Land Sharks

by S. L. Stoner

  “Enough, Master Fong.” The words came from a throat aching for air, “I’ve reached the point where my entire concentration is now on how to avoid collapsing.”

  Fong brought his palms together and bowed.

  As he struggled to breathe normally, Sage voiced a question even though he feared the answer, “Are you going to be all right, when I’m gone?”

  “I will be fine. I wait for Sergeant Hanke to get information from other side of mountains. After that, I know what to do.”

  “Mr. Fong . . .” Sage didn’t know what plea to make so he voiced his fear. “I don’t know how we could continue without you. Not just the missions, but you, your presence in our lives. And you and Mrs. Fong risk losing so much if you kill LaRue.”

  At first, Fong made no response, instead looking into the blackness that pressed against the edges of the fir flooring. When he spoke, his voice was heavy, “Life is sometimes like river. Crane standing in shallows cannot know what flowing water bring next. He must stand ready to act quickly. Life current has pushed LaRue against my legs. Now, I must act quickly.” Here he paused, looking at Sage, his eyes sad in the candlelight. “If I have to.”

  Sage’s huff of exasperation lifted the hair off his sweaty forehead.

  Fong smiled, his eyes now soft with affection. “Mr. Sage, as the lady mother always like to say, ‘You have no room to talk.’ Days ahead also hold danger for you. You are crane, about to wade in strange water full of sharks. You also must be ready for what current brings.”

  Sage saw only impenetrable black. His heart pounded in his chest as he fought to breathe through the dust clogging his throat. Dust so thick that his lungs wheezed. His legs strained to escape the rubble that had him pinned to the dirt.

  There was a gentle tug on his shoulder and a faint glow began to fill the tunnel.

  “Sage. Sage.” The pulling on his shoulder became forceful as he struggled to lift his dust-caked eyelids. His mother stood there, a sleeping wrapper clutched around her body, a lit taper on the bedside table. Relief slowed the pounding in his chest and sweet-smelling air flowed across his sweat-drenched body.

  “You awake now, son?” she asked softly.

  “Yes, thank you. Sorry I woke you.”

  “Don’t worry about it, son.” Tenderly she brushed a hank of hair off his forehead, squeezed his shoulder and went back to bed, leaving the candle burning on his bedside table.

  After she’d gone, he focused on the flickering candle’s warm light until his eyes closed and he slept.

  FOURTEEN

  THE RENTED BUGGY ROLLED along the river road at a spanking pace. Sage’s mother rode without complaint although she bounced atop its tufted seat like a corn kernel in hot grease. Her sparkling eyes meant she was enjoying the mad afternoon dash to Milwaukie. Generally her activities were limited to working at Mozart’s or shopping about town. For a woman who’d been raised in the wooded crumples of Appalachia’s landscape, a trip into the countryside was a rare treat. As the buggy rolled toward Milwaukie, Mae voiced her observations: “Grass over there is the kind that makes good baskets; tried once, I was all thumbs; farmers around here like a tidy field, bet they go to bed with the cows; my Lordy, look at all the filberts on the trees. They call them hazelnuts back East, you know”; and, “there’s some sturdy bones, beneath that haystack over there,” she said, pointing toward a tidy hayrick.

  Her obvious pleasure in the surrounding countryside sent Sage’s thoughts rambling down a dirt lane to an imaginary farmhouse where she wove baskets on the front porch, baskets he filled with green velvet balls of newly dropped filberts. “We need to get you out more,” he teased, earning a swat on the arm.

  Her face sobered quickly. “I don’t understand why it is you think you should start working in the shanghaiing business tonight.” Her words came in spurts, as ruts in the road jostled the buggy and made her clutch the side rail.

  “James Laidlaw advised me to start out with a crimp named Tobias Pratt. As crimps go, he’s a fairly honest man. I won’t be in danger working for him. Thing is, Laidlaw wrote that Pratt just lost his runner and is looking for a new man. It’s an opportunity I can’t afford to pass up. I’ll go down to the North End soon as I return today, figure out how to find Pratt, convince him to hire me and maybe room in his boardinghouse,” Sage explained. Catching her frown, he quickly said, “If I wait too long, Pratt’s going to find himself another runner. That forces me into approaching a less honest crimp. First, I need to hook up with a decent one. Otherwise, I won’t know enough to achieve the acceptance of the crimping crowd. It’s not a familiar world to me.”

  He’d thought the situation through and Pratt really was the best approach. It beat the other obvious option–using himself as shanghai bait. Just imagine Mae Clemens’s response to that idea. He’d get more than a swat on the arm from her.

  She stayed silent over another mile of jostling road, apparently mulling over his plan. She slowly nodded, “I guess your plan makes sense.” But there was one more objection up her gingham sleeve. “But Lucinda’s expecting . . .”

  “Darn it, Mother, Lucinda is my business. I already told Matthew to take her my note. She’ll understand.”

  “She’s supposed to understand a note from a delivery boy? After you haven’t seen or visited her in days?” Incredulity laced her words. “I tell you, Sage, you do this one too many times and you’re going to lose that gal.”

  “We’ll be fine. Lucinda understands my work.” He spoke firmly to cut off any objection or further discussion.

  As the buggy wheeled around the corner onto the Kincaids’ dirt street, they saw the young woman sitting on her stoop holding her baby, watchful, as if expecting someone. She wasn’t sitting there waiting for them.

  “Oh, dear,” Mae Clemens muttered, “she doesn’t seem to be doing any better.”

  Sage reined the horse in, noting that the window box flowers hung wilted, like the young woman already turned gaunt and colorless. She pulled herself to her feet and stepped toward them, a flicker of hope in her eyes when she recognized Sage.

  “Mr. Miner, is there news of Joseph?”

  Sage nodded, took her arm and guided her back down onto the stoop.

  His mother evidently concluded that it was better for the woman to receive bad news without an audience, because she quickly said, “Let me see to the tea and child.” She took the baby from the arms of the unresisting mother and disappeared into the house.

  Sage remained standing, turning his hat brim around in his hands. “How have you been doing?” he finally asked.

  She looked at him, her forehead wrinkled, as if puzzled why he’d driven such a far distance to ask the question.

  Sage said, “The baby is looking very well. That’s good.”

  Again silence. He breathed in and out. “I’m not positively sure yet,” his words came slowly, painfully, “I think your husband was shanghaied, taken aboard an ocean ship against his will.”

  Mrs. Kincaid’s spine straightened and her gaze sharpened. “Shanghaied?”

  “Kidnapped, taken against his will and dumped aboard a seagoing ship. For money.”

  “Then Joey could come back to me and Faith? Once he reaches a port?” Hope suffused her face so completely that Sage dreaded speaking the next words, “Mrs. Kincaid, I don’t know how to say this, . . . I think, . . . I’m afraid, that Joseph died trying to return home to you and Faith.”

  Blood drained from her face as if a plug had been pulled, “No, please no” she whimpered, burying her face in her hands.

  To her bent head, he quickly recounted his fruitless search and told her about the strange men in the Millmen’s saloon on the night her husband disappeared. And, worst of all, he told her about the body found at the river’s mouth, a body that fit her husband’s description. At last there was nothing more to say. Her shoulders shook with sobs, as she murmured, over and over, “He’s dead, he’s dead. I knew he was dead. I felt it these last few days. I didn’t feel it at f
irst but, lately, I just knew.”

  Sage took a seat beside her, waiting as her body heaved with sobs. He didn’t know whether to pat her back or murmur words of comfort. Relief from the dilemma came with the call of Mae Clemens from inside the house. The sobbing slowed. Kincaid’s wife raised her head, dashed tears from her face with shaking fingers and stood. When Sage started to enter the little house, his mother rested a gentle hand on his chest to keep him outside on the stoop.

  “Mr. Miner,” she announced, “I think it’s best that I stay with Grace for now. I’ll take the interurban train back to town later on today. You go ahead. You need to start your search for the men responsible.”

  More softly, barely audible, she told him, “Sage, you staying around here isn’t going to help. Lord knows, maybe I can’t either. I just don’t want to leave Grace alone.” She raised her voice to normal tones and continued, “Tell Ida that, if I’m not back by supper, she’s in charge until I return. Ask Matthew to help her.”

  Sage welcomed the opportunity to escape the weighty grief that seemed to fill every corner of the small house and its yard. He called an unanswered ‘goodbye’ through the crack in the door to the woman. She sat unmoving in a rocker, staring blankly into the air before her eyes.

  Climbing in and turning the buggy, he began the trip back into town, snapping the leather reins to send the horse into a vigorous trot. “Grace,” he thought, “so that’s her given name.” An apt one he suspected.

  The night before, Sage had no luck finding Tobias Pratt. Late in the evening, though, he’d got a lead on where he might find the crimp come morning. Dawn the next day had come and gone by the time Sage reached the Couch Street wharf. He stood looking down the length of gray, gouged planks running alongside the tin-roof warehouse and out over the river. Wagons rolled up to deliver the wooden crates and barrels that men were loading onto carts and pushing into the warehouse. Likely readying for the next day’s shipment, he guessed, since no ships were tied up to the wharf’s iron hawsers. Most likely the morning’s ships had sailed before dawn with the receding tide.

  About fifty feet off the wharf a small rowboat, crammed to its gunnels with men, was wallowing its way toward a sailing ship anchored about two hundred feet upriver. A rotund old man, nearly dwarfed by an oversized hat with a tall crown, sat in the stern, his face toward the ship. The old man fit Laidlaw’s description of Tobias Pratt perfectly. Sage swore. Matthew’s skulking around, trailing behind on his bicycle, had prevented Sage from reaching the wharf before Pratt rowed out to the ship. Sage had been forced to duck out of sight down a filthy stairwell and wait until the boy gave up the hunt. Maybe that bicycle wasn’t such a good idea.

  Behind him a creaky voice spoke, “Don’t worry, son. If you’re thinking to ship out on the Mary Jane, ole Pratt will gladly come back to fetch you.”

  Sage looked around to see another old man, age hunching his back, perched atop a nearby wooden crate, apparently contemplating the view and enjoying the sun on his face. A smoldering tobacco pipe was resting in a thick-fingered hand that was missing its thumb. At Sage’s notice, a toothless grin split the old man’s deeply creased face.

  Sage laughed. “Nah, I’m not looking to ship out. I was hoping to work with Pratt,” he said.

  “You be a rowing man?”

  “I rowed a fair bit in Frisco. I figure this river’s a mite easier than the Bay,” Sage lied. He had never rowed on San Francisco Bay. He’d only hung around Frisco’s Barbary Coast waterfront a few weeks while he hustled inexpensive passage to Alaska and the Klondike. Still, he was no stranger to rowing. The mine owner insured that he enjoyed all the trappings of an elite education. That meant serving on the University’s rowing team. Nowadays, he sometimes rowed the Willamette River for the pleasure of feeling that familiar rhythm in his muscles.

  The old man pulled his pipe from his mouth and nodded wisely. “I know that’s true. That ole’ Bay is a rough one,” he said. He gestured with his pipe stem toward the rowboat, now more than halfway to the ship. “Matter of fact, your timing is good. The feller rowing that boat is shipping out. Ole Pratt’s going to have to pull his own oars if he wants to make it back here to the dock. By the time he ties up, he’ll be ‘dee . . . lighted’ to hire a younger man to row him to and fro, heh, heh.”

  Sage settled himself on a neighboring crate. He gazed around. A ship repair operation was in full swing fifty feet upriver. A small sailing ship lay on its side atop a floating raft, its barnacle-encrusted bottom exposed, its stern afloat in the river. Men were at work on the stern end while standing atop river rafts, some of them using pry bars to strip metal sheathing from the hull. Others floated along behind, scraping the unsheathed surface down to the planking. Hard to believe that such a frail structure withstood crushing ocean waves and battering sea winds. The seagoing life was foreign to him except for luxury passenger travel to Europe and the short sail up the inside passage to Alaska. Mining, stevedoring, farming, gold sluicing and falling trees; those were livelihoods he knew well and, with the exception of mining, he sometimes liked the work’s physicality. But the idea of working aboard a collection of tarred-together sticks midst a vast expanse of pitching ocean? No, thank you!

  He looked northward, gazing down the river to where it curved slightly west. Summer’s low water meant the outflow end of a wooden sewer pipe dangled over exposed boulders, instead of being submerged in the river. A town grew big enough, like Portland, and people started switching from their cesspools, septic tanks and outhouses to indoor plumbing. The switch meant more business for the sewer pipes that dumped into the river. The brown gunk flowed without pause. Funny how some folks thought, just because you flushed a water closet, it meant whatever you flushed disappeared. Good thing the breeze sent the stink the other direction. Wouldn’t think the fish liked sewage all that much. Sure wouldn’t want to eat a fish that did.

  Sage looked the other direction, back toward the whaler.

  “Heh, heh,” came a spumy cackle at his side.

  Sage twisted to look again at the old man on the neighboring crate. Seeing he’d secured Sage’s attention, the old man began talking, “That rotten old beached bucket you’re looking at is an arctic whaler, name of the Karluk. She was heading for Alaska and started taking on water. They couldn’t pump her out quick enough. Captain had no choice. It was sail up here or sink.‘Course, the fresh water in the river killed the barnacles on her plates. That was good but that weren’t her worst problem. Barnacles just been slowing her down. They wasn’t what was sinking her.

  “You see where they pulled that copper plate off’n her?” he asked, pointing with his other hand toward the bow of the whaling ship. Sage saw with a start that the old man’s other hand also lacked its thumb. How the hell had that happened?

  The old man responded to the question on Sage’s face. “So you noticed both my thumbs was missing, did you?” He raised his hands side-by-side so the absence was unmistakable. “A sonof-a-bitch captain tied me in the rigging. Wasn’t able to keep my toes on the deck for long enough. Ain’t seen these thumbs for more than fifty years. I tell you, I miss ‘em every day.”

  “Why’d he do that to you?” Sage asked, recalling stories of devil ships and cruel captains. No way to escape a bastard captain in the middle of the ocean unless you killed him. Even if you succeeded, there’d be no putting the act behind you. Mutiny at sea, no matter how awful the captain, carried a death sentence. Just the thought of being trapped aboard such a ship made his skin crawl up his back. It’d be claustrophobic, only above ground, surrounded by an endless expanse of bottomless water.

  The old man was rooting around in his own memory, reliving the loss of his thumbs. “Bastard claimed I was insubordinate because I spoke up. He was too hard on the younger boys in ways that weren’t natural.” Despite explaining those missing thumbs for more than fifty years, his words carried outrage. The easy geniality on the old man’s face was gone. “Next time we hit port, I scarpered. It was hell making my w
ay home from Africa, took a couple years. I didn’t care. Heard that later in that same voyage someone stuck a knife between the captain’s ribs while he was whoring it up in some Chilean brothel.”

  The old man shifted atop his box and said, “Them days are long gone for me, my boy, but captains like that are still sailing. Old salts like me, we know all of ‘em that comes to port here.” He puffed vigorously on his pipe and nodded toward the beached whaling ship.

  “So, what was sinking this whaler here?” Sage asked. “Well, you see the squiggly channels and small holes in the wood? They mean that sea termites honeycomb the planking. Carpenters can tamp new oakum, that’s hemp coated with tar, into the seams, plank them over, tar ‘em up and sheathe her with metal. But she’ll still be barely seaworthy. Old and riddled as she is, I’m willing to bet her inside frame is rotted out. I sure know I wouldn’t want to be sailing her into the Arctic.”

  “She’s going back into the Arctic this close to winter?”

  “The captain’s a crazy drunkard so she might. She’ll leave port soon, once she raises a crew. Maybe instead of heading north so late, her captain might decide to hunt humpback whales down around Mexico, then beat across to the Japan grounds for sperm whales. Come April, though, if she’s still afloat, she’ll for sure head into the Arctic seas, looking for the bowheads. Won’t never touch land the whole trip.”

  “Bowheads?”

  “Them bowhead whales carry the most baleen.Whalebone–that is. They grow more of it than any other kind of whale. More oil, too, not that their oil brings much anymore. Nowadays, with that cheap kerosene oil everywhere, fella can’t hardly give whale oil away. Still, the baleen is worth something. Women need their corsets. Besides, folks fashion other stuff from whalebone–combs, boot shanks, why, even tongue-scrapers–anything needing some bendability.”