The Big Both Ways (39 page)

The door of the wheelhouse slammed shut and Carl was starting the engine of the boat. Cockatiels fluttered around in her head and her eyes were half open. The door opened and slammed shut again. Slip was pacing back and forth in the wheelhouse.

“Is Ellie here?” Annabelle rolled up on one elbow. She could still feel the pull of gravity as she flew the Lockheed Electra. She could hear Ellie laughing.

“Go back to sleep, now,” Slip said. His eyes were red and he
looked pale. For a second Annabelle thought that maybe he had hurt himself, like Ellie.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “Did you find Ellie?”

“Go back to sleep, I tell you,” Slip barked at her, and then he went out on the back deck, slamming the door once again.

“Just lay down, honey,” Carl Tisher said. “I’ll wake you up for some supper in a bit.”

She could raise herself up just enough in the bunk to look out on the back deck where Slip was hanging on to the dory. He was leaning out over the water. He looked as if he were vomiting, which seemed strange to her because it was hardly rough here in the channel.

“Everything okay?” Annabelle asked, as she put her head back down on the pillow.

“You just go back to your dreams, honey. We’re just going to head on up to Juneau,” Carl Tisher said in a voice that seemed soft and wet.

He is a nice man, Annabelle thought. Ellie is going to like him.

Her clothes still felt warm to her and the steady vibration of the engine thrummed through her body. Once again she pulled back on the yoke of the Electra’s controls, while a down of yellow feathers fell like snow from the sky.

TWENTY
 

To Annabelle, Juneau looked like a little town you might find in a snow globe: wooden buildings clinging to the side of a mountain. The big crooked building clung to the steep hill like a giant staircase someone thought to enclose. She sat on the skipper’s berth, bouncing in her seat, thinking that this looked as good as any place to wait for Ellie.

Slip hadn’t said anything since Ketchikan. He didn’t eat supper when Carl cooked up a rockfish he jigged up at anchor. Slip sat on the back deck as
The Shepherd
motored up past Petersburg and out into Frederick Sound. He slept on the back deck even when Carl told him there was a bunk for him up forward. Only once did Annabelle poke her head out onto the deck and she saw him sitting in the pen that Carl had used to transport his sheep.

“Hey,” the girl said above the motor, “come inside.”

He waved her back into the wheelhouse.

By the time they arrived in Juneau, Annabelle told herself that Slip was crazy and it was definitely time for her to find Ellie. As they eased up to the wharf, Annabelle could see black dust hanging in the air. When she turned to look
at Slip she saw a meanness in his face that brought a chill to her heart.

“I’m going to head uptown,” Slip said, helping Carl tie the boat. The girl stood on the back deck next to the dory and he looked at her for a second, filled his lungs with what he knew he should tell her, then stopped.

“I’m going to head uptown,” he repeated.

Carl Tisher grabbed onto Slip’s elbow. “I’ll anchor out tonight. You find Amos. I know you got things on your mind but I want you to find him, understand?”

“I’ll get someone to ferry me out to the boat if I find him,” Slip said. He turned away without a word to the girl.

The pressure building in her chest kept her planted to the deck and unable to speak. Up the hill by the stamp mill, a man walked across a steep sidehill. Rocks clattered down like damp fireworks. Annabelle raised her hand and waved at Slip, who was climbing up the ladder to the top of the wharf.

“I wouldn’t worry, detective, we’ll clean out the damned Reds. We know how to run our own affairs.” The federal magistrate sat across his oak desk from George and Walter. The magistrate was cleaning his fingernails with the point of his Barlow pocket-knife. He was a portly man whose chin was sunk back under several folds of fat. As he ripped the tip of his knife under each nail, he would flinch just enough so that his entire face jiggled. Beside the magistrate sat Tom Delaney, the head of Floodwater’s office in Seattle.

“The strike’s been going on for a month?” George asked.

“Something like that. I don’t suppose it matters how long they stay out; they’ll never get those kind of wages to work in a mine.” The magistrate didn’t look up from his nails.

“They got replacement workers coming in?”

“They even got some stump speakers down there building a fire underneath them. It’s like they got a new union to replace the
old one.” He jerked back his hand and looked at a thread of blood winding down the little finger of his left hand. He put the finger in his mouth and sucked at the blood.

“I don’t know. If they did happen to get those wages I might be tempted to be a miner myself.” He looked at the soft white tip of his finger and wheezed out a flatulent laugh.

“Do you have people inside the union?” George said, looking at Delaney who was keeping conspicuously silent.

The magistrate looked a bit confused, and spoke for Delaney. “People?” he looked at the shamus with basset hound eyes. “You mean, like spies?”

George nodded and Delaney was about to open his mouth when the magistrate interrupted.

“Don’t really need spies. Guys come up here to my office and tell me anything I want to know.”

“Just come up here during the day to tell you what the union is planning?” George smiled at the thought.

“They know enough to have their bread buttered on both sides.”

Tom Delaney flicked at a piece of lint on the knee of his wool trousers, cleared his throat, and spoke up before the magistrate had anything more to offer. “We’ve got everything under control, George. You don’t have much to do up here.”

“You looking for Ellie Hobbes?” George asked.

“I’m here to help with the strike situation and head off any civil disturbance. It’s a pretty simple job.”

“Then you aren’t after Ellie Hobbes or Slippery Wilson?”

Delaney shook his head slowly as if he were gently stirring his next thought. “I’m not worried about Hobbes, and I don’t care about Wilson,” he said. He opened his mouth and it looked as if he were going to say something more but then he leaned back in the chair. “I’m not worried about either of them, actually.”

George stood up and dusted off the brim of his hat. He looked
from the magistrate to Delaney and back. “All right then,” George said, putting his hat on.

As he turned and walked to the door Tom Delaney said, “Did you hear we lost another operative?”

George turned. “I heard about Fatty. It’s too bad. I suppose it will be hard on his family.” George looked closely at the brim of his hat.

“He didn’t have much of a family left,” Tom Delaney said, though his attention was already turning elsewhere. “You be careful out there, George.” The Floodwater man reached over and closed the door and the edge of the door brushed George’s shoulder on his way out.

George walked down the hill from the courthouse. He knew that if Ellie Hobbes were still alive she wouldn’t be hard to find. The magistrate was a fool—that was plain to see. There were two miners unions in Juneau that summer: the original local that had gone out on strike and the new workers association that was backed by management and the Arctic Brotherhood boys. It wasn’t uncommon for management to try to organize strikebreakers but it was a new twist to masquerade scabs as radical union men. If they had tried that down in the states, the town would have been overrun with agitators from all over the country. But Juneau was a long way from anywhere. It was a landlocked town with its back against the Canadian Coast Range. Any Red who wanted to come here to organize had to run the gauntlet of boatmen and night watchmen. They had to bring everything they needed with them on their back and survive in the town once they arrived.

George guessed that Ellie Hobbes would be drinking. She had a mangled hand and she was separated from the little girl and her running partner. She had a death sentence hanging over her head, and she was running out of places to run. Hobbes was not going to become a radical hermit out on one of the islands. She was a natural born speech giver.

Slip didn’t want to tell Annabelle about Ellie. He didn’t want to say that she had murdered three men and was on the run. After he had come up with nothing at the Ketchikan hospital, a cabby had directed him to the whorehouse on Creek Street. There, John told him Ellie was on the run and under suspicion of murder. The tall black man watched his words carefully so Slip knew he wasn’t telling everything he knew. But one look at the newspaper the black man held out told him that the essentials had been true. There were the three names that the enterprising reporter had tracked down—Pierce, Conner, and Cobb—and then there were some photographs of the men that had been taken on the Everett docks. Slip recognized all three even though he had only a glimpse of Conner and Pierce at Ellie’s meeting hall. But he remembered Cobb as the fireplug on the porch that first morning driving the black car with Ellie. Slip slapped the paper against his leg. Somewhere over his shoulder a withered laugh fell out into the street and a radio played dance music from some distant station. He thanked the man and walked away.

Even though it had only been two days, Ketchikan seemed a long time ago now. Slip had to put the past out of his mind or he would be sunk down with the gravity of all his mistakes. Now he was walking down Franklin Street in Juneau looking for Ellie. Slip had been standing right there when Clyde, the machinist at the cannery, had told Ellie about heading to Juneau, and Slip figured that Juneau was a big enough town with trouble enough for Ellie to hide in. Ketchikan was too hot for her now and Seattle was too far away. Ellie had to be in Juneau.

The late evening sun filled the street like canyon light. People wove their way around the legs of the men sprawled on the sidewalk and heavy trucks rumbled up the street toward the mine. He was walking down the sidewalk when he came abreast of an open doorway. A short man with steel-rimmed glasses stood squarely in the opening and he flipped a cigarette in front of Slip’s legs.

“You looking for work?” the short man said as he adjusted his visor above his eyes.

“Naw,” Slip said and he turned away. “I’m looking for somebody.”

“They’re hiring up at the mine. There’re going to be good jobs up there and plenty of them.”

“Naw,” Slip said. He looked behind the man’s shoulders where he saw the dark forms of men sitting around a card table. Slip could hear the chatter of poker chips and the creaking of wooden chairs against the floor.

“This the hiring hall?” Slip asked.

“Just go over to the new miners association building, down the block and to the left. You’ll see it. They’ll fix you up. Unless you’re in the mood for a card game.” A cob of yellow teeth appeared in the man’s face. He stepped aside and Slip could see women bringing drinks to the players.

Slip shook his head and started to walk on again when the little man took him by the elbow.

“What’s your name, friend?”

Slip looked down at him and pulled his arm back. “I’m just looking for Ellie Hobbes.”

“You a friend of Ellie’s?” The man looked at him and then spit on the plank sidewalk.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“What you say your name was?”

“That’s all right. I’ll just keep looking,” Slippery Wilson said, and he hurried down the street, right past the next open doorway where Walter Tillman had been standing listening to their conversation.

George walked into the bar and saw a blonde wearing three dirty shirts sitting hunched over a bottle in the corner. Her right hand gripped the bottle’s neck and her bandaged left hand was cradled in her lap. This was the unhappiest soul in a town of unhappy souls
and George knew it had to be Ellie Hobbes. George walked past the barman, tapped his finger on the mahogany counter, and asked for a clean glass.

“Hello, Ellie,” George said and sat down. “Having a rough time of it?”

Ellie didn’t look up from the glass. “Get away from me.”

“I bet you’re tired of rowing, Ellie. I’m here to help you.”