The Big Both Ways (37 page)

Slip took a swig of coffee and stood up.

Annabelle stirred and spoke in a sleep-muddled voice. “Did Brother Twelve ever come back for Mary?” the girl asked. “You know, that lady on the island with the sunken boat out front. Did he ever come to save her?”

The old man looked away from the girl and spit in the fire. He did not answer the child.

“Is she still waiting?” Annabelle asked again.

“Yes, I suppose she is.”

“Is he ever going to come back?”

“That fellow was a stick and not a boomerang. She’s seen the last of Brother Twelve.” Carl Tisher stood up and slapped his old felt hat against his thigh.

“But you came to save us, didn’t you?” Annabelle said and stretched.

“That I did, young lady.” He chuckled and motioned toward the dory, and said to Slip, “Let’s get you loaded up. Sooner we get going, sooner we can have something to eat.”

The Swan
was a slow and smelly boat. When Larry felt like it, he would stand at the wheel and pee down a crack into the bilge. If there were any seas at all, his aim would suffer and the piss would cascade down the steps and all over the diesel stove. Larry liked to drink whiskey and beer while he traveled, so it was a blessing the boat was so slow.
The Swan
would simply bounce off most everything it ran into.

Ellie slept out on the deck. There was a small cover over the trolling cockpit and she wrapped herself in a fetid blanket that Larry threw out to her. She kept the revolver close and never let herself drift into deep sleep. She was out of live rounds but Larry was too dumb to know that. The seas were calm on that first day so when they ran out of daylight Larry just found some shallow
water, threw out his anchor, and went to sleep without taking his clothes off.

When the sun rose, Ellie got up and ventured down into the galley where Larry was lying tangled in a pile of dirty coats. There was a wet paper bag on the deck of the wheelhouse. A can of beans was breaking through the sack and was ready to fall down onto the bilge. She took the beans and a nasty-looking spoon from the table. Then, unable to tolerate the smell, she took the can back up on deck. Ellie’s hand hurt too badly to hold the can and open it with a knife, so she poked a circle of holes around the top with a gaff hook and, after cleaning the spoon with salt water and the hem of her dress, Ellie ate the beans for breakfast.

The commotion of opening the beans woke Larry, who rolled over, drank the last of his beer from the night before, peed in the bilge, then hooked his arms through his suspenders and greeted the day.

They traveled like this for four nights and three days. They didn’t speak much. Larry drank until he couldn’t steer and then Ellie would take the wheel. There were minimal charts, and by the time Larry was ready to finish his watch he couldn’t speak clearly enough to give Ellie a proper heading, so
The Swan
went down a few dead ends. Eventually they wound their way up through Behm Canal and Clarence Strait, through Stikine Strait, Wrangell Narrows, and Frederick Sound, all the way up past Glass Peninsula and into Stephens Passage. The days passed in a tableau of silver to gray to light blue, gray clouds scraping the green trees and the currents whirling through the narrow passages. Tugs with barges of lumber and stone headed south. Fishing boats with their poles up motored toward the coast. Men in dories rowed with their gear balled up in tarps, and small gas boats hauled freight with a few passengers bound for the villages. There were whales diving through the surface of Frederick Sound, and a schooner with a dozen dead eagles strung up on the boom waiting to be turned in
for bounty. Each muddy little town was made lively with the shriek of a steam whistle and the thump of a pile-driving hammer, and every harbor had a scattering of hungry men wandering the docks looking for work.

Ellie was at the wheel when a humpback whale came up near the bow of the boat. She cut the engine because she wasn’t sure that the poor
Swan
, despite its resiliency regarding sandbars and pilings, might not come off the worse in a collision with a forty-ton beast. The whale’s great gaping mouth came to the surface and Ellie could see the haze of silvery fish inside. The rubbery creature closed its jaws and the birds dove down on the leftovers. As the whale rolled back to right itself, the eye broke the surface and Ellie felt the queasiness of being watched by a warm-blooded creature bigger than a fishing boat. The gearshift lever was a box-end wrench elaborately lashed to the linkage. Ellie kept her good hand on it as she watched the whale blow, rest, blow again, and then raise its tail to dive under the boat.

She turned for a moment to say something to Annabelle. She wanted her to see the whale. Then she grimaced, realizing that she was alone on
The Swan
, with the drunken skipper curled up in the bunk below cradling a rusty saddle gun.

The Alaska-Juneau mine dominated the mountain on the east side of Gastineau Channel just south of the town of Juneau. The old Treadwell mine on the other side of the channel had flooded with seawater and collapsed in 1917 and was now abandoned, leaving the Alaska-Juneau as the richest place for gold in the territory. The Klondike gold rush had made a few prospectors rich, but had made the fortunes of many more who were quick enough to sell supplies to the frantic gold hunters. Many of the biggest buildings in Seattle and Portland had been built with money made from selling gear to Alaskan fortune hunters, many of whom limped home broke if they made it home at all. Mining had always been more profitable for the storekeeper than it had
been for most of the miners themselves. So when Alaska’s biggest gold mine was standing idle because of a strike, the merchants of the territorial capital were incensed. This was their livelihood the miners were fooling with.

The A-J mine, as it was called, was made up of a honeycomb of tunnels back in the hard rock of the mountain. These mines were riddled with seeps of fresh water and rotten shale. There was some quartz and microscopic amounts of gold. To make any profit at all, hundreds of tons of rock had to be jackhammered and blasted away, carted through the tunnels, rolled down into the stamp mill that was built in stair-step fashion on the side of the mountain, and crushed into dust. When the crushed rock floated away, flecks of gold were left to settle. It took hundreds of men stooping and straining in damp rock crevices to get a pouch full of gold. On May 22, 1935, the miners voted for a raise, a forty-eight hour workweek, some kind of hospitalization plan for the injuries they knew were part of the work, and finally they wanted more than two days off a year. A squall rose up from management. They insisted that this would make the Juneau miners the most coddled miners in the world. Alaska had jobs. More miners would come. They didn’t care if the president of the United States was driving the country toward socialism; they were not going to pay.

The miners had stayed out and blocked any scabs from entering the shafts. By June, a “miners association” had formed with the help of the Juneau city attorney. The men belonging to the Arctic Brotherhood, a fraternal order of middle-class merchants and professionals, stood four-square behind the new miners association, as the scabs were called. The city fathers assured the scabs that they would be allowed to cross the picket line and go to work. Carl Tisher’s son, Amos, was one of these replacement miners. He just wanted to work and he didn’t like the threatening taunts of the strikers who stood defiantly out in front of the Union Hall.

Once Amos had walked by the hall and a miner stepped in
front of him, blocking his way. “Where you headed, bub?” the man asked, and he took a tobacco pouch out of his shirt pocket.

“I’m just going for a walk,” Amos had said in a tone that was more defiant than he had intended.

The man sprinkled tobacco in his paper, licked the edge, and rolled his smoke. “You got a match?” he asked Amos.

Amos said, “No.”

Then the man took a section of pipe out of the back of his pants and slashed it across the boy’s head, splitting his ear and laying him out on the boardwalk. Amos lay on the planks of the sidewalk, dimly aware of his blood dripping between the cracks in the planks.

“You better stay the fuck away from the mine, or it will be worse the next time,” the man said. He lit a wooden match with his thumbnail, fired up his smoke, and threw the match on the boy’s head. The dull eyes of the men beside the Union Hall stared at Amos as if he were a rabid dog. They didn’t really care who put him down, just as long as it was taken care of quickly.

Amos limped away. He had made the mistake of writing his mother that night. He sat in his boardinghouse room that he shared with two other men, and scribbled out a few lines in pencil, while the two men sat on the single bed watching him work.

They had taken the single room thinking they would be working shifts and able to avoid each other, but now that none of them was working their quarters were tight. The landlady didn’t mind because she was charging them each the same rent as she would have for the single bed. She could live with tripling her money as long as they didn’t break the bed. If they did, of course, she would charge them for it.

Amos was hoping to get a job and find a girlfriend in Juneau. He hated the life in the Gulf Islands back home. He hated the smell of sheep and cedar chips. He hated the feeling of being bound up on the tiny island. Juneau was landlocked, but there was plenty of activity, cars churning up the hills in summer and the rumble
of oar trucks on the plank roads. There were people walking into restaurants wearing tailored clothes and women with strange accents calling down to you from second-story windows. These women had beautiful dark eyes, and when he looked up at them his heart would tighten with the thought of walking up those narrow stairs. Amos didn’t care how many times he got his head cracked, he was going to work in the Alaska-Juneau mine.

It was late evening by the time
The Swan
made it into Gastineau Channel. The A-J mine was as quiet as the pyramids as the little troller sputtered past. Trucks rumbled up and down the wharf along the front of town. They had passed shacks along the edge of the channel where Tlingit boys were throwing sticks into the water and their mothers stood watching with a pail in one hand and a baby on their hip. The smell of coal dust eased down the channel toward them and the lights from the little wooden buildings seemed as yellow as rotten teeth.

As they pulled in toward the wharf, Ellie could hear men arguing and women laughing back up the side streets. Dogs barked on the hill and someone was breaking bottles on the rocks in the scrubby trees above town. Ellie again cupped her bad hand in her good one. Then she put it gingerly into the pocket of the wool coat she had borrowed from Larry. She checked the revolver in her pocket and pulled a filthy cap down on her head. As the boat got near enough to the dock, Ellie jumped and took the mid-ships line to wrap around a cleat.

“I’m going to go find the boys. They’ll be looking for my report. I’ll tell them you did good, Larry.”

“Not so fast there, little missy.” Larry was holding his .30-30 at his hip and he was pointing it straight at Ellie’s belly. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“What is this? You don’t know who I am, do you? When they find out you’ve been threatening me you’re going to be in a whole new world of hurt.” Ellie stood with her right hand on
the cracked wooden grip of the revolver plainly showing above her pocket.

“Yeah, that may be so. But I’m getting paid to deliver you … or at least somebody from Ketchikan, and I ain’t gonna risk not gettin’ paid the rest of my money by having you run off somewhere leaving me with only my word on it.” Larry tried to pull back the hammer on the rusted rifle and Ellie could see he was having trouble.

“Well what you gonna do, parade me up the street at gunpoint?” Ellie leaned forward as if talking to a child.

“Yeah, well … I don’t know. I just know I ain’t letting you go uptown.”

“All right, then. I’ve got an idea. I’ll stay here and you go get the boys.”

Larry mulled this idea over. He wanted to go uptown in the worst way. He had run out of beer a day before and he was about as dry as dirt. He liked the idea, but there was something in the back of his mind that was bothering him. “What do I get as security so you won’t run off?” Larry asked.

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you my gun. I don’t go anywhere without it. I’ll wait to get it back. Look …” And she pulled out the revolver, showing Larry how the cylinder spun and the hammer actually pulled back. “You can even use it to shoot me if you want. Hell, it’s a damn sight better than that rusted-up fowling piece of yours.”

Larry smiled. He knew he could trade the rifle for whiskey uptown and keep the new pistol for himself. He’d get himself a drink and Ellie would have to watch the boat.

“It’s a deal,” Larry said, walking slowly off the boat still holding the rifle in front of him. Ellie took out the revolver and turned its handle out to Larry. He smirked, and tucked the pistol in his pants. Then with some effort, he cranked the three cartridges out of the saddle gun and dropped the empty rifle onto the deck of the boat.

“You stay with the boat now. I got your gun, and I’m gonna kill you if you wander off.”

“I understand, Larry. I’ll be right here,” Ellie said. She looked over her shoulder at a steamship slowly churning up the channel toward the wharf just ahead of
The Swan
. A few crows darted out of the shadows and sliced the air under the wharf. One of them was holding a mussel in its beak.

“Yeah, you better be here. I’m gonna get the boys up at the Union Hall right now.”

“All right,” Ellie said. And she stepped back onto the boat, waving as Larry labored up the ramp of the rickety floating dock.

Once the drunkard was out of sight, Ellie hopped off the boat, walked up the ramp, and headed away from the clatter of the barrooms. She smiled to herself as she walked down the boardwalk, thinking of how much the cops would believe the sorry man’s story when they found the gun that had killed three men in Ketchikan and two in Seattle tucked away in Larry’s pants.