes hung in the shade under the eaves. They had missed the direct sun on this side of the building and the evening sun was slanting around the corner. He touched the sleeve of a cotton nightshirt. The fabric was still damp. He stood on the porch fingering the material and
looking out toward the alley. There was music seeping out from under the doors of the parlors along the creek and he could hear the footfall of two men wandering up the boardwalk with tentative steps. The blue sky was darkening to a purple bruise and the fat crows stood sentinel on the wires overhead.

His eyes followed the clothes down the line and then to the edge of the steps. Then he turned and walked back upstairs to her room and lifted Ellie’s suitcase out from under the bed to see that it was still there. He looked in the drawer of the bedside table and found the revolver he knew would be there. That she had a gun didn’t bother him. He felt it in her waistband that first night he carried her up the stairs with Yvette. He had put it in the drawer. It was a good thing for a crippled-up whore to have a gun but it was not wise to tell Yvette about its existence.

He went back to the porch and sat down on the steps. He looked in the dirt near the path. There were footprints scrambled in the mud and gravel. Two men, and between them the dragging heels of a woman.

Thirty feet down the path he found her shoe, and twenty feet past that he found the button from a man’s coat, the thread still holding in its holes. The tracks were scattered and then confused. There was a bit of blood on the handrail of the boardwalk, and John was hoping that Ellie had bitten someone and made a getaway. Then he saw a hank of bleached blonde hair caught in a splinter of the decking and a larger stain of blood. He stopped and looked around. He put her shoe in his pocket. The crows were hopping down the boardwalk as if they were following him to food. This was probably a good sign, for if there were a fresh body dumped somewhere, the crows would not be waiting around for him.

The creek made a musical tumble over the rocks and up on the hill behind the creek the tops of the trees swayed gently in a light breeze. John turned his head around and slacked his jaw. His ears were ringing from the exertion, but still, under the music from the
whorehouses and the wind through the trees, he could hear it: the soft percussive chopping of shovels striking rocky ground.

“I told you we should have just dumped her in the river,” Ray said, as he leaned into his short-handled shovel. “This ground is too damn rocky. We’ll never get her deep enough.”

“Goddamnit, we are not supposed to kill her,” Bill Pierce said. He was sick to his stomach. “I mean, what the hell are you thinking, Ray?”

The short man with the barrel chest leaned on the shovel. “Don’t worry, boys. I’ll kill her then stick her in the ground, then we go catch the
The Swan
up to Juneau. It leaves in an hour and a half. Hell, boys, we’ll have time enough to get a beer and maybe a bath before she sails.”

“Is it solid, Ray?” Conner asked, his voice trembling with fear. “I mean, they know we’re coming?”

“Hell, yes, he’ll be there, but he damn sure won’t wait all night. So, let’s get back to diggin’, boys.” Ray threw the shovel over to McCauley Conner, who was sitting on a rock with his head in his hands.

“Fuck it, Bill. I ain’t doing it,” Pierce said.

Just off to his left John could see the trussed-up body of the little injured whore. She was breathing hard and snot ran down her face and dripped down onto the gag stuffed in her mouth.

“Crap, Bill, seems like I’m doing all the work in this outfit,” Ray brayed at the others.

“Quit your bellyaching, Ray. Either way, killing her is not the right move. If we shoot her and then dig a hole, no telling who will hear the shot and come running. You dump her in the creek, especially now at low tide, she’ll be found in ten minutes and the cops’ll be all over this place.”

“They’ll just think she’s a whore. They won’t do nothing,” Ray said. He rolled a rock out of the hole they were making on the steep-sided hill.

“Now see, that’s where you’re wrong again, Ray.” Bill Pierce stared down at him from above. “I happen to know that these local cops are softhearted when it comes to their whores. They don’t so much mind when one of their customers gets killed, unless it’s a judge or something. But it’s plumb bad for business when a whore gets killed. It’s just another good reason not to kill her.”

“Well, she ain’t a whore anyway,” Ray muttered from the bottom of the hole.

“You’re as dumb as a stump, Ray,” Bill said.

“Well, I’m not dumb enough to let you be the boss of me.” Ray threw down the shovel and stepped out of the hole. “I’m going to get a beer. You deal with it.” And he stepped over the white heap lying next to the narrow hole he was digging.

“Now hold on, don’t sulk off like an old cow,” Conner called after him.

The footing was steep and uncertain. The slope above the creek in Ketchikan may have been the poorest place on earth to bury a corpse. Besides being uneven and hard, the thin layer of moss and dirt supported a thick bramble of berry bushes and stems of broad-leafed devil’s club with thorns like slivers of glass. Ray’s hands had dozens of these tiny thorns in them and they were making him grumpy while he dug the grave; the thorns and the fact that he was being treated like Bill Pierce’s own personal slave. He was not going to put up with it much longer, he thought to himself. He might as well just kill the lot of them and head out on his own.

“Them bastards can do some of the heavy lifting,” he muttered to himself, and he pushed back another thorny stalk. He stumbled a bit, twisting his ankle. “Goddamnit,” he swore. “These pantywaists will wet themselves before they take care of this Red.” Then he looked up and saw the flash of the muzzle from the shot he never heard.

Bill Pierce tried to run but the steep rocky ground threw him down and he tumbled. The second shot caught him in the neck.

McCauley Conner jumped in the hole and tried to hide. The third shot burrowed across the scattering of fresh dirt and tore out the side of his head.

The breeze blew, and the music still drifted up from the street. The sun slanted through the trees from the west and the understory of brambles glowed golden with the smoke from the revolver. John stood over Ellie. Her blue dress was ripped and her head was bleeding but she did not struggle or call out. He bent over her and gently straightened her dress. He set her shoe beside her. When he saw that her underwear was missing, he pumped another shot into McCauley Conner’s head. Someone might hear him. Hell, he was sure that someone had heard the shots. But he didn’t care. He put one more shot into each of them and took the gag out of Ellie’s mouth.

“Thank you,” was all she could manage to say.

“Peckerwoods were right about one thing for sure.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s bad for business trying to kill a whore around these parts.”

“That seems true enough,” Ellie said.

She stood and took the gun from the big man standing next to him. “I’ll take this. Anyone asks, this is my gun and I did the killing.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Hell you can’t. I’m not saying you have to offer it up. But if it comes to it, I’ll take the blame. You saved me and I’m grateful.” Then she stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the lips. “I’m gonna catch a boat. If a beat-up guy and a little girl come looking for me, tell them to try Juneau. Only them. You understand?”