About that time, Norman Ormandy comes pushing through the crowd with that sawed off ten gauge of his.
“Take it out on the dock, Gainey,” he says. “I’m not having my place busted up by you goons. This isn’t The Spoilers and I’m not Marlene Dietrich.”
That got a laugh from the crowd. Norman was what in those days we called a pansy, a slim, balding, doleful man who had come into Gurry Bay before the war on the lam from a morals charge in San Francisco. Today, he would be called “gay,” I guess, though how anyone so mopey could be thus classified beats me hollow. His little boyfriend, Too-Tight LaFourche, stood next to him holding the 7-mm. “Baby Nambu” automatic he claimed to have taken off a Jap marine on Attu during the Aleutian Campaign. I watched him pop rats with it one afternoon on the dock and I never doubted his story.
“What’s to keep these ginks from putting the boots to me the minute we’re out the door?” says Sam.
“We’ll escort you,” says Norman.
The whole gang troops on out of the saloon and down to the dock, cannery workers laying off bets right and left as if it were a heavyweight fight, chattering excitedly in five or six languages, hip boots flapping and feet clomping on the hollow weathered boards. The mercury-vapor lamps gave the whole scene a washed-out, hard-edged look. The tide was out and the masts of the seiners tied up alongside barely cleared the top of the dock. You could see the crabs scuttle on the mossy pilings. I caught Josey looking at me and gave her a wink, braver than I felt. She smiled back doubtfully.
The crowd formed a circle around Gainey and Sam. Gainey handed the swab stick to Wee Willie. I stood near Willie and Bill Wales, ready to wade in if they interfered. Sam and Gainey had stripped down to their skivvy shirts and I couldn’t see the pistol in Healey’s belt. He was wearing Wellingtons, though, and I wondered if he had it tucked in the top of a boot. If so, his footwork was going to suffer.
Gainey moved in low, with his arms out, in a wrestler’s crouch, hoping to tackle Sam and use his seventy-pound weight advantage to pin him and then demolish him with his fists. Each paw looked like it weighed ten pounds. Sam circled away and then shifted in with a left that smacked loud on Gainey’s cheekbone. Gainey grunted and lunged, but Sam slipped away to his right, circling just out of range of Gainey’s long grab. He caught Gainey with another left, on the ear, and then crossed a right to his eyebrow. He was still grinning, his teeth clenched, up on his toes and moving well. He couldn’t have the Colt in his boot, not the way he was moving.
Gainey gave up the wrestling approach and stood straight up, aping Sam’s stance and throwing a left of his own. Sam slipped it and faked a right to Gainey’s kidney, then hooked his left to Gainey’s mouth as Gainey came around trying to face him. It drew blood, a black smear in the vapor light. Gainey sucked it in and spat at Sam. Sam batted the glob away with his left hand.
“You’re slow, Gainey,” he said. “Fat and slow. You can’t even spit fast.”
“Bastard.”
Gainey lunged in swinging with both hands and Sam backed away to the edge of the open space, circling to his right, popping and popping through Gainey’s clumsy swings, and when they stopped moving the blood was running black down Gainey’s upper lip and over his chin. His right eye was coming up and he was starting to breathe hard. But I could see that Sam’s left fist was swollen too. You can’t fight bareknuckle very long, not if you’re connecting.
I looked around and I couldn’t see Wee Willie. Bill Wales looked at me and shook his head as if to say he didn’t want any part of this. Bill was a good gee, with a wife and four kids, and he skiffed for Gainey because he needed the money. I’d been surprised to see him with them when they came into the Blue Bear. Wee Willie was up to something.
I heard a whack and turned back to the fight. Gainey had landed a punch to Sam’s gut, and I could see Sam sucking air as he backpedaled. Gainey closed and Sam tied him up, and they went round and round, Gainey’s big legs pushing Sam wherever he wanted, but Sam had his shoulder up in Gainey’s face, rubbing the rough cloth over his cut lip and butting up with it into Gainey’s nose. Gainey was grunting like a bear now, whoofing and chuffing as he tried to whip free of Sam’s arms and level him with a clean swing. He threw a knee at Sam but Sam had his hip cocked and blocked it, then let loose of Gainey and spun away to the right again, and as Gainey came for him, he planted himself and threw a left-right combination, the left skinning off Gainey’s cheekbone but the right coming across solid on the side of Gainey’s jaw, whap, and Gainey’s head snapped and his eyes went gaga for an instant.
It was as solid a shot as I’ve seen, smack on the button, but Gainey didn’t go down. He shook his head and gulped, and his eyes came back to focus.
His face was a mess, though. Both eyes were swollen now, and his eyebrow split bone-deep as well as his lip. His right ear was big as an artichoke and there was blood all down his skivvy shirt and on the dock in weird ropy splatters, like someone had spilled a can of Thirty Weight. He stood there breathing hard, and you could almost hear his mind ticking.
“Had enough, Fatstuff?” Sam asked him. His hands were raw and swollen, and I could see his heart thumping against the wet T shirt. He had his Clark Gable grin on now, but I knew he couldn’t last. He knew it too.
Just then, Wee Willie burst out of the crowd behind Sam and grabbed him around the elbows, sliding the swab handle in as a crossbar.
“Take him, Cap!”
Gainey moved in, his eyes glinting through the fat lids, but I got between them and felt his right arm come across taking me on the neck as my own right landed on his ear, and then he and I were tied up, him stinking of sweat and blood and stale salmon, and I brought my knee up into his groin, feeling his balls give against my kneecap, and I swung around as he went over and clubbed him on the back of the neck. I turned and I couldn’t see Sam, but Willie was coming at me with the swab handle and I ducked, but it caught me across the side of the face and I saw the lights shatter and fell back on the splintery boards of the dock. I saw Sam belly down, groping in a crab pot over the dock. Then Gainey was on me, retching and gouging, pounding me in the side, and I got my thumbs into his eyeballs and pushed until he backed off, seeing Willie’s feet dancing around and feeling the stick whacking on my shoulders and head. I heard a gun go off close by—Norman, I thought, firing to break up the melee. The crowd was all around us now, hands grabbing and pulling and people screaming and cursing, fists splatting on faces, and I broke loose of Gainey, skidding on my palms through a pool of blood and puke and something that felt mushy with sharp bits of rock in it, and Gainey’s weight was off me. My hand touched metal and I grabbed it and stood up.
“Christ! You plugged him!” Norman grabbed me, his hand like a claw.
The crowd fell back and I stood there, reeling, and looking at the horror on their faces. Then I looked down. The back of Gainey’s head was gone. Just a black gooey hole there, with hair matted around the edges. The pistol was in my hand. Someone stuck out a boot and rolled Gainey over onto his back. There was a blue hole in his cheek, just under his staring right eye, a hole edged with the black of powder burns.
Sam was gone.
LaFourche took the gun from my hand. It was Sam’s .357 Colt all right. He flipped the gate and checked the cylinder. One empty brass, smoking.
“I didn’t shoot him,” I said, but it sounded weak. If I didn’t, who did? Sam, of course. But I couldn’t say that.
Where the hell was he?
“We’d better go back in the bar,” said Norman Ormandy. He wouldn’t look me in the face. “I’m going to have to get on the raddio.”
I looked at my hands. They were slippery with blood and brains, Gainey’s brains, where I’d skidded through them on the dock. Red-handed, I thought. So that’s what it means.
Five minutes later, the shakes set in.
Ten minutes, while drinking a beer in Norman’s kitchen, and I began to feel the sting of the powder burns on my wrist and forehead.
&nbs
p; A minute later, we heard the drone of the Dakota’s engines, boring overhead and then banking east, toward Canada.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IT TOOK the better part of three weeks for that pussel-gutted numbskull Earl Ledbetter, the federal marshal, fetid in his chalk-stripe rumpsprung double-breasted suit and the tie ragged at the knot with a quid of Red Man in his sallow cheeks and tobacco stains on his cracked patent leather oxfords and his vacuous yellow-veined pale blue eyes that never looked at anything with a comprehending glance but rather pored and puzzled over the simplest sight, to conclude what any fool could plainly see: I hadn’t dropped the hammer on Gainey Olds. Even at that, he worded his report on the shooting so ambiguously that the CAA had no choice but to lift my commercial pilot’s license. Hardly a tragedy as far as I was concerned. We’d become little more than airborne truck drivers, Healey and I, and the air freight business was so hectic now with the Arctic DEW Line bases going in and new mining companies and canneries opening everywhere in the state that I’d had no time to spend back in the bush, which was where I wanted to be. They issued a bench warrant for Healey’s arrest for manslaughter and let me go. I still had the Cessna, though I owed Hank Maynard for rigging the floats.
“Uh, how’d you like to go out and watch the bears?”
“At the dump?”
“No. I had the Alugiak in mind.”
To my amazement, she agreed.
Josey Poole. Twenty-six. Schoolteacher from Pismo Beach, California. Navy brat. Her father, a career gunner’s mate, had gone down with the Juneau off Savo Island in the Solomons, the same night action when the Japs came down the Slot and killed the famous Sullivan brothers in the same ship. But not before he’d taught her how to shoot and fish and get around on her own.
Because it was necessary now to get into the bush, she knew it, away from the sleaze and torn toilet paper of the coastal settlements, just California moving north, fags running saloons, fat cops wheezing and spitting in the year-round mud, chalk-stripes and D-7 Cats and the stink of the cannery like someone had peed on the sky, brown bears mangy and ropy with dirty yellow Shirley Temple curls poking through the garbage, and the forever of the fog off the Gulf with the distant bitching cries of the sea lions aching in her ears, yes away into the bush up to the ice: at least there it would be clean and cold.
“I owe Maynard for the floats.”
“So?”
“We’ll have to kill some bears this fall, pay him off.”
“Jim dandy.”
At sixty bucks a hide, we’d have to kill ten of them. The first was a glossy black bear, smacking salmon out of a riffle on a clear bright afternoon, leaning at the edge of the run with his muscles rippling under the sheen of the fur, cinnamon snout almost red in the clarity of the day, and she took him clean just in front of the ear with a fifty-yard shot from the Johnson so that he simply slumped forward as if in a doze, his jaws lolling and then a trickle of saliva looping down into the rushing blue water.
“I’ll do him.”
She worked the knife in around his asshole, leaning over him naked to the waist, her tits lolling pale and a shag of hair under her armpits, nipples stiff with the breeze and the spray of the rapids shining on her pale skin, grunting as she ripped the knife guided by her fingertips up along his shaggy belly, until she had him laid open from tailbone to chin. She grunted again as she peeled the hide back from the pink translucent meat where the rib bones bulged, then ran the knife carefully up the integument until the gray-green coils of gut bulged through, her arms up to the shoulder into his throat to cut the windpipe. Crich.
There’s a lot of guts in a bear. She pried the mess loose with strong fingers and together we rolled him on his side so that the innards of him flopped out onto the rock. Christ, how he stank! Then we peeled the hide the rest of the way off of him, skinning out around the nose and ears and the big flabby pink lips that showed his young white strong teeth, and around the eyelids. She was expert.
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“Why should it?”
“All the blood. The guts.”
“Ah, that’s sissy stuff,” she said laughing. She shook the long dark hair away from her eyes and knelt there, bloody to the shoulders, the knife easy in her hand, white teeth and those wide green eyes, her little breasts hard and round and pale-shadowed down where they met her ribs.
“I killed it and I gutted it and I skinned it and now all we have to do is drag it on out of here and eat it.”
“You’d better get that blood off.”
“Indeed,” she said. “Cleanliness. Godliness.”
We were both pretty bloody by then, the bear blood drying fast in the breeze and browning us up like old gilt statues, and she stripped off her slacks, lovely curple, pale, a silken bush on her, then we walked down the rocks to a back eddy and I could feel myself stiffening but it was all so matter of fact that I didn’t embarrass myself with a full one, and she plunged in head first, whoofing and barking like a seal, the water eating the dried blood off of her shoulders in yellow flaking rivulets, her hair sleeked back and her teeth shining, and I dove in after her, caught her about the waist with my hands, our feet skidding and slipping on the greasy cold rock of the river’s edge, and kissed her, cold lips, hot tongue, and the roar of the rapids and then the sliding brush of a passing, dying salmon.
“Think you could do it treading water?”
“I’ll give it a try,” I said.
She bellied up to me, her arms light around my neck, wrapping her thighs over my hips as I feathered my hands and kicked dog fashion, upright flutter kick, and found my way into her. It was passing strange, the cold swirling water and then the hot entry, and the two of us spinning slowly in the back eddy, cold lips, hot tongue, gooseflesh and the slow steady deep working hip to hip, the dying salmon circling and eagles overhead, waiting to get hungry enough to eat, the dead eyes of the bear glazed and staring up into the sky, the crash of water bulging over unseen rocks just over her shoulder, her head bent back throat broken ying yang yelping over the roar of the Alugiak as I spent and spawned my love away into her. And then, again, the bear staring, skinned and dead-eyed, into the sky.
The gazing eagles.
“How was that?”
“Damn fine.”
“Better than the girls in India?”
“I never tried it in the Brahmaputra.”
“Or the Ganges?”
“Ganja, yes. Ganges, no.”
“But really . . .”
“You don’t have to worry.”
“But I do, I do. My nose is too long and my teeth are too big and I’ve got funny motes in my eyes, and sometimes I think I walk funny.”
“I never saw it.”
“That’s because I’m a witch. A bitch of a witch.”
“I never saw that either.”
“Tell me about the first time you did it. You’re not saying much, and I like to hear you talk!”
The fire was dying down now and the bear hide where we had it stretched on a frame of popple poles loomed darker than night against the blue-glowing loom of the glacier. We had dined on cutthroat trout and bear loin, finishing off with a can of Queen Anne cherries that we’d left to chill in the icy water of the river, stiffened and fierce with brandy. We lay naked in front of the fire, under a Four Point blanket and on top of the sleeping bags. The Cessna bobbed at its moorings, tied down to a wind-weathered snag in the gravel shallows just downstream, its floats pucking and whapping on the back riffles of the roaring current.
“Maggie Cruel.”
“Not really?”
“Something like that. It was after the prom, on a back road near a gravel quarry just outside of East Periwinkle, Vut. Vut stands for Vermont. When you abbreviate it on an envelope.”
“What did she look like?”
“Short, but put together, with reddish hair and a heart-shaped face, nice tits, a bit of a snob. She’d been dating the track star at our high school. But then they got cau
ght in the sack and she was sent away to a private school. He took up with another girl, doctor’s daughter, and then one night he was driving home from a date along Route 100 where it winds and bends through the black hills and the old quarries outside of Rochester and he tried to pass an empty semi, but the truck batted him out onto the shoulder and another car was coming, and bingo! Head on. Broke his neck. Finished.”
“But the girl.”
“Not now. Some other time. It’s hard to live in the head on a night like this.”
The following morning we set to work building the cabin. We laid it out on a level patch of well-drained ground above the high-water mark of the spring runoff, right at the juncture of the clear river and the glacial river. We gathered ice-ground boulders and, the day being fair, Josey mixed “mud” with the Portland cement I’d brought along in the hold of the Cessna while I laid the corner pilings. The rivers provided an abundance of natural “bank run” aggregate and plenty of good-sized pole timber, much of it already skinned and dried. The heaviest baulks I squared with an adze for the sills, securing the sills to the stone corner pilings with heavy anchor bolts sunk in a wet concrete core.
Josey was a good worker, wiry and indefatigable, never complaining even when I clumsily dropped a heavy boulder on her foot one morning. She had drawn her time at the cannery, quit, and figured to stay up on the river with me for the rest of the summer.
“I can’t pay you.”
“Don’t be a ninny.”
We notched the logs for the end walls and side walls, framing in the door and the two south-facing windows with finished lumber I’d bought up from Gurry Bay. For now, the door was the hide of Josey’s bear and the windows tacked Plexiglas until we could get real glass from town. When the walls were ten courses high, we roofed them with pole timber and shingled them Tlingit fashion with flattened slabs of spruce bark. In the course of our hunting expeditions in the low hills north of the cabin, we found a stand of yellow cedar. We camped there for a week while I split out rough planks from a well-cured blowdown and Josey killed two more bears, again both blacks. We lived on roast of bear and bear jerky, on Indian rice and Arctic grayling and trout. Our skins burned black with the constant sun, crosshatched with scabbed slashes from devil’s club and bug bites, and our clothing at the end of those weeks of hard labor hung on us in fringed tatters, and she loved it.
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