Ghost Sea: A Novel (Dugger/Nello Series)

by Ferenc Máté

  “You don’t mind killing, do you, Cappy?” he said sadly, and gave the oars a pull.

  “When I have to,” I said.

  The evening darkened. Even the soft squeak of the oarlocks seemed an affront to the silence.

  “You’d kill me too, wouldn’t you? If you had to.” He smiled. “For a woman you barely know.”

  I yanked out the boat hook and trailed it in the water. “Sorry,” I said. “Nothing would make me happier than to forget her.”

  The smell of alder smoke drifted over from the ketch. She looked small and forlorn in that empty immensity. Her smoke seemed a plea in all that desolation. Twilight had erased all depth between the islands; they formed a relentless ring of darkness around the still luminous sea. In the north, where night had already fallen, the mountains stood solemn and indifferent to the descending gloom.

  WE ATE THE roast fish in the cockpit without speaking. From the dark, wooded slopes, the howl of a timber wolf rose guttural and deep, a melancholy sound but somehow comforting in all this emptiness.

  Charlie washed the dishes down below, placing things gently without a sound. Nello lit his cigar stub, and the flame of the match lit his angry eyes.

  “Mr. Hay,” he began softly, but with a tone of menace that was impossible to miss. “Excuse me for prying, but I’m afraid our lives—and your wife’s—may be hanging on the line. How many people know why we are up here?” and he sucked hard on the stub so the glow threw light on Hay. There seemed to be no reaction on Hay’s face, and when he spoke his voice was calm, as if he had been ready for this question for some time.

  “Very few. But why?”

  “Because someone followed us. They followed us, then, when they saw us last night in the strait, they went around the outside—in the gulf—and passed us. And beat us here. There are traces on the island. Unmistakable traces, fresh from this morning.”

  He struck another match and put it next to some others. When they flared together, he held them up. He held them until they burnt down, then he threw them overboard, plunging us into darkness. It was much too dark to see if Hay had flinched, but I heard his ring knock against the deck.

  “So who knew besides you?” I insisted before he had a chance to settle down.

  “Only Hopkins,” he said. “And he was sworn to secrecy.”

  “And your crew.”

  “And the Kwakiutls,” Nello said. “But I don’t think they went and bragged about it.”

  “Can Hopkins be trusted?” I asked.

  “For what he’s being paid—more than you can imagine, just for insurance—I can assure you he’ll stay silent.”

  “Yes, of course. I forgot, you and insurance.”

  “So if no one knew,” Nello said, “who the hell is up here?”

  “What makes you think they have anything to do with us?”

  “Because last night an unlit old junker passed us. And this morning, here in the middle of nowhere—right on the path that anyone could figure they’d be on—one of the Kwakiutl who took your wife is dead. Shot clean between the eyes, then hidden underwater.”

  This time Hay didn’t even rustle.

  “Look, Hay,” I snapped. “We’ll never find your wife if someone buggers up things ahead of us.”

  “Maybe the crew,” he finally pleaded. “At a bar. I’m sure Mr.—” He caught himself. “Maybe the crew.”

  “Mr. Hay,” Nello cut in calmly. “We can’t defend ourselves unless we know what we’re up against.”

  “Mother of God,” I blew up. “One of your crew is short a head, I almost blasted an old squaw to kingdom come, and now there’s a Kwakiutl playing fish food. This is a fucking slaughterhouse. And if you don’t help us and she is killed, I swear to Christ—” but Nello cut me off.

  “Try hard, Mr. Hay. Come up with something. Like who the hell this ‘Mister’ is you just mentioned.”

  It took Hay a long moment to find an answer, and when he spoke his bland piety was shocking. “There are some things in life whose explanation would serve no purpose. That should, in fact, for the good of all, remain unexplained. So things can go on in an orderly fashion. But I promise you that—as far as I know—no one, besides those mentioned, knows that we are here.”

  The night fell silent. Even the murmur of the current against the island had ceased. Nello sucked hard on the stub, blew out a cloud, and flicked the embers over the side.

  “We better go,” he said. “The tide’s turned.” He got up and started forward. “It’s no longer against us. The rest of the world might be; but at least not the tide.” He freed the main halyard, hoisted the sail, then he went to the foredeck and pumped the windlass back and forth. The chain clattered over the gypsy with a belligerent sound, an attack, on the vast peace of the night.

  WE SAILED OUT the anchor on a breeze so light the water kept its sheen, so light I could barely feel it on the back of my neck. Across the sound, keeping the boomed-out mainsail full, we ghosted. To the west the islands rose like dark stairs to the sky, to the east the sound vanished under peaks of starlit snow.

  Nello brushed by me in the cockpit, went below to study the chart under a wan flame. At last, he folded it carefully in four and slipped it in the drawer. He turned down the wick and blew out the flame, said pleasant dreams to Charlie, then came up. He leaned on the mizzen shroud and took a deep breath—as if something had been resolved, a worry lifted from his mind.

  Hay picked himself up and said he was turning in.

  When all was still below, Nello spoke so softly it startled me. “Well, that’s that, Cappy,” he said. “We’re on our own. We’ve sailed off the chart.”

  The wolf howled again, but now very far behind.

  I smiled. “Good. Now we don’t have to worry about all their rocks and shoals. We just sail and if we hit, we hit.”

  “Just be careful,” Nello said. “Or you’ll run into a mountain.”

  There was no use lighting the compass light; I just steered by the path of stars that hung between the islands.

  “How far to his village?” I said.

  “A hundred miles. Maybe more.”

  “Good luck to us,” I said.

  THE NIGHT WAS still. The ketch moved ahead but her wake was so slight it didn’t make a sound. Far, far away there was a murmur or a sigh; a puff of wind in the trees, or the current against the shore. The sails stayed full without a flutter, and the current moved us north—where the dead man had pointed. There was a soft thud as Nello vanged the main boom down to the starboard rail to keep it from gybing, and put the reaching pole out with the genny to port.

  The mountains closed in. The shore rose on both sides enormous and dark, and by some trick of the eye, the stars above them grew ever denser and brighter, an unnatural brilliance.

  I felt I had entered a world I didn’t know. Not just the islands, or the unknown sea; it was more than that—a sensation of something enormous. Not in size, but in power, in possibility. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the seas had parted, or the mountains all fell down.

  That’s when I saw her.

  She floated in the night where the pale sail had been. First just her eyes, then her face; so close. I touched her mouth, the back of her neck, held her so tight her heart pounded my ribs, her breath filled my lungs. The vein on her neck pulsed in my lips; I tasted the salty sweat between her breasts. Bit her warm thighs. This wasn’t love; this was madness. And, in this world without restraint, how much worse would it get?

  I don’t know how long I stood there. The shores had closed in; we were sailing in a canyon.

  We ghosted wing-and-wing pale in all that darkness, ghosted without a sense of motion, with a sky of stars above, and a sky of stars below. And for the first time, I felt stars all around me. I was adrift among fiery giants in a boundless immensity; adrift among stars aflame in a universe gone wild. And if they could burn with a fire that would at the end consume them, then why not I? Why not go out in a great blaze—like the stars?

&nbs
p; “You’re too far starboard, Cappy,” Nello whispered. “Come back or we’ll gybe.”

  He took the helm for the next watch. I went below, lay down, and closed my eyes. And fell asleep with her head across my chest.

  KATE

  Northern Lights

  I awake in the bottom of the canoe but feel no movement. He sleeps behind me. The moonless night is faded, the stars look dimmed, and when I raise my head I see why. We are in the middle of a bay surrounded by mountains and along their northern rim, as bright as if a whole row of suns are about to rise, hangs a wafting ribbon of pearly light. It does not light the sky as would a dawn, but hangs there, glowing.

  A single stream of green-blue light snakes slowly across the heavens, then arcs of colored light billow upward and fold into curtains: pinks, blues, golds, and violets, vast and undulating, they swell and cover the night. The curtains swirl, then dive toward the sea, and back skyward again. Starting from the center, they burst into sparks toward the horizons, burning up the last remnants of darkness. My breathing swells and ebbs with the pulsations of light. From the top of the dome of night, light pours down around me; like a circular waterfall it tumbles into the sea. Then it closes in as if to carry me away.

  I feel I’ve been living this since the beginning of time. Or have gone mad. Or am just now being born. Or dying. Tears wash my face. The streams of light burst for the last time, and in a giant, sky-covering dust devil of sparks, they rise away—and leave me in the darkness.

  NELLO SLUMPED SLEEPILY over the wheel. The sea had opened and the snowcapped mountains lay against the night. I took the wheel but Nello, instead of going below to rest, settled into the cockpit corner and stayed. An owl lit near the shore, hooted, flapped the air, then settled with the sound of rustling branches.

  “Somebody’s soul,” Nello said. “While the owl lives, the soul lives.”

  A cold dew had slicked the wheel.

  “Why don’t you go get some sleep?” I said.

  “I better stay,” he said. “He might come.”

  “The owl?”

  “The Kwakiutl.”

  I shuddered as if the cold dew lay on my skin.

  “He’d take on a boatload of armed men by himself? He’s that brave?”

  “No, Cappy. He wasn’t taught to be brave; he was taught to be sly. Hard and murderous. And sly. When a father decides to raise a warrior, he begins by rubbing his newborn with a hornet’s nest. Handles him roughly, bathes him in ice water. And he makes him a thing you wear around your neck.”

  “An amulet.”

  “That. Out of a toad’s tongue, a snake’s tongue, and a lizard’s tongue—because they all have Death-bringer on their tips. Then he scrapes four pieces from a grizzly’s paw to give him merciless power. Puts it all on a black pebble, and wraps it into a piece of grizzly heart. Ties that in grizzly sinew, braids the ends, and hangs it around the baby’s neck.

  “As he grows, he’s taught to swim, run, dive, kill; with weapons or his hands. Taught how to insult men and seduce women. He sleeps on planks. Owns nothing. Rubs himself with snake’s blood and the fresh heart of a grizzly. When he kills enemies, he gets to wear a necklace of their toenails. He takes their women as slaves, or fills them with eulachon oil and rapes them.

  “Before going to war, he stands in ice-cold water and rubs his body with a hemlock branch until it bleeds. Eats little; a bite of dried salmon at a time. He rubs his canoe smooth with dogfish skin, then oils it, so it glides fast and without a sound. He paints himself black from head to foot with charcoal from a tree struck by lightning—for power, and to be invisible in the dark. He sneaks up on his victim just before dawn at the time of his deepest sleep. Not to fight; just to kill.”

  I didn’t say a word. I just kept looking around on the star-littered sea for the dark, gliding canoe.

  THE MOON ROSE. The night lasted forever. When I steered, I looked around more than up ahead; when Nello took the wheel, I sat in his corner, sleeping only now and then, the rest of the time keeping vigilant watch. I saw the canoe a hundred times; every rock near shore, each cloud shadow on the water, every time the current or a breath of air took the sheen of stars from the sea, I unclipped the holster and held the pistol grip. I was steering, staring at the shore, when Nello sat up with a sudden start. “Sayami,” he whispered. “It has to be Sayami.”

  “Wake up, would you?” I snapped.

  “The bullet,” he whispered on. “Would have blown his head off close up. Must have been shot from a distance. From a bobbing boat. Who else? That fuckin’ little Jap.”

  I sat down to make a smaller target. Suddenly the night felt colder. Sayami was scrawny, with a nose that had been broken a few times. He always had a red bandana tight over his head; tied back like some old washer woman, and wore a rough jacket with long sleeves that crumpled, and pants that ended just below the knees. Padded knees: he knelt when he shot. And he had big striped socks that he must have stripped off a dead clown. And faraway eyes. Carried his rifle wrapped in oil-soaked rags. Shot whatever they hired him to shoot: cougar for ranchers, wolves for sheep farmers, seals for the fish companies. They say he could hit a seal between the eyes at a hundred yards. Not from land; but from a moving boat.

  A COLD DAWN drenched the ketch with dew. It beaded like rain on the varnish and ran in streaks down the paint. The sea was broken by loaf-shaped islands to the west and great mountains to the east, under whose vast, steep, wooded slopes long fjords twisted and vanished in the continent.

  There were sounds in the galley and the smell of bacon frying. Then Charlie’s little face poked out the hatch—half fearful, half smiling—and he handed us steaming cups of coffee.

  “You a helluva good Charlie, Charlie,” Nello said. “If we live through this, I give you nice big tip.”

  Hay poked his head out and bade us good morning, but glanced furtively at us: that, if I remember right, was the last time he looked us in the eye until the end. He asked if we’d seen anything, looked around, saw nothing to catch his interest, and went below to eat his breakfast in the warmth.

  Sea fog drifted over the cold water. The tide had turned but was neap during the day and with the waters here more open and the land breeze still coming down the fjords, we sailed north at three knots toward a lump of land that seemed to block our way.

  “The pass,” Nello said, his voice flat from concern. “That’s where the North begins. It runs at thirteen knots; not the fastest pass on the coast, but the bloody longest. A two-mile dogleg of reefs and rocks. There’s only a half hour of slack water but with this engine it’ll take us an hour, if not more. The whirlpools will be up; and the overfalls. It flows at thirteen knots, Cappy, except it doesn’t flow—it boils. This whole fjord, fifty miles long and a mile wide, has to blow through a hundred-foot-wide throat in just six hours.

  “Imagine a giant wave out at sea—what would it take for a wave to move at thirteen knots? Would have to be thirty feet high, right? Now imagine that wave blasting through those narrows. One colossal wave breaking and breaking, for hours. They call this end Yuculta Rapids, the far end Devil’s Hole.

  “It’ll be good for you, Cappy. Take your mind off things.”

  WE WERE LESS than two miles from the entrance of the pass—we could see the cleft between the steep bluffs where it began. But slack water was not for three more hours, so Nello steered us into the only anchorage around, a sandy hook-shaped cove, huddled below the dark wall of forest. A mass of brambles framed the cove: salal, blackberry, salmonberry, some fruit trees gone wild, all entwined into a green chaos. Someone had once eked out a life here.

  With our slow sail during the night, we had given up hope of catching the Kwakiutl before the rapids; even paddling alone, he would have made it through, if not on the midnight then for sure on the dawn slack.

  We dropped anchor and launched the skiff. We had Charlie bring a bucket and an old knife. “Good clams, Charlie,” Nello said, pushing off. “Good clams in the sand and oysters on the ro
cky point.” Hay was given the hatchet to cut some firewood, Nello took the Winchester, and I took my pistol.

  Hay had been silent all morning. His manner had changed from that quiet arrogance to almost deferential; he seemed more like a hostage than the one who paid for the show. It took him a while to understand that we were going ashore just to stretch our legs, and he had to be told twice about the narrows and the slack. As we rowed, he kept turning back and looking north toward the pass.

  I jumped ashore. It was good to stand on land for the first time in days.

  The sun rose behind a mountain and seemed to torch the trees, leaving only dark skeletons against the sky. The clamshell beach glowed white. Beyond the high-water mark, where shells were packed in dense welts by the storms, the shadow of the mountain still left the forest and brambles dark. An old log sticking out of the brambles into the sun, covered in lichen, seemed a comfortable place to rest. But as I sat, it collapsed under me; I fell into its hollow. It was a rotted, upside-down dugout canoe, the once-thick cedar sides as crumbly as a biscuit. I reached down behind me to push myself out but stopped; I felt as if I had stuck my fingers through some bars. I edged to one side to look down. The sun shone into the hole, onto my hand, and onto the rib cage which my fingers were gripping. Beside it, askew, as if looking up in curiosity, was the skull. Gap-toothed. The rest of him—shin-bones, shoulders, arms, all jumbled—had been scattered by animals and restacked by the tides. I backed away. I could discern odd shapes up in the salal now, mounds that had been houses, and more rotten “logs” just below a low bank of a midden. I walked along the brambles searching in the shadows and saw a drooping eye look back; a burial pole lay face-up just beyond the sand. At the end of the midden was the solitary remnant of a house: a carved post with a once-ferocious wolf’s head, teeth bared, half rotted away. A fern, waving in the light breeze, sprouted from one ear. Inland of the brambles, in a great cedar whose lower branches had been desiccated by time, a half dozen boxes hung or were wedged in the crooks. Parts of them had rotted and fallen long ago, and out hung shreds of blankets, clothes, feathers, and more bones. A raven had made a nest in one of them; it now flew off cawing lowly over the cove.