Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel

by Heacox, Kim

  “Armed and potentially dangerous,” interrupted a ranger from Seattle. “Ron’s right. The only way you achieve absolute safety is through a serious mind-set.”

  Somebody out of Anne’s view said, “Keb Wisting isn’t our problem until he’s in marine reserve waters. Even then, he’s in a canoe, and there’s no restrictions on the number of nonmotorized vessels allowed into the bay.”

  “He’s a problem if he’s headed this way,” somebody else responded.

  “How? Are we going to make him a problem before he is one? I say he’s not a problem until he’s inside the bay, within our jurisdiction, or until he’s broken reserve regulations.”

  Kate said, “My concern is the lawsuit, the very real possibility that Pac-Alaska will capitalize on this ‘Old Man and the Bay’ story no matter what we do. We could lose this case in the Ninth Circuit, and lose a national marine reserve. We could have gold and copper mining in Crystal Bay. Let’s keep our eye on the big picture and handle this smart from the beginning.”

  Anne listened to the opinions fly back and forth.

  “If we let Keb Wisting into the bay, or keep him out; if we search for him now, or not at all, there are no easy answers.”

  “We know that,” Kate said. “I don’t want platitudes. I want concrete ideas.”

  “Strategy and tactics,” a ranger said.

  Taylor leaned over to Anne and whispered, “What are platitudes?”

  “If we don’t stop him,” somebody said, “and he goes up the bay and dies, it will look really bad.”

  “Are we making too much of all this? He’s a hundred years old and sleeping in a canoe. He could get hungry and sore and be back in his soft bed in Jinkaat in two days.”

  “He doesn’t have a soft bed. He sleeps on a cot in his carving shed. But the shed burned down. So he doesn’t have a cot and he doesn’t have a shed.”

  “Maybe he wants to die.”

  “Wanting to die is one thing. Dying is another.”

  “The public is going to see this whole thing through whatever lens the media puts on it. I was in Yellowstone during the ’88 fires and the ’95 wolf reintroduction. What we’ve experienced with this ‘Old Man and the Bay’ thing is nothing compared to what’s coming if it doesn’t end quickly and quietly. Ron’s right. We need to contain it with strong public affairs and law enforcement, put an end to it before it begins. Find Keb Wisting and escort him home.”

  “Crystal Bay is his home.”

  “Yes,” Kate said, through the speakerphone. “We know that. He knows that. But the world-at-large doesn’t know that. It’s his home only if we allow events and the media to make it his home.”

  “How do we stop him?”

  “Safety. We make it a safety issue. We rescue him.”

  Anne heard herself groan. She pulled back from the open door and whispered to Taylor, “You’re right, this is ridiculous.”

  Taylor showed Anne a picture of her boyfriend on Facebook.

  “Nice,” Anne said.

  Taylor asked, “Why is it sexy men have a ‘cute butt,’ but sexy women have a ‘nice ass’?” She Googled Crystal Bay. “Whoa, look at this.” A story from the Seattle Times:

  Over the past half century, Keb Wisting has become the best—and last—canoe carver in the Tlingit Indian village of Jinkaat, on the north shore of Chichagof Island, nine hundred miles north of Seattle, across Icy Strait from the entrance to Crystal Bay National Marine Reserve, the only marine reserve in Alaska. He alone represents a dying art, for he himself is dying, friends say.

  He gave away every canoe he ever carved. Gave them to friends, loved ones, and the sons of powerful clan leaders. But not this one. Beginning Tuesday night, this canoe he paddles himself, headed north for Crystal Bay, a home he hasn’t known for a long time. This will be his final journey, some believe. “We don’t expect to see Old Keb again,” said Dag Nystad, a friend who watched him paddle away with his grandson and two other traveling companions. “We hope he finds what he’s looking for.”

  TWENTY-TWO YEARS AGO this old man—white-haired even then, yet capable and strong—pulled Anne from the sea. Like an angel, traveling alone by skiff from Jinkaat to Juneau, he came upon her and Nancy and their overturned boat. He later visited in the hospital and embraced Anne’s mother. Kneeling before Anne, he said, “I’m sorry about your sister.” Anne said nothing, words stuck in her throat.

  And now? Say something, do something. . . .

  She heard a division chief say, “It’s blowing in Icy Strait. They’re probably hunkered down on shore, wet and cold in the forest.”

  “I feel sorry for the old guy.”

  “That’s how PacAlaska might want everybody to feel: sorry for the old man who can no longer hunt and fish in Crystal Bay.”

  “From everything I’ve heard, I don’t think Keb Wisting is pro-PacAlaska or pro-corporation of any kind. He’s doing this for his own reasons.”

  “Have you ever seen him? He’s barely five feet tall. I saw him at a basketball game a few years back, in Jinkaat. Everybody was screaming and pounding the bleachers and I swear the old guy was sound asleep, sitting there with his chin on his chest. I can’t imagine him out in weather like this.”

  “I can. He’s a tough old Tlingit Norwegian who fought in World War II, in Sicily and Italy. You know, there are only about eighty people left in the whole world who speak Tlingit as a first language, and he’s one of them.”

  “He’ll probably sleep better in that canoe than he did on those bleachers.”

  “How do you hide a twenty-five-foot dugout canoe? It’ll be too heavy to haul up the shore and into the forest.”

  “We should invite the Jinkaat elders to Bartlett Cove and ask their advice.”

  “Good idea,” Paul said.

  “We’re going to need every set of eyes we have, people working in pairs, mostly in the lower bay. I say we get Simon and Joel up on Feldspar Peak with spotting scopes.”

  Kate said, “Put Anne and Taylor in Icy Strait, under the guise of looking for whales.” Anne felt a spasm. “Paul, call Ruby Bauer. Tell her we will find her father and nephew and make sure they’re safe. Safety, safety, safety. That’s your mantra.”

  Anne closed her eyes and tried to think of whales. Only one image came to her: Old Keb out on the sea, appearing as if by magic; her angel. Timeless, yet out of time. A voice in her head kept saying, Do something . . . do something . . . do something.

  a kindness never heard

  STEVE THE LIZARD dog scrambled up to the bow as James and Kid Hugh paddled the canoe into Flynn Cove. Keb could hear the dog topside on the small foredeck, feet alight in anticipation of landfall. No doubt his stubby tail wagging too. Pain shot down the old man’s spine as he pulled back the heavy blankets and raised himself to look around. “Head for the tender,” he heard James say.

  Tired but still strong, both paddlers had faces strained in the gray morning light. They wore the weather like a second skin, Keb could see. Flynn Cove made a good lee in a southeast blow. The rain had eased. Sitting amidships, Kid Hugh had stripped down to his Lakers jersey, the short sleeves ripped off at the shoulder, to free his arms. James was in the stern, bare-chested, steering with J strokes, his bad leg wrapped in a blanket.

  Keb had hoped to find a good coho stream and set the canoe in high tide sand under good alder cover, as Uncle Austin used to do. Keep the keel moist to prevent cracking. Anchored up ahead, he could see a large fish buyer, a wooden power scow, wide and flat, about one hundred and twenty feet long, forty at the beam, probably built as a floating repair rig in the 1940s. The wheelhouse sat aft of two big booms over an open deck.

  Silverbow read the black letters on the rounded bow.

  As they drew near, a wide-hipped, buxom fisherwoman stepped out and watched them, her arms across her chest. A fish-cleaning knife hung from her thick waist. A large ball of tobacco rested between her yellow teeth and lip. “Well, don’t that beat all,” she said as she spit her chew. “I figured you�
�d get about this far in one night. You must be hungry.”

  Keb regarded her with one bleary eye. Little Mac stirred under her blankets.

  As the canoe drifted in, Kid Hugh raised his paddle while James used his to rudder. James said proudly (a little too proudly, Keb thought), “We hunt and fish for our own food.”

  “I reckon you do,” the fisherwoman said as she waved her hand. “You see this ocean? It was a foot higher yesterday than it is today. Know why? It’s got that many fewer fish in it. Know why? I got them all right here, inside. Fish are my business, my flock. I got more fish than Moses had chosen people. I didn’t catch them myself, but I know every man who did, half of them scoundrels, half of them saints. I got a good price because I always do. I bought fifty thousand pounds of salmon just yesterday and the day before. I’m taking them to Lisianski, and I can feed you, if that interests you. I got crab cakes on the griddle, cornbread in the oven, and horse-kick-to-the-head coffee that’s hot in the pot, and it’s doing nobody no good until it warms a belly or two.”

  “Cornbread?” Keb asked.

  “That’s right, old man.”

  “Square or round?”

  “Keeeeerist. Square, of course. What do you take me for? I make my pies round and my cornbread square. What more geometry does a woman need to know around these parts? Nobody but a damn hick-town clown makes round cornbread.”

  “Or square pies,” Keb said.

  “Never have, never will.”

  “We appreciate your kindness.”

  “Come aboard then. It looks to me like you could use some comfort and hot food.” She leaned down to hand James two heavy straps connected to one of the large booms. Everything lunged against her open-neck denim shirt. Keb saw James stare into a rounded rift valley, a lusty, busty hiding place. After a delicious moment, James looked away, red-faced. “If you run these straps under your bow and stern,” she told him, “I’ll swing the boom and hoist up your canoe.”

  “Our canoe floats just fine,” Kid Hugh said.

  “I can see that, Long Hair. But let me tell you something. The United States Coast Guard has a region-wide alert out on you guys. They’re asking every boat from here to Mozambique to look out for you and report anything we find. You’re all over Juneau radio and TV. You’re even in the Seattle Times. The minute this storm lays down, all manner of search and rescue and law enforcement people are going to come looking for you. Floatplanes, helicopters, hucksters, lots of folks with nothing better to do. The whole US Air Force might come after you, with Yoda and Luke Skywalker and a bloody armada too—boats from Jinkaat, Elfin Cove, Strawberry Flats, Lisianski, Juneau, even Japan. You hearing me? Once this storm is over, Icy Strait and the north shore of Chichagof is going to be a Monty Python Flying Fuckhead Circus, and Flynn Cove might be the first place they come looking. It’s the first place I looked.”

  “You came looking for us?” James asked.

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Why?”

  “I heard about you on the radio. I got a big boat; figured you could use a lift, maybe a place to hide for a day or two. Am I wrong?” Keb could see James sizing her up. She was a bunker, a battleship when you crossed her, but otherwise honest, maybe even honorable. She said, “If we put your canoe up here on deck, I could cover it with a tarp and nobody would know what it was, except you and me.”

  “How do we know you won’t turn us in?” Kid Hugh asked her.

  “You don’t. I offer no guarantees. Now I have a question for you? What makes you a Lakers fan?”

  “Phil Jackson.”

  “Not Kobe Bryant?”

  “Nope, Phil Jackson.”

  “You ever heard of John Wooden?”

  Kid Hugh grinned. “UCLA, ten NCAA national championships in twelve years, including eighty-eight consecutive wins.”

  “Damn straight.”

  James said, “You can’t be alone on this boat. It’s too much work.”

  “Me and my two boys run this boat. Morgan and Quinton. They’re good boys, strong as oaks and deaf as posts, and trustworthy in all things except poker, which I take full responsibility for. We could take you to Graves Harbor, where nobody will look for you, if that’s what you want.”

  Graves Harbor, far to the west, beyond Icy Strait—past the entrances to Crystal Bay, Dundas Bay, and Taylor Bay—all the way to Cape Spencer and beyond. Oyyee . . . north into big water, the Gulf of Alaska, another world, stormier and wilder than this one, where mountains cut holes in the sky. Old Keb hadn’t been there in a long time. He’d spoken to James about it, and told him stories, many stories, about wolf and wolverine, gooch and nóoskw, and brown bear tracks the size of pie plates. He could see James chewing on the fisherwoman’s offer, her words tasting better the more he chewed. He wore a look of deep satisfaction, the paddle in his hands, powerful arms, bare chest, a young man unmindful of the wind and rain, no longer the basketball gazelle he used to be, the indoor boy, more like a seal or a sea lion, tsaa, taan, half-man, half-water, leaving behind the lacquered court and screaming fans.

  The fisherwoman lowered down the straps.

  Old Keb remembered something Truman once told him: Suicide, sugar, whiskey, television, Twitter, incest, drugs, boredom, and beer. For a lot of Native kids in village Alaska, the tragedies of Hamlet would be an improvement.

  James was looking at Keb, the straps within reach. Fisherwoman waiting for a decision. “Take the straps,” Keb told James as Little Mac climbed up from the fo’c’sle, ready for hot food.

  THE CORNBREAD WAS the best Old Keb had ever had. He ate two corner pieces lathered in butter, and gave the other two to Little Mac. Steve the Lizard Dog fared well, wolfing down three crab cakes courtesy of the fisherwoman.

  “I like your dog,” she said.

  She might have been pretty once, on the other side of hard experience and poor men’s promises, before her red hair turned platinum and her smile died. Before too much tobacco and booze. She’d fed a lot of loggers, she said, cleaned a lot of fish, washed a lot of dishes. Keb looked close and found a history of heartbreak and lowered expectations in her gray-green eyes, a reminder that we can only get so far away from ourselves. She said she’d cooked in logging camps on Prince of Wales and Kuiu Islands, run a tavern in Lisianski, prospected for gold up the Taku, and finally bought the Silverbow. She said she knew Galley Sally; everybody knew Galley Sally, the woman whose cookies made good roofing tiles. Fisherwoman told stories, and Keb was struck by how every one was funny and sad. “I’ve known about you for a long time,” she said to Keb. “You and I know a lot of the same people.”

  “Are you Marge Farley?”

  “That I am. Large Marge, people call me, and that’s fine by me.”

  “I’ve known about you for a long time, too.”

  “Well, there you go. You and me, we should start a club or some damn thing.”

  “Thank you for the food, it’s good.”

  James and Kid Hugh nodded in agreement, their mouths full, while Little Mac fed morsels to Steve.

  Morgan and Quinton paid little attention to Keb and his party, though James caught them sneaking furtive appraisals of Little Mac. Red-haired boys with crooked teeth and freckles gone to peach-soft facial hair, they spoke with fingers blackened by bilge grease; they wheezed, grunted, screeched, laughed, and whistled in response to one another. Marge signed with them, though not as fast, and seemed disinterested in their lower-deck humor.

  They didn’t wait for the storm to break. The Silverbow weighed anchor and headed west toward Point Adolphus and beyond, down to Lisianski to offload fish and refuel, then northwest toward Cape Spencer and the Gulf of Alaska, birthplace of storms. A long journey, to Graves Harbor. The last place anybody would search for a canoe from Jinkaat. The only other people Marge expected to see out there were salmon trollers and salt-bitten longliners fishing for black cod on the Fairweather Grounds.

  Keb stretched out on the long padded bench next to the galley table, and must have
fallen asleep. He awoke with no idea who he was, where he was, or how much time had passed. He had seen Bessie dancing. Bessie his love, his wife in another life, long ago—in a dream, a memory? A memory of a dream? Did he remember that he had a memory problem? Or did he forget that he forgot? He heard the distant thump and knock of twin Detroit diesels. He watched lamplight play on the galley ceiling. He felt the roll of the storm, the scow being pushed by her port quarter. No longer in the protection of Flynn Cove. Headed west? Yes, west. James and Little Mac and Kid Hugh and me, yes, and Steve. If the storm is a southeaster, then we’re headed west, still in Icy Strait. He smelled coffee and cigarette smoke, and heard voices, those of James and Marge. James said something that Keb missed. Marge laughed a throaty tar-in-the-lungs laugh that turned to a cough, salted with contempt, as if James wasn’t funny, but naïve. She blew a train of blue smoke, and got up and asked him if he wanted coffee.

  “Got any Coke?”

  “Nope.”

  “Root beer?”

  “Nope.”

  “Coffee will do then.”

  “So where you headed in that canoe of yours?”

  “Away.”

  “Running then?”

  “No.”

  “Sure you are. Every young man runs at your age. If he doesn’t, he’s a fool.”

  “I got a girlfriend.”

  “All the more reason to run.”

  “She’s pretty, don’t you think?”

  “Having a girl because she’s pretty is like eating a bird because it sings.”

  “I saw your sons looking at her.”

  “And they saw you looking at me.”

  Keb could feel James thrumming his good leg.

  Marge said, “This coffee’s bitter. I’ll make a fresh pot.”

  James said nothing. Keb could see him thinking things so hard that you could almost see his thoughts.

  Marge left the galley and returned with two large cohos and slapped them down on the counter. She began cutting up fillets. She said to James, “So tell me, what are you going to do now that you can’t play basketball anymore?”