The car rocked lightly as the ferry from the Ketchikan Airport lurched through a wave. Ketchikan Airport hadn’t fit on the same shore as the small fishing town backed by steep hills that had called gold-rushers to their doom or fortune. So, they’d built the airport on the island on the other side of Tongass Narrows. The airport ferry only took a few minutes. Would these few minutes be enough to bribe the ferry captain to turn left and just see how far they could get? Anchorage? Dutch Harbor? Russia?
The phone call had been just before lunch on Saturday and now Jo was going to be having dinner in Ketchikan, Alaska. Assuming she could keep anything down. Her single least favorite place on the planet. She didn’t hold it against the state, the town, or the people in it. Well, not as much as she held it against one person in particular.
But he was no longer in it and that was the problem.
Earnest Jack Thompson was dead. And it was now up to his only child to deal with whatever mess he’d left behind.
Muriel had a reservation waiting for her by the time Jo landed and called to check in. Jo couldn’t remember what Muriel had said about it, so she would just head for her usual retreat up on the hill at the edge of town and hope for the best. She hated to impose on Muriel on a Saturday morning, as they were supposed to be working that afternoon and Sunday. But when she’d received the phone call, her brain had muddled and she’d become wholly incompetent. Any court in the land would have declared her so, including a jury of her friends.
Perrin and Cassidy had removed the wedding dress while she’d stood like a lifeless mannequin. They’d given her clothes and she’d put them on. Now, looking down as she waited for the ferry to carry her across the Tongass Narrows, Jo saw that she wore hiking boots, her Calvin jeans, and an REI rain jacket. Under that, her blue blouse and a dark gray flannel shirt. She didn’t even know she still owned a flannel shirt. Well, her friends had dressed her appropriately for this adventure.
Her friends. They’d taken care of her. Packed for her. Muriel had found the flight and Cassidy had delivered Jo’s mortal remains to the airport. She’d wrap that support around her and be strong.
Deep breath.
Another.
It was jolted from her by the ferry jarring hard against the dock pilings. The dock pilings in Ketchikan, Alaska.
She was so in for it.
She kicked on the windshield wiper to clear the heavy mist and ducked her head down.
She didn’t wave at the deckhand, doing her best not to look at Dave Garvey as she rolled by inches away from his toes. The years had been hard on the former star wide receiver and king of auto shop class. Jo shouldn’t be so mean about him, he’d always been decent to her—by never noticing she existed.
This was going to kill her. She was turning back into her fifteen-year old worst self. She was a lawyer of national and soon to be international repute, for heaven’s sake.
She sat up straighter and eased her grip on the wheel. Just in time to come face-to-face with the ferry’s Captain, Steven Lancaster. He hadn’t added the thirty-pound beer gut which now weighed down Dave. He looked great.
“Hey, Jo!” He shouted it loud enough to be heard through the tightly closed windows. Loud enough to be heard throughout the town. Well, it would be out soon enough anyway. The locals weren’t that big a community. Her graduating class had been a hundred-and-forty-six strong, and in all likelihood about a hundred-and-forty-five of them still lived in town. Ketchikan was the sort of town that everyone talked about leaving, but no one actually did.
She’d run into this the few times in the past when she’d been forced to fly in here for meetings. She actually scheduled dinners with her father when she was in town only partly as a reason to see him. Mostly it had been to avoid her former schoolmates as much as possible. Her meetings here were typically all-day ones and much livelier after all the fishermen in the crowd had their three-beer lunches. Afterwards, anyone attending who she’d known from her youth, tried to get her to “Go out on the town” with them. That meant a total dive like the Crab Hole or some other hideous bar.
Steve showed no sign of letting her just roll on by, so Jo lowered the window. The air was cool on her face. It smelled of ocean, deep forest, and thirteen feet of rain every year.
“Hi, Steve! How are you doing?” That sounded normal, didn’t it?
“Great! Heard about your dad. Sorry.” He didn’t look too contrite, but then he knew what her home life had been like. “Any chance of seeing you while you’re in town? Marta and I eat at the Crab a couple times a week.”
“Marta? Marta Benkowitz?”
“Marta Lancaster.” He corrected her but his grin of pride showed she’d gotten it right. Steven and Marta? Sure, why not? Steve had always been an easy-going, cheerful guy that everyone liked. Even if he wasn’t the smartest guy around, he was one of the nicest. Marta was shy, dark, and pretty enough. She was also one of the few that gave Jo a run for her money on test scores. As close to a friend as Jo ever had in Ketchikan, which wasn’t saying much. An odd couple, but Steve’s smile showed that it was clearly working for them.
“The Crab? Ah, sure.” She was going to have to shoot herself. She’d just agreed to go back to the Crab Hole. Of course, that had been her dad’s favorite bar, his second home. She’d have to go there anyway to make sure his bar tab was settled.
A horn blared behind her making Steve look back at the remaining ferry load.
“Mainlander,” he scoffed then returned his attention to her. “Just let Gerta know when you’re in and we’ll come down and join you.”
“Gerta.”
“Yeah. Ukrainian lady. Barely speaks English. But she showed up one day looking for work and old Fred hired her. Rumor is they’re an item but it’s hard to tell because Fred never talked all that much anyway and no one can understand her when she does. But the food’s almost edible now which is a nice change.”
“Okay. Good to see you doing so well.” Then she waved and drove off the ferry and into hell on earth.
Chapter 26
Unable to eat, Jo had merely curled up in her room at the Cape Fox Lodge, hidden under the covers, and prayed for sleep. Somewhere during the third movie of an Adam Sandler marathon, she hated Adam Sandler, slapstick humor, and the world in general, she’d finally fallen asleep for a few fitful hours.
Sunday morning she tried the house, but, though the black and gold letters spelling out “Thompson” still clung tenuously to the mailbox as they always had and the same old fishing gear littered the porch, she couldn’t get in. The door was locked, which was unusual. They hadn’t been well enough off to have anything worth stealing, so why bother. The obvious spare key under the mat was gone, too. It had probably been used to lock the door.
Jo then went down to find his fishing boat, but didn’t remember what slip it was in. Well, she thought she did, but the Eloise wasn’t there. Maybe she’d finally sunk, though the dark waters alongside the finger pier hid any evidence if it had sunk at dock. The marina was empty of people, surprising even for a Sunday morning, so she couldn’t find anyone to ask. Right. It was June in the salmon fishing capital of the world. The run was on and every fisherman who could crawl onto a trawler, or snag a tourist, would be out on the sea or up in the fjords making a living.
Well, the hook had been baited and it had dragged her back to Alaska. Now it was time to see just how fast she could get unhooked. Since not even the Crab Hole was open at this early hour, she went for a drive through the town, a major mistake.
Two cruise ships had arrived in the night and she could see a third pulling into the Tongass Narrows even now. The population of the town had just doubled for the day. The historic waterfront was already clogged past reason, the few cars stupid enough to brave the lower streets of the town crept their way between pedestrians, even at seven in the morning. By mid-morning the lower streets would be wholly impassable except on foot, and barely then. It took her forever to escape the congestion.
As a result,
rather than cruising by some pretty little shops, she was up driving through the back roads. The middle school and high school looked exactly the same, except for another decade of age and moss on the roof. They were okay, her only refuge other than the library. She didn’t go there just in case Mrs. Freson was still head librarian. The woman had given her a vision of the outer world. She’d grown up in Seattle, gone to Vassar, and for reasons beyond Jo’s imagining, ended up in Ketchikan with four kids in the four grades ahead of Jo.
Mrs. Freson had fed Jo’s need to know, her need to escape. Having four kids ahead of Jo, she knew which courses Jo would be taking and what books, both fiction and non, would enhance the relatively mundane teachings aimed at fisherman’s and shop owner’s kids. They were mostly headed to work at the fish plant or servicing the cruise ships hitting Water Street like gunshot, leaving a wide damage path and never quite enough money in their wakes.
It might be nice to see her. Sit down and visit about how Vassar had changed, about how she was doing in Seattle. Somehow it was too sensible, too rational, too normal.
The last thing Jo wanted was for anything in Ketchikan to start feeling normal.
The second to last thing Jo wanted to do was see Mrs. Freson and burst into wracking sobs that Jo suspected were lurking just below the calm outer surface she was struggling to present. She continued past the library without stopping.
At the far end of town, the fish packing plant where she’d worked part time in the gift shop during the summers was at full roar. She definitely didn’t stop there, way too many former classmates and coworkers. Though she couldn’t resist slowing down to see if it looked even a little different. “Severely weathered” was the standard paint job of Ketchikan, Alaska, and the packing plant was no different. Some of the cars were newer models, but not enough for it to really look different.
Finally, unable to escape the town, as the road simply ended five miles past either side of Ketchikan, she’d gone back to the lodge, lay down on the bed for a few minutes, and finally gotten much of the sleep she’d missed last night.
It was late that afternoon by the time she again braced herself to venture out into the Alaskan “sunshine.” A bright gray sky offered a near blinding brightness in every direction, backed by just enough moisture in the air to drench your hair if you walked through it, but not enough to justify an umbrella. That was a laugh, she had become a city girl. Umbrellas were useless in Ketchikan, because rain here often rode in on gale-force winds. And she hadn’t come equipped with a hood or hat. Even crossing from hotel to rental car had dampened her freshly dried hair.
Driving back through town, only touching the back roads this time, the windshield wipers squeaked and stuttered across a windshield too dry to wipe properly and too speckled to ignore. Once she reached her destination, she parked, but couldn’t force herself to get out of the car.
Jo looked up through the rental car’s windshield at the spitting sky. She tried to ignore the new car smell that was rapidly mutating to take on the sickening overtones of lichen and moss, no matter that the windows were sealed tight. The tall fir trees were standing stock-still against a uniform bright gray sky. No big blow coming for at least the rest of the day, probably not the one after that either. Other than the light precipitation, this was a perfect fishing day. And she was certainly about to go fishing—for any clue she could find.
Looking back down from the sky, she glared at the bar across the street. The Crab Hole was really too nice a name for the place. It bore a notorious paint job. Fred was a cheap son of a gun, or maybe he just didn’t care, no one could decide for sure and it wasn’t a topic he bothered with. Either way, he bought the mis-mixed paints at the paint store for half price. Someone orders five gallons of peach that comes out puce? The Crab Hole’s south wall will be puce for the next five years. Half the trim pale-piss yellow, the rest of it pumpkin orange. The only thing that never changed was the large, carved-wood sign. Until you knew what it was, it was hard to make sense of it.
Jo could still remember the heat on her cheeks when at the age of eleven she’d finally figured it out.
A crab hole is what the crab fisherman called a place in the ocean that crabs gathered. Often a dip in the ocean floor, it caused crabs to swarm and cluster. Good crab holes are deeply protected secrets passed down generation to generation within a family. Crabber captains lie to their crews about their actual coordinates to hide the locations. So she’d always thought the Crab Hole was named for a good place to go crabbing.
At eleven years old, Jo’s mind had finally matured enough to unravel the aged, weather-softened carvings of the sign. It was a male crab mounted on a female’s back. That wasn’t so unusual. The Arctic Bar just down the road had a logo of two grizzly bears humping. What was out of place on the Crab Hole sign was the very obvious, once you knew how to see it, the human phallus that the crab was ramming up the she-crab’s backside.
People thought it made the place colorful. Tourists who made it this far down the waterfront always took a picture of themselves with the sign over their shoulder in the background. Only a few, however, had the nerve to venture inside. This was completely a locals’ watering hole.
Jo forced herself from the car and tried to forget how many times she’d gone through that door looking for her father. She wished she’d worn gloves, but forced herself to take the door handle shaped like a giant crab claw, a hand-worn electric green at the present time, and go inside.
Almost twenty hours a day of sun here in mid-June Ketchikan, and at four in the afternoon the bar was a place of shadows and smoke. Right, you could smoke in bars in Alaska, she’d forgotten that. New York State and Washington State barely let you smoke in your own home, which was fine with her.
Here, a low cloud of nicotine stained the walls a motley brown. Mixed with the ever constant smell of deep-fry fish and chips and grilled burgers, that were not bought for their “percent lean,” it had a palpable nastiness that was bitter on the tongue and nose, stung the eyes, and left her feeling the instant need for another shower.
For “ambiance” the Crab Hole had the KTKN broadcast offering inaudible but constantly murmuring talk radio that no one listened to, but it filled any overlong silences, as if there was a busy background debate going on in the room. The other entertainment was an old Wurlitzer juke box that might have been worth something, but hadn’t worked since as far back as Jo could remember. She’d dreamed for hours as a little girl of all of the places it could take her. California Dreaming, Girl from Ipanema, both the Dionne Warwick and the Frank Sinatra versions, she’d even wanted to ride The Last Train to Clarksville, wherever that was. Back then, it took an active interest to make out the faded titles through the layers of grease on the curved glass front. Probably wholly invisible by now.
The whole scene created a miasma so thick that it could have been chopped up and sold for poisoning typical house pests. The atmosphere blurred the backs of the regulars at the bar until they appeared to blend together.
But Jo didn’t need to see them clearly to know who they were. Adam, Bernie, Carl, and Dan. Had nothing in the place changed? She’d been gone a dozen years and all they’d done was get a little wider and Carl’s long hair showed a little grayer where it hung down in a severely dated mullet. Dan, the massive Tlingit, so big he must be part Samoan, anchored the row on the fourth stool. The fifth stool at the bar was empty. They always sat in alphabetical order for reasons none of them claimed to remember. The bar would have to find an Eric or Evander to sit on the stool that had belonged to Earnest Jack Thompson as surely as if he’d bought and paid for it.
From the hazy shadows she inspected the rest of the bar. A thousand, maybe ten thousand crab shells had been glued to the wall. No legs, just the shells so close together they were nearly indistinguishable. Not just Dungeness and Alaskan King. Travelers who had braved the Crab Hole went home and sent in new ones from all over the world. Blues, spider crab, stone, rock, South American land crab… She’d l
earned them all, when bored with sitting at some sticky table doing her homework and sipping a Coke. Floor to ceiling, the shells covered the wall.
The place looked as if some mad painter had blotched the walls with a ragged sponge then covered the whole place in dust to gray out any real sign of shape, color, or semblance to anything natural. Rather than crab shells, the ceiling had been mostly covered with dark blue mussel shells, with some gray clam and white oyster mixed in. That was almost pretty, if a little oppressive as it wasn’t a very high ceiling.
There were a dozen or so patrons. The locals were quiet and wore tough working clothes or sensible sweaters for the cool summer day. But there were a few tourists off the cruise ships, the more adventurous ones who were seeking that “authentic Alaskan experience,” all marked very clearly by the urban clothes and cruise ship attitude that was practically tattooed on their foreheads.
She’d hated that as a kid. Because of her half-Alaskan heritage, she looked native enough for all of the tourists to want a picture of her up against some wall of the Crab Hole as if she were an attraction placed there for their own enjoyment. She’d started charging them a quarter a shot. Her father’s sole comment about the whole situation was that she should charge a buck. She tried it and it worked. Almost well enough that she stopped minding as much, though not quite. She spent most of her take at Parnassus Bookstore which left her canning factory gift shop paychecks to go into the college fund savings account.
Behind the counter sat Fred, looking old and craggy exactly as she’d always remembered. Near him, drawing a beer, was the woman Steve had mentioned. Gerta stood about Jo’s height. She had short blond hair, a narrow face, and athletic shoulders. Jo wondered if Fred had hired her to continue the alphabetical chain.
The Complete Where Dreams Page 46
