The only reminder of the wilderness surrounding Gurry Bay, out beyond those mossy walls, was the full body mount of a blue-furred glacier bear that stood near the door, erect and awful with its jaws agape and its paws extended in the time-honored threat of the bear hug. Someone had hung a sign 52 in the shape of a cartoonist’s balloon from the bear’s jaws. It read, “C’mon, honey, give us a little smooch.” Blue bears were just color variations on the common black bear, adapted to glacier country, not as aggressive as grizzlies or coastal browns, but tough enough anyway. They were unique to this stretch of the Alaskan coast. Norman liked to shadowbox with the bear, dancing around like Willie Pep, flicking jabs at the bear’s silent, snarling jaw and then crossing hard with his right to the ribcage—thwock !
“You ought to come up into the country with me sometime and try that on a bear that can punch back,” I told him.
“No thanks. I like it here just fine.”
Most of the men in town went out into the bush only with the greatest of reluctance, and then only to make their winter meat. Moose was the staple of their winter diet and in those days, before wolves were protected from aerial hunting, which was the only efficient way to cull them, there were plenty of moose to go around. A single moose provided meat enough for a family of six to make it through the winter—some five hundred pounds of it—though after a few months of nothing but moose steak, mooseburger, braised moose nose au gratin, moose stew and moose croquettes, it began to pall.
No, the clientele of the Blue Bear preferred to sit around the bar every evening after work, bitching or bragging about how rough it had been that day out there, listening to Hank Williams or Eddie Arnold on the juke, and getting pie-eyed on drinks they invented from the bottles that stood under the mirror behind the bar. A “Williwaw” was half beer, half Irish whiskey, with a dollop of horseradish for zest. An “Irish Nigger” was crème de menthe and crème de cacao, over ice. Most potent of all was the infamous “Red Brick” (or “Red Prick,” as some styled it)—a mixture of sloe gin, bitters, vodka and tequila topped off with a maraschino cherry and a slice of lime. One of them excised your kneecaps. Two spelled Puke City.
I like to drink as much as the next man, but in the Blue Bear the drinking had an ugly, hysterical undertone to it much of the time, a sour stench of ennui and defeat and bottled rage waiting to erupt. A constipation of the soul that only blood could clear, only suicide or murder.
When I got back from filing our homestead papers in Juneau, the salmon run was at its peak. Healey had stayed in Gurry Bay to clear up some paper work and negotiate the purchase of a Cessna 180 that we planned to convert to floats and skis for our hunting lodge. I found him in the Blue Bear, drinking with Marie Olds, and I knew we were in trouble. He was into his Clark Gable routine with a vengeance, all slow lopsided grins and merry twinkles, his deep voice husky with booze and implicit promises and his heavy shoulders hunched slightly like a man about to spring. The ear that the carcajou had chomped was nearly healed, but now it didn’t jug out as far as the other, giving him a slightly rakish tilt. Marie was eating it all up with a rusty spoon. She was a big blonde gal, good looking as Alaska women go, but somewhat coarse featured. Dumb as they come, but with big knockers and a well-packed can that bulged her slacks like a couple of king salmon kissing.
The only trouble was that Marie was married. Her husband, Gainey Olds, was captain of a purse seiner (the Sweet Marie) and one of the meanest, most vengeful men up and down that mean and vengeful coast. Two seasons earlier, when a college kid who was crewing for him gave him some backchat, Gainey stranded the kid on a rock in the Shelikof Strait off Afognak and left him alone with the sea lions for the better part of a week. When he came back, the kid had jumped his trolley and only talked in seal yaps. Another time, he socked a salmon gaff into the buns of a cannery boss he suspected of making eyes at Marie. The cannery took him to court, but Gainey was too valuable a highliner for them to alienate, so they dropped the charges and fined him his bonus for that season. Most of the year they lived down in Ketchikan, but during the run Marie worked in the cannery where Gainey could keep an eye on her when he was in port. Gurry Bay was too small a town for her to run around without him knowing about it, so I was surprised to see her playing Sam’s game.
“Jack-O my boy,” said Sam. “You get it filed okay? Have a drink. Have a couple of drinks. Hey, Norman, bring this Jack-Off a double O.P. straight up. Bring us a couple too, hey Marie?” “O.P.” was overproof rum from the Yukon, 160 proof and strong enough to fuel a ramjet.
Healey was flying all right.
“Sam’s been telling me about your place up on the Alugiak,” Marie said. “It sounds neat. Sam says as soon as the Cessna’s ready, he’s going to fly me up there and show me the glacier and we’ll go fishing and hunting and everything.”
Sam smiled his crooked grin at me and winked.
“You think Gainey will let you?” I asked her.
“Gainey and me are through,” she said, pouting a bit. “I’ve taken enough from that palooka. The other night they came in with a load and he started yelling at me, that I was fooling around and I never foolt around, not so’s he’d notice, a girl can’t have no fun anymore, and he slapped me around, and I gave him the old heave-ho.” I could just see that. Marie’s a big girl and she packs a wallop—I once saw her cool a college asshole who got fresh with her on the packing line—but Gainey weighs about two-sixty, all of it bile and rocks. A big black hairy son of a bitch, that Gainey.
“You made the deal on the Cessna?”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “I got the price we wanted and she’s down at Maynard’s right now. Hank’s hanging the floats on her. We should be able to fly her by this weekend.”
“Come on over here,” I said.
We walked over to the door by the mount of the glacier bear that Norman had standing there, its paws out so that the afternoon light shone through the long, curved yellow claws.
“You’re not taking her up there, are you?”
“Why not?”
“Gainey will kill you, that’s why not. I don’t care if she’s given him the air or what. That fucker will have your balls for breakfast.”
“See this?” He pulled back the flap of the flight jacket and I saw the curved walnut grip of a revolver tucked into his belt. “It’s one of those new .357 Mag Colts we were reading about. I bought it off the guy who sold us the plane. He said he stopped a brown bear with it over on Kodiak. One shot.”
I looked at him, then shook my head.
“You’re serious. Listen, Sam, when was a coozie like that worth killing a guy over? This isn’t the goddam Gold Rush anymore. You plug him and they’ll have you down in the hoose-gow in Sitka before you know it. There’s lots of chippies better than that over on Kodiak. Why don’t you save yourself the grief and fly down there for a while?”
“Now you’re serious.” He laughed, but it was tight, not that gritty Gable laugh of his. “Where’s your spirit of adventure, Jack-O? Where’s the old Find-’Em-Feel-’Em-Fuck-’em-and-Forget-’em Jack-Off of the good old days? The old Four-F? You’re turning into a prissy old fart, partner.” He laughed again and clapped me on the shoulder, then went back to the bar. He patted Marie on the butt and nuzzled her ear, then winked at me and drank.
CHAPTER NINE
I WENT OUT and down the boardwalk to the docks where some cannery workers were handlining for ling cod. Herring gulls squawked and circled against the pink sky. It was one of those summer evenings when the air is just going crisp and the smell of kelp feels like iodine on a nick in your soul. The sun just hangs up in the western sky, motionless, like it will never fall, and the white night goes on and on. One of the workers fishing was a girl, a young woman actually, and I sat on a bitt and watched her fish. She had her line coiled around an empty tin can and when she wound up to throw the baited hook and sinkers, her shoulder action was like that of a man. She was tall and willowy, though, with long dark hair and when she turned toward me, I
could see she was pretty, in a long-nosed Egyptian kind of a way. She held her lower lip in her teeth when she threw, and the bait sailed out against the pink sky, exciting the herring gulls so that they dove toward it, but the bait splashed and sank before they could grab it. The line paid off the tin can the way it does off the spool of a spinning reel. She knew what she was doing. Then she turned and caught me looking at her. Her eyes were wideset and gray-green in that light. For a moment, we stared at each other. I wanted to smile, but I couldn’t. Then she broke the gaze and looked back to her line. She folded her free arm across her chest. Not much there compared to Marie, but enough. She wore dungarees and a faded blue workshirt, but she had class.
The bell in the cannery mess hall rang last call and I walked up there and had a salmon steak, mashed potatoes and peas. It’s amazing how fast salmon can pall when you eat it six days a week. I read somewhere that back in colonial times one of the New England states—Massachusetts, I think—passed a law that indentured servants should not have to eat salmon more than three times a week. Do-gooders. You’d never get a bill like that through the Alaska legislature, not even back then when salmon were so thick during the run that you couldn’t see the bottoms of the rivers for their black backs.
As I was finishing my coffee, the girl from the dock came in with two others. I watched her again and this time, when she caught my eye, she nodded. I tipped my hat. Healey would have walked right over to their table and sat down with his mouth at full revs, spinning them some yarn about the mating habits of the polar bears at Kotzebue or cannibalism in the Klondike during the Rush, something that would have them all agog and off-balance. Then he would squire the girl of his choice back to our shanty on River Street and have his way with her. I never could operate that way. For me, it had to be a formal dance, agonizing, glancing eye contact, nods and half smiles, finally a few cool words, the careful painful search for precisely the right pretext to ask her “out.” Whatever that meant up here. “Out” was just about all of Alaska, but it wasn’t the sort of “out” you ask most girls to.
“Uh, how’d you like to go out to the dump tonight and watch the bears?”
I took my tray back to the kitchen. Ole Bengtsson, the cook, was leaning on the counter smoking one of his El Ropos and sipping coffee spiked with rum. He was the only greasy squarehead I’ve ever met. The story goes that once a new foreman came to the cannery and insisted on inspecting the kitchen before taking over from his predecessor. Ole was making hamburgers that evening—the one meat meal of the week—and his method of shaping the patties was simplicity itself. Standing there in the steamy galley, wearing a sleeveless undershirt that only half covered his hairy gut, he would grab a hunk of hamburger, slap it under his armpit, and, sqoosh, down would come the arm, and the meat was not only shaped but salted. Machinelike. The new foreman had gulped queasily and looked at the man he was replacing. “That’s nothing,” the other guy had said. “You oughta see him make doughnuts.”
I asked him about the girl from the dock.
“That twist,” he snorted, scattering ashes over tomorrow’s potato salad. “She’s a new one, came in while you guys were away. From the Outside. They call her Josey or Joey, something like that. The bitch come in here the other day and complained about ‘foreign matter’ in the meatloaf. I look her up and down, see, and then I say: ‘What you expect when you’re eating dead Jap?’ That took the wind out of her sails, you bet.”
When I walked past the Blue Bear I could hear music from the juke and the usual laughter, and Healey’s voice right in there with them, but I went on back to the shanty. It was a bleak barebones of a place, two rickety beds covered with rough sheets and musty O.D. army surplus blankets, a rusty sink, a heating coil that we could make coffee and fry eggs on, and mildewed beaverboard walls where Healey had pinned up a couple of Vargas Girls. I lit the kerosene lamp next to my bed and flopped. I’d been living in places like this since I left the farm. First the air corps, all the empty-hearted barracks from Texas to Frisco to Hawaii to India and China, and now Alaska. All the cheap hotel rooms in places like Juneau and Fairbanks and Sitka and Nome. In Dillingham they let you sleep in the jail, free of charge.
I heard Healey and Marie come staggering down the boardwalk, their voices low and cozy, her giggling at something he said. They stopped when they saw the light in the window. He said something and they laughed again. Then they went off, probably to her room in the dormitory. She’d shoo her roomies out and they’d have their rattle. Well, screw it, I wasn’t going to evacuate the room and spend the next couple of hours leaning on the bar at the Blue Bear, listening to the same shit from the same assholes that I’d heard for more nights than I care to remember. Grim and Dim, my nighttime companions. I tried to read—something by Dos Passos, I think it was, maybe U.S.A.—but I couldn’t concentrate. These weren’t my people and this town wasn’t my place. Alaska was fine, but the towns were even worse than Outside. I thought of the Alugiak, up near the glacier, and how if I were there I’d be lying next to the fire, burned down by now to coals that glowed under the random cracks of warm ash, with the lights coursing overhead the way the lights move across a Wurlitzer juke box, and that high almost inaudible hum that they have when they’re really surging. The salmon would be upriver by now, gone black and tattered with their journey, the males with their jaws bent so they could scarcely close them, flesh peeling from their flanks in the instant senescence of the spawning run. Everything would be at the river for free lunch. Eagles perched in the snags, fat with dead salmon, waiting for hunger to overtake them again, then down to the water to work over the spawned out body of a fish that still twitched as the eagle ripped it. Bears ambling the banks, glossy and arrogant, stinking of dead salmon so that you could smell them long before you could see them. Wolves and weasels and skunks cashing in on nature’s annual bonus. That would be something to take a girl “out” to see. I wondered if—what was her name?—Josey would be interested.
The next day, we flew a load of canned salmon up to Anchorage for shipment Outside and picked up a priority cargo of machine parts for a cannery the company owned on the Nugashak. There was weather all the way. Healey was redeyed so I handled the flying and he navigated. Neither of us mentioned Marie Olds. Then, on the way back in to Gurry Bay, he said: “Sweet Marie’s due in port tonight.”
I didn’t say anything, just flew.
“I said Sweet Marie’s due in.”
“So what do you expect a prissy old fart to say to that?”
“Aw, hell. You’re not pissed off about that, are you? I never knew you were so goddam sensitive.”
“I’m not sensitive,” I answered, getting hot now and knowing he was right. “I just don’t want to see you get the shit kicked out of you over some dizzy broad.”
“How about that time up in Kashmir?” he said. “You and that British major’s wife. Who backed you up on that one, sport? ‘Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar.’ You picked a ditsy that time, pal. A goddam nympho with a husband who liked to kick ass, one of Orde Wingate’s lads, a real meanie. Had you down on the verandah, playing a bongo solo on your noggin until I came up and kicked him in the kidney. How about that, Jack-O?” We both laughed thinking about it.
“Well, I’ll back you on this one, don’t worry,” I said. “But no gun. Okay?”
“Only if I have to.”
We were shooting a stick of eight-ball in the back room of the Blue Bear when Wee Willie Hinkey came in and looked around, a week’s growth of beard on his weasel kisser and his sea boots still wet. Hinkey was Gainey’s mate on the Sweet Marie. He flicked a look at us and then went back out, whistling casually with his hands in his pockets. Healey looked up from the table and winked at me.
“Here we go, partner,” he said.
He was running the solids and had three balls left to go, one of them a trick downtable carom on the four-ball. He lined it up nicely, then stood up and chalked his cue. Then he bent back down and sank it clean and crisp—w
hap-whap, like that. The other balls were easy and he ran the table and I went out to buy him a beer. I was turning back from the bar with a beer in each hand when Olds walked through the door with Hinkey and his skiff man, Bill Wales. Olds had a splintered swab handle in his right hand.
CHAPTER TEN
“YOU BEEN messing with my wife,” Gainey said. He stood there big and awful in his gurry-stained yellow slicker, his face black with a pumped-up rage that couldn’t quite mask his happiness. He’d been at sea for two weeks filling his hold and taking a pounding from a cold wet enemy whom he couldn’t hit back. Now he was going to do some stomping of his own.
“At her own request, you might add,” says Sam, cool as you please.
The Honcho in the Poncho Meets the Macho Muchacho.
“That ain’t the point,” says Gainey. “A man’s got to take care of what’s rightly his, even if it is a damn poor thing. That bitch has been nothing but grief to me since I took up with her. But I’ve handled that end of it already, don’t you worry. I hope you like women with no teeth. They’re supposed to give terrific blow jobs.”
“You’re a mighty wordy bastard for an outraged husband.” Sam is standing there leaning on his pool cue, grinning with his teeth and looking Gainey straight in the eye. By now the loafers at the bar—mostly off-duty cannery workers—are crowded up to the door of the poolroom shuffling and hooting and licking their lips, and more of them are pouring in the front door. I could see Josey back there in the press, waiting with the rest for the action to start.
“You smart-ass flyboy,” says Gainey, grinning back. “We’re gonna give you back what you give Marie.” He gestured with the broken-off swab handle. “We’re gonna give you a good fucking over with this here stick, splinters and all, and then we’re gonna nut you. Like a shoat.”
Slade's Glacier Page 5
