Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel

by Heacox, Kim

  “I’ve lived in Hawaii for the last twelve years. I got my master’s degree there in marine biology at the Manoa Campus in Honolulu, with a focus on whale acoustics. I did my fieldwork in the Pailolo and Auau channels between the islands of Maui, Lanai, and Molokai. This is my first summer back home, in Alaska.”

  “So Alaska is home?”

  “I think so.”

  “How’s it feel?”

  “Cold.”

  “I’m sorry about your sister.”

  “Yes . . . me too, thank you.”

  “Whale acoustics, what’s that?”

  “Whales vocalizing, singing. They do it in Hawaii, during courtship, males mostly, and we think they do it here, too, in Alaska, but not as often.”

  “You do seem at home here, I have to say.”

  “Is that a compliment?”

  “Take it as you wish. It warms my heart to see young, skilled, dedicated women like you and your friend Taylor in the NMRS.”

  “We’re not that young.” Or dedicated. Maui Wowie.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean.”

  THE LITTLE PUNT slid onto shore and Anne rested the oars. Kate asked, “How well do you know the Tlingit people in Jinkaat?”

  “Not well.”

  Kate’s expression said this wasn’t the answer she wanted.

  “I know their culture is matrilineal,” Anne added.

  “Meaning?”

  “In the past, every Tlingit was born into the moiety of his mother, but had to marry into another moiety. A raven married an eagle, an eagle married a raven. But I’m not sure it’s still that way, since Jinkaat has a lot of Norwegians and Germans.”

  Kate shook her head. “I want to know how the Jinkaat Tlingits see their relationship to Crystal Bay.”

  “From what I’ve heard, many feel displaced, and want more time in the bay to collect gull eggs and hunt seals and live like their ancestors did, when Crystal Bay was their homeland, their grocery store.”

  “But PacAlaska is a corporate approach.”

  “Yes, and I think that worries many Jinkaat Tlingits.”

  “So while many want a greater presence in the bay, only some support the PacAlaska lawsuit?”

  “I think so, yes. They’re relieved that Crystal Bay is a marine reserve, and protected.”

  “Are they willing to say so publicly?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person. This is my first summer back here. I’ve only been to Jinkaat a couple times to land at the airport, the last time in a single-engine Piper Cherokee before going on to Juneau. That’s when I last saw Old Keb Wisting, in May, when he got on our Marine Reserve Service plane after his grandson hurt his leg.”

  “The Marine Reserve Service gave him a ride into Juneau?”

  “Yes. It was Paul’s idea.”

  Anne could see Kate processing this, figuring out how to make it work to her advantage. Kate said, “Paul tells me you spend a lot of time on the water.”

  “Looking for whales.”

  “Looking. Seeing. Developing your vision.”

  It was true. Anne had sharp eyes.

  “Do you plan on making a career in the federal government?”

  “I don’t know. I’m still figuring it out. I’ve thought about starting a nonprofit someday, for community development. I also love whale research.”

  “I ask because you’re a seasonal employee with no retirement or benefits. You have little to lose by telling me the hard honesty of what you see and think and know.”

  “About what?”

  “Anything. Your job, your boss, the PacAlaska jurisdiction case, the people of Jinkaat who consider Crystal Bay their homeland. Whatever you feel free to tell me, I’ll hold in strict confidence. You have my word.”

  Paul Beals is a nice guy but has the courage of a rabbit. I hate safety meetings and love mango salsa. . . . “Other than Keb Wisting, who’s mostly Norwegian, I’ve never spent much time with a Tlingit from Jinkaat.”

  “Here’s my concern: as this PacAlaska case heats up, Tlingits in Jinkaat could get excited and start staging press events in the bay, bring media attention that could affect the final court ruling. However this lawsuit goes, it could set case law for other marine reserves and ocean conservation policy. It could weaken our jurisdiction everywhere.”

  Everywhere? The last time Anne checked, the US had seven marine reserves: two in Florida, two in Hawaii, and one each in California, Maine, and Alaska. No more. The US Marine Reserve System was young and small, with Kate Johnson handpicked by the president, like an apple. “They want their ancient homeland back,” Anne said. “Every summer the NMRS brings the Jinkaat schoolkids into Crystal Bay on a tour boat, so they can see and learn and develop their own relationship with the bay.”

  “Yes, I support it 100 percent. But the Jinkaat Tlingits are part of a large corporation now. They’ve made their choice. They can’t have it both ways.”

  Can’t they? Anne decided she liked Kate Johnson better back on the Firn eating lunch, when she had pita bread in her mouth and hummus on her hands and laughed at Taylor’s wit.

  Kate climbed out of the punt, stood on her toes, and stretched. Anne could hear distant streams tumbling off mountains, a thousand voices speaking of ice melting into water, rock pulverized into silt, habitats coming alive, rebirth and change, everything on its way to becoming something else.

  Kate said softly, almost to herself, “I became a grandmother two months ago. It changes everything, you know, motherhood. Are you—”

  “No. I was engaged once, but he loved sports more than he loved me.”

  “When I was in the space shuttle, my own hand was larger than the world we call home. I was traveling at five miles per second, and could cover Africa with my finger.” She studied the mountains with her steady eyes. “It changed my life.”

  “I think the sea is the same,” Anne said. “Go deep enough and the blue turns to black, right? It’s not outer space, it’s inner space.”

  “Like the human heart,” Kate said with a rueful smile.

  Yes, well, the human heart, forever inexperienced. Anne remembered her stepfather, a plum-faced man who mocked her mom and fished off the pier and pitched cigarette butts into the sea. “You, a scientist?” he had said to Anne when she came home from first grade after learning about Rachel Carson and announcing what she’d be one day. “Where’d you get a crazy idea like that?” It’s a brutal thing to discover that some men should never be fathers, and yours is one. She thought about Nancy, beautiful Nancy, who could get people to tell her the truth even when they lied to themselves.

  “I hate him,” Anne had whispered late one night in their bedroom.

  Nancy, three years older than Anne, whispered back, “Just because his dreams didn’t come true doesn’t mean yours don’t have to.”

  KATE REACHED INTO her pocket and extended a hand. “This is my card. Do you have a cell phone?”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t always work in parts of the bay.”

  “Do you have a satellite phone?”

  “No.”

  “Get one. Paul tells me you’re working the lower bay this summer, out into Icy Strait, off Point Adolphus.”

  “If that’s where the whales are, I’m there too.”

  “That’s where the Jinkaat boats will be. If you see anything suspicious, I want you to call Paul. If you can’t reach him, call me. Don’t worry about waking me, with the four-hour time difference between here and Washington. I’d like to hear from you.”

  “I’ve got VHF radio contact with Ron at reserve headquarters, in Bartlett Cove. He’s my immediate supervisor.”

  “I know. Feel free to call me as well.”

  Anne stared at her.

  “Are you comfortable with that?”

  “I’m a whale biologist, not a patrol ranger.”

  “You’re an employee of the US National Marine Reserve Service. Paul tells me you have a law enforcement commission.”
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  “I do. Point Adolphus isn’t in the reserve, you know?”

  “But the waters around it are administered by the National Marine Fisheries Service, our sister agency. You’ve got jurisdiction there.”

  Was this true?

  “We need you to be our eyes and ears, Anne. That’s all I’m asking. Be our eyes. Report everything you see. You can still do your whale work.”

  Anne told Kate what she wanted to hear. She would be her eyes and ears and call by VHF radio, cell phone, or satellite phone. What she didn’t tell her was that long ago native Hawaiians used a member of their tribe—a wise old woman called a wahanui—to protect their identity by divining the biases of outsiders who came looking for knowledge and telling them exactly what they wanted to hear. She would confirm their prejudices and make them think they knew everything, while in fact they knew nothing, and send them packing as ill-informed as when they arrived. Another thing Anne didn’t tell Kate was a story she’d heard years ago about an astronaut and an anthropologist who visited a remote island tribe. When the anthropologist told the tribe that his colleague had been to the moon, an old shaman was brought forward, who said that she too had been to the moon, many times.

  Anne was thinking that no science is so complete or poem so perfect that one cannot benefit from the other. A cold wind brushed her neck, a breath off the glacier. She heard Kate announce that she was going to take a short walk. Would Anne be so good as to wait with the punt? A crazy impulse hit Anne, to pull out the Maui Wowie and smoke it in front of the Grandmother Astronaut. Kiss it all good-bye. No retirement. No benefits. Little to lose. She pulled out her journal instead, and sat with her back against a rock.

  Remember when we talked all night

  and rounded the rounded shore?

  the sky was cold, and old

  and young, too

  Did I say that,

  or did you?

  Frozen stars, melting sun

  Watching the rivers run

  We finally slept

  when morning came

  everything new, ancient, patient,

  the rounded shore the same.

  KATE RETURNED, BREATHLESS with an idea. “Paul is scheduled to speak in Jinkaat next week. It could be challenging. I’m going to change my plans and join him. My celebrity status can be a plus in times like these. I’ll have Victor join us. That way we can be a triumvirate of sorts, a team, to explain our case in Crystal Bay. What do you think?”

  “Great,” Anne said.

  Wahanui strikes again.

  a cornbread crime

  OLD KEB FIGURED that if a greedy man could put his money where his mouth is, stuff it all in there, then he couldn’t talk anymore and that would be a good thing.

  This particular man was Harald Halmerjan, chairman of the board, looking mighty smart up there in his suit and tie. Important, too. Most people with money are, or imagine themselves to be. There’s nothing more powerful than the imagination, as Truman said. So they make their reputations by the acre, as Harald did now, on stage in the Jinkaat High School gymnasium, at one end of the basketball court, talking about a hundred high-minded things, so many things and so high-minded that Old Keb heard his voice as a sticky, wet, bubblegum hum. Harald had a lot to say and was saying it to a packed audience. He gripped the podium with his big ham hands. Never mind that he used other people’s time. Seated next to him and waiting her turn was Ruby.

  Keb felt his heart break.

  He set his mind on pies. Strawberry, nagoonberry, or rhubarb pie, any pie. Cherry pie from Juneau Safeway. Apple pie from Fred Meyer. Cow pie from Trinidad Salazar’s lupine field and horseshoe pitch with his inflatable puffin. Shoe-fly-pie from Peter Becker’s Boot Shop. Any pie to erase Harald Halmerjan, the Great H. H., often wrong but never in doubt. Gracie once said that H. H. treated Big Oil like a good neighbor, or an ATM, whatever that meant.

  H. H. blathered on.

  Keb sat in the back row in a small metal chair that cut off blood to everywhere. His toes were numb. His ass felt like lead. His back ached. He had to pee. He was hot. His heart raced. He had no pills. He had to get outside and breathe the earth, if it was still there. The gym smelled like paint thinner or a lacquer of some kind. He wondered: Why do we sit in here to decide how to do things out there?

  His leg twitched. He moaned.

  “Okay, Pops, get up,” Gracie said, sitting next to him. She helped him. As bad as he felt, she looked worse. It wasn’t just her size anymore. Gracie had always been big. Other people ate and she gained weight. It wasn’t her fretting over James either, or her diabetes. Something else was going on. Gracie wasn’t well.

  Now Ruby was speaking, saying all the same things H. H. had said. Keb heard a lawyer cut her off from across the stage, a big guy who quoted a Frenchman named Alex Cokeville. That’s how Keb heard it, Cokeville, a sugar water man with a lot to say about how runaway enterprise and industry built America but also threatened to destroy it. Apparently this Cokeville knew more about America than Americans knew about America, which didn’t sound very American. It sounded French.

  Gracie said the tall man next to the lawyer was Crystal Bay Superintendent Paul Beals, a nice guy by most accounts. Keb had met him once. The woman next to Paul was the famous astronaut who’d walked in space. That’s what they called it, walking in space. Keb wasn’t fooled. All they did was float along, tied to the mothership like a baby on an umbilical cord. He’d watched movies with Mitch, Vic, Oddmund, and Dag. Anybody could do it, Mitch said.

  It was Oddmund’s turn to testify. He approached the microphone, hunched forward like a human question mark, rolling up on his toes with each step.

  Keb had to pee. He shuffled off toward the men’s room at the back of the gym, a long and perilous journey on a waxed basketball court. He made it and did what he had to do. More peril. He washed his hands, gently soaping his new calluses from the adzes, wedges, and mauls that shaped the canoe. When he reentered the gym he was surprised to see Charlie Gant and a couple sidekicks standing nearby in a defiant knot. Charlie waved, and Keb waved back. That’s what you do in a small town, you wave. Charlie walked Keb’s way, open-faced, wearing an easy smile. As he did, Stuart Ewing called from nearby, “Hey, Charlie, got a minute?”

  The smile fell off Charlie’s face.

  “Where you been?” Stuart asked.

  “Around,” Charlie said.

  “You seen Tommy?”

  “No.” Charlie wore a dungeon face, a chin full of stubble under bloodshot eyes. His long hair was matted and unclean and sprinkled with spruce needles. Keb wondered if he’d been out sleeping under a tree.

  “You know he’s in trouble for cutting up Taff’s desk,” Stuart said. “The sooner he turns himself in, the better.”

  Charlie shrugged.

  “People are wondering, who were the choker-setters that day, up on Pepper Mountain, and why you had the crew skidding the logs.”

  “Bugger off, Stuart. I made my statement to Taff.”

  “Where was Pete?”

  “Pete?”

  “Yes, Pete.”

  “He was cutting, I think. Felling trees further to the west, down the line.”

  Keb walked into the discussion. More of a shuffle than a walk.

  “Hey, Keb,” Charlie said, his face brightening. “How ya doing?”

  “Fine.”

  Keb noticed that Stuart had the good sense to step aside. Charlie reached out and shook Keb’s hand gently, allowing for the old man’s bent, arthritic fingers. Coach Nicks walked up with Mitch and Vic and several boys from the high school basketball team.

  Important things were being said back on stage. Oddmund had finished and Superintendent Beals was wrapping up. “You good people always make us feel welcome here in Jinkaat, by golly. Thank you for your attention, and your thoughtful questions.”

  Charlie said something that Old Keb missed.

  “What?” Keb said.

  “The canoe,” Charlie said. “My buddies and me
, we were wondering if we could take a couple swings at the canoe, when you work on it next. We heard it’s kind of a community thing.”

  “Any time,” Keb said.

  “James won’t mind?”

  “No. He won’t mind.”

  The shadow of a wolf crossed Charlie’s face. “Look Keb, I have no argument with you or James. But you should know that what he did was wrong, telling Taff what he did about Pepper Mountain. It cost me my job.”

  “What is it you’re saying, exactly?” Vic asked Charlie.

  “I’m saying James is looking for somebody to blame and there isn’t anybody to blame.”

  Coach Nicks stepped forward to project his full coachness.

  Keb fidgeted. There was too much going on . . . too many people.

  Charlie snapped his head back and forth as a crowd gathered. Keb tried to spread his arms, to give Charlie room; Charlie appeared to do the same for Keb. The crowd thickened and pressed in, moving toward the gym doors. Somebody stepped on Keb’s foot as he felt himself jostled to and fro. Is this what Coach Nicks meant about a full-court press? Then, as quickly as it began, it ended. Keb could breathe again; the bulk of the crowd had passed by and was out the doors.

  Keb looked over in time to see Stuart reach for Charlie and Charlie flick his arm away with terrible speed. Stuart’s face turned the color of paper ashes in a cold stove. Charlie burst through the doors. Keb watched him, hoping he’d turn back for a final friendly gesture of some kind, but he did not.

  BY NOW, TWO dozen people milled about the waxed gym floor like pebbles that wash up and down a beach, rubbing each other. No sooner had Charlie left than a new rubbing began, this one between Ruby and Gracie. By the time Keb got his foot to stop throbbing and his head tuned in, they were well into it. “So what then?” Ruby said, “you think we should live on government handouts? Live on welfare, buy cigarettes and booze with food stamps?”

  “No,” Gracie replied.

  “What then? Move to a reservation? Build a casino?”

  “No.”

  “What then? What’s your solution?”