Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel

by Heacox, Kim

  “I SWEAR,” GRACIE said, “we are hard on each other in this town. A lot of people say they wanted my James to get into Duke. Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. We’re like a bucketful of crabs. Any time any one of us tries to crawl out to be somebody, the others pull him right back down. That’s what happened to my James. He’s talented. He’s a good student. He’s a Tlingit crab trying to get out with everybody pulling him right back down. It’s sick.”

  Just then James angled his way through the door, a wide-shouldered silhouette, heavy on his cane. Old Keb couldn’t see his face. He didn’t need to. Eyes like chestnuts, downcast, vulnerable, one slightly higher than the other. Flat mouth, set jaw. Contours hardening in the cold journey of consequences that turns a boy into a man.

  Gracie said, “I’m making your grandpa waffles. You want some?”

  No reply. Keb could see the boy assessing his place, the wood shavings on the floor, the faint oily smell of yellow cedar, the hand tools on the wall and on the corner workbench where Kevin Pallen had been carving a block of hemlock.

  “You need to beat on something?” Keb asked him.

  “What?” James answered distantly.

  “You need to beat on something?”

  James turned. A motorcycle crested the hill, coming fast. It blasted up to the truck and skidded to a halt. Riding it was the kid, the same feral boy who delivered news of the accident to Old Keb six weeks ago. He wore the same baggy pants and ball cap and Lakers jersey like winter fur on his weasel back. He had a lean and hungry look, fed on conflict more than food, as though no part of him would go unused in a fight. As he loped to the door, Keb heard Gracie say something but didn’t get the words. Dust veiled things. Sunlight slanted through thirsty boughs in the trees. Keb couldn’t see a whole lot, but one thing he did see rattled him. Standing in the doorway, the kid was a soul on fire. “Charlie Gant’s coming,” he said. “He’s got the Greentop boys with him.”

  removed and strangely dispassionate

  EVERY FAMILY FACES moments when the world rises up to bury it, that’s what Uncle Austin used to say. Be ready. They’re little moments that get big fast, each one different for a thousand different families, each one made of truths and lies woven into patterns or woven not at all. Some approach with naked teeth, others you can’t see until they drag you into darkness. They change everything and nothing. Wounded Knee, Trail of Tears, Pequot Wars, all big moments. Little moments have no telling in the history books. Still, lives end. Tribes and clans disappear, and the hurt comes from how easily others forget. This could be one of those moments, Keb knew. He had to get his shoes off. Gracie passed him and was out the door when he heard the ATVs—five big-wheeled machines that roared up the narrow rutted road into the clearing past Ruby’s house. They stopped a short distance away and rumbled beneath their rebel riders who flanked Charlie Gant two to a side. Old Keb recognized Pete Brickman behind silver mirrored sunglasses, true as any shadow. Next to him was Charlie’s brother, Tommy, his eyes the color of ice in a pan. The two riders to his other side added nothing to the descriptions of the first. All were short-haired and grizzly-bearded except Charlie, who was clean-shaven with dishwater blond hair down to his shoulders. All five wore T-shirts except Tommy, who wore no shirt at all. Keb watched one rider roll a toothpick between his teeth. “Stihl Crazy After All These Years” read a sticker on Tommy’s ATV, Stihl being a chain saw favored by loggers who rendered forests into slash. After clear-cutting Idaho, these gentlemen had come to Alaska for the last big slice of American pie. Keb wondered what they would do when all the ancient trees were gone. Cut grass? Mow the big boss’s front lawn?

  James stood next to the truck and faced them, his hand on his walking cane. His mother, standing behind him, appeared snake-bit. Old Keb rolled his tongue and clenched his hand thinking it’s a young man’s nature to have an adversary.

  Charlie turned off his machine and motioned the others to do the same. “Hey, James,” he said. “You got time to talk?”

  James shifted his weight but said nothing.

  “The troopers are asking a lot of questions and I’ve been answering them,” Charlie said. “We’ve all been answering them, haven’t we, fellas?” He looked at his buddies, who nodded. Tommy’s nod lacked enthusiasm, Keb thought. But it was a good beginning. Charlie added, “I’m sorry about what happened. We all are. It’s a bum deal for you, and it was an accident. It really was.”

  Again, no comment from James.

  “It would have been cool to see you make it in the NBA,” Charlie said. He sounded so sincere, looked sincere too, with his open face and expressive eyes and winning smile. Remember Custer? Uncle Austin used to say. He had a winning smile and long golden hair and didn’t smoke or cuss or drink; he loved the opera and classical music, adored his wife, spoke sincerely, and shot Indians.

  “Anyway,” Charlie said, “my brother Tommy has something to say to you.”

  By now Tommy had dismounted his machine and was standing next to it, but didn’t look at all comfortable. Keb thought he might catch on fire from the friction eating away at him. A wounded moment limped by. Keb had to get his shoes off. He tried to swallow. Everything was too hot and dry. How long since it had rained? Keb loved the rain. From his position behind James, near the truck, he watched the Lakers jersey kid circle to his left. The kid was lean and small, but something in the way he moved said it didn’t matter.

  Tommy said to James, “Just before the logs rolled, I heard something break, a D-ring, I think.”

  James stared at him.

  “You might have set the choker wrong,” Tommy added.

  “I set it right,” James said, his hand shaking on his cane. “You were the crew boss, Charlie. You made the decision to skid the logs and not high-lead them.”

  “That has nothing to do with it.”

  “That has everything to do with it.”

  “Read the Alaska Forest Practices Act. Skid logging and cutting in the buffer strip are completely legal.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I know so.”

  The Lakers jersey kid kept circling, aiming to outflank Charlie and Tommy and the others.

  “Stop right there,” Charlie yelled, pointing a finger at him. The kid stopped.

  A hot wind blew up then, like a breath, crazy as it sounds, but that’s how Old Keb felt it, as a parched, dry sigh that whipped up dust and grit, and brought people’s hands to their eyes. It funneled through the open cab of the truck where a raven feather lifted off the seat and sailed out the cab window and onto the ground. Keb alone saw it, from where he stood behind James. As quickly as the wind arose, it died.

  Keb reached down and picked it up.

  “Hey, Keb,” Charlie said, “I didn’t see you back there.”

  Keb nodded. He had nothing to say.

  “It’s time for you to leave, all of you,” Gracie said as she wiped the dust from her eyes.

  Charlie had more to say, Keb could tell, but Sheriff Stuart Ewing roared up in his Jeep Grand Cherokee and parked next to the only puddle that three weeks of sunny weather had failed to vanquish. Coated with pollen and dust, it lay concealed until Stuart opened the door and stepped right into it. Kaploosh. “Everybody stay where you are,” he said in his best sheriff voice. He kicked his feet dry and strode forward on skinny legs.

  A train of vehicles followed, the rusty, dented cars and trucks of coastal Alaska. ATVs too, bringing a small-town theater of eager onlookers keen on any conflict. Coach Nicks was there, and Dag Nystad, and Truman, Helen, Myrtle, Little Mac, and several of James’s friends from the high school basketball team. Coach Nicks said, “Go home, Charlie. All of you, go home.”

  Sheriff Ewing said, “I’ll handle this, Coach.” Problem was, he wasn’t a sheriff. He was the former Jinkaat village public safety officer and now deputy sheriff-in-training, the wheat-haired son of a retired Alaska state trooper who Truman said got the other end of the male chromosome. Instead of doing what he should have do
ne—sell kitchenware in a Seattle Sears—he became a cop. His shoulders sufficed for little more than a coat hanger. Still, you had to admire his fearlessness and determination, even though they would probably get him killed one day. With arms extended referee-style, as if breaking up a fight, he stepped between Tommy and James and said, “All right, what’s going on here?”

  Nobody spoke. Charlie started up his machine.

  Tommy looked wistfully at Little Mac.

  A RAVEN FLEW overhead just then, northbound. Not any raven. Imagine an oracle rising from the dead, a bird with one feather missing, cutting the sky. Imagine the feather in Keb’s hand lifting too. Not a downy feather from the bird’s neck or breast, but a primary feather, broad and black as a January sky. Made for lift and speed. What happened then Keb couldn’t say. It seemed as if hours passed, but in truth only seconds went by. He saw himself on the bird’s back, everything visible from Raven’s eye. Icy Strait appeared below. Up ahead, approaching fast, a vast wall of ice commanded the entrance to Crystal Bay. Keb recognized it as the great glacier that long ago marched down from the mountains and forced his ancestors from their home, the glacier that locked the bay in cold storage for hundreds of years before it melted back. Had it returned? Was yesterday tomorrow and tomorrow today? Raven seemed to float, the shadow of his wings patterned onto the glacier’s deep blue crevasses. Reflected in one wing-shadow, above the ice, Keb saw his own face. In the other wing-shadow, James’s face. Between them, the glacier climbed in fractured towers of ice—the colors separate yet one. The sky was an untended grave, rolling back on itself. Keb forgot to breathe. Then a movement, far below. Approaching the ice was a small canoe, hewn from wood, sharp-prow, seet, the most beautiful boat in the world. Keb watched as two men paddled that canoe right through the glacier as if ice were water. Then a voice: “Pops? Pops . . . are you okay?”

  He gasped.

  “Talk to me, Dad.” Keb was flat on the ground, pressed to the earth. He blinked through dusty shafts of sunshine. Hovered over him were Gracie, Coach Nicks, Little Mac, and Deputy Sheriff-in-Training Stuart Ewing, their faces half in shadow, half in bright light. Tyronniemorris Rex was there too, Steve the Lizard Dog, his head cocked in bewilderment. Gracie stroked Keb’s hair. “Say something, Pops. Can you hear me?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Can you sit up?”

  He was lying on his back. He sat up and saw James not kneeling beside him like the others, but removed and strangely dispassionate, still on his feet.

  “You stopped breathing,” Coach Nicks said. “You feel okay, Keb?”

  “Am I breathing now?”

  “Yep.”

  “I feel fine.” Keb got to his feet so quickly that he startled everybody. “Where are Charlie and Tommy?”

  “They left.”

  Keb looked around. His stomach rumbled. “I’m hungry. Let’s make waffles.”

  the death of too many dreams

  THE CONFRONTATION HAD unsettled Gracie, Keb could see. She was more fragile these days. “We’ll eat in Ruby’s place,” Keb said. “It has a big kitchen table.”

  “Ruby won’t like it,” Gracie said in a weak voice.

  Keb shrugged. Ruby was in Juneau or Anchorage or Washington. He couldn’t keep track of her anymore. “We need waffles, Gracie. Make them like you used to.”

  “Little Mac will help me,” Gracie said.

  Little Mac smiled, her way of saying yes.

  Old Keb watched James, the radius of his heat, his hands working in and out of fists.

  Coach Nicks and his boys set the table. Truman made orange juice. Gracie pulled out the sourdough starter, added cinnamon, whipped it up, and gave each waffle a minute in the waffle iron. Little Mac opened a couple rashers of bacon. Out came the butter with maple syrup tinged with spruce tips and nagoonberry jam. Best waffles in Alaska. Keb tried to remember if James had ever turned them down. Wounded and confused, James probably wanted to get away with Little Mac. That’s why Gracie recruited her, and Truman and Coach Nicks and the ballplayers, James’s best friends, hoping as hopeless people do that things could be as they once had been, back when her son had two good legs and lived in an ocean of light. Back when she made waffles after every home game victory—there had been many—and the lanky-legged boys ate and laughed and told stories with such bravado you’d have thought they’d just slain a mammoth.

  The Lakers jersey kid zoomed off on his motorcycle to follow the Gant brothers down the hog-backed road to make sure they didn’t double back. Who was this kid? Keb was beginning to like him. Coach Nicks said his name was Hugh; he lived alone in a rat-hole trailer down at the boat harbor and worked as a carpenter and heavy equipment operator. He looked about fifteen, but according to Deputy Sheriff-in-Training Stuart Ewing, he had a driver’s license that said he was twenty-three. He came from up north and never got cold and smoked cigarettes and sometimes wore wire-rim glasses that made him look like Johnny Depp, though his manner was all dispossessed Indian. Stuart had run a criminal check on him and come up clean. Beyond that, nobody knew much.

  Ten minutes later the kid motored back up the road, parked his motorcycle, and stood at the door until James waved him in. The waffle iron was hot, the bacon browning.

  “Smells good,” Kid Hugh said.

  “Did you see the Gant brothers?” Coach Nicks asked him.

  “Nope.”

  He sat down with a polite nod to Gracie and Little Mac. Everybody listened as Stuart’s Jeep rumbled up the road. He came through the door with Carmen Kelly and Daisy Robinson, Carmen with her book of horoscopes, Daisy with her cribbage board.

  “Where’d they go?” Coach Nicks asked Stuart.

  “Up the Pepper Mountain Road.”

  “You going to talk to them?”

  “I already did.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I said they need to stay civil and calm. So do you, James.”

  James shrugged. Kid Hugh opened a small knife, cut a callus off the palm of his hand, and said to James, “You should probably get a gun.”

  “No,” Gracie snapped.

  “For protection,” Kid Hugh added.

  “No guns,” Stuart said.

  “Everybody in America has a right to bear arms,” Carmen said.

  “And arm bears,” added Daisy, a flaming environmentalist who like Carmen had a crush on Truman.

  “Charlie’s a Gemini,” Carmen announced. “That’s why he’s witty and adaptable and clever but also devious and superficial. With Jupiter in ascension the way it is right now, and with Mars totally in Virgo, he’s not the one to worry about.” Keb watched Coach Nicks roll his eyes. “Tommy’s the one to worry about. He’s an Aries. So is Pete Brickman. That’s why they’re friends. That’s why Tommy has a bad temper. He’s going to be even more unstable with Mercury in retrograde and with Venus as a morning star.”

  “I thought Venus was a planet,” Daisy said.

  “It is.”

  Keb ate his third waffle and did his best to follow Carmen, talking the way she did: like, oh my God, everything so totally like something else. Truman called it simile shock, whatever that meant. He said her horoscope was actually a horrorscope, since most of what she predicted was doom and gloom. But she did it with a fetching smile, and since Truman’s heart was as big as a pumpkin, he treated Carmen like a scholar and she loved him for it. Others thought she was a fruitcake. Carmen and Daisy were good friends, and that went a long way. In fact, as Keb looked around the table and saw so many people knitted together by friendship, it warmed him and reminded him that when he grew up as a kid in Jinkaat he had good friends too. The best friends. He didn’t know Mercury from Venus back then, or Leo from Virgo, or a bagel from a burrito, but he knew who he was, and where he belonged.

  WAFFLES LANDED ON plates and disappeared as if slam-dunked. Coach Nicks called for a full court press. The table became a free-for-all. Gracie and Little Mac kept it coming like short-order cooks. Daisy and Carmen pitched in. Keb watche
d one of the basketball boys connect a gadgetgizmo to speakers above the stove. Music soon thundered through the kitchen and everybody sang along in words Keb couldn’t follow. But the beat thrilled him. When Gracie went to the pantry to get canola oil, Little Mac flipped a waffle Frisbee-style at James. He caught it one-handed to the gleeful hoots of his teammates. Everybody laughed and cheered. It was the first time Keb had seen James smile in weeks. Gracie returned. “What happened?”

  “You have to stick around if you want to see the action, Gracie.” Coach Nicks said something about major league baseball and the “crazy big salaries.”

  One of James’s teammates responded, “The Rockies paid a hundred million dollars for that pitcher dude from Japan.”

  Keb tried to imagine what he could buy with a hundred million dollars.

  “If money is so important,” Truman asked, “why do some of the best basketball players come from the poorest inner cities?”

  “It takes heart first,” said Stuart. “You have to have great heart.”

  “And natural talent,” somebody said, Old Keb didn’t catch who; the conversation was too fast among a dozen people who sat at the table eating and talking like a pack of wolves, making a big mess. Ruby would have freaked out.

  “You’re either born with talent or you’re not,” somebody else said.

  “It’s all in the planets and the stars,” Carmen announced. “I know you don’t believe me, but it’s true.”

  The boys chuckled. One said sarcastically, “You mean when the planet Pluto is aligned with the planet Mars?”

  “Pluto’s not a planet anymore.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Who’s got the maple syrup?”

  “It’s a funny thing, how talent improves the more you practice.”