Sailors passed the coffin to enter through a red doorway and onto narrow stairs leading to upper rooms. Chinamen slouched quickly past wide front doors, while Indians sneered. Hitching posts displayed horses with buggies and wagons—while floozies, loggers, merchants, other riffraff strolled and gossiped, colorful beneath gray sky. Farther down the street a man either preached or politicked, his words smothered by mist.
“I reckon we had to have an occurrence,” the skinny cop said. “Blamed if it isn’t walking right at us.” He reached in his pocket and concealed a two-shot derringer in his palm.
“Makes me weary.” The Irish cop settled his right hand into a knuckle-duster. “It’s like the old country, only more so.’’
The man approached with tight control, a heavyset farmer type wearing a horse pistol on his hip. He wore stained rubber boots, muddy overalls; his lips a tight line, his eyes so focused he did not see the cops. As he approached Janie’s Tavern, he started to draw the horse pistol.
“Not a good idea,” the Irish cop said in a loud voice. “Lad, what can ye be thinking?”
The skinny cop pointed the derringer. “We can shoot you to death or beat you to death. I recommend the first.”
“Or you can walk up the hill and out of town.”
The farmer stood and stared, disbelieving. “I have a woman missing. You know about that. I expect Starling has shanghaied her for his cathouse.” The farmer’s voice sounded flat, uncaring, ready to die, but not before doing a job. “He needs killing.”
“Indeed he does,” the Irish cop said. “And you may be the lad to do it, but not while we’re on duty.”
“Get a rifle,” the skinny cop said, “and take him from afar. Where’s your common sense?”
“I’d be obliged,” the farmer said, “if you told me where she is. I want no trouble with you boys.”
On the shaded side of the street, fancy oil lamps with stained glass shades shone in upstairs windows. Common oil lamps lighted the trading company. A small glow streaked illumination across the ebony coffin.
“We’ll tell you true,” the Irish cop said. “We don’t know about any woman. If one is shanghaied, I’ll believe Starling’s behind it, but this is the first we’ve heard.”
“We get off duty when we deliver Starling to his house,” the skinny cop told the farmer. “After that he’s on his own. Give me your gun. Walk away.” The cop’s voice, no longer sympathetic, was all cop.
The farmer paused. “You take it.” He put his hands behind his back. “That way none of us makes mistakes.”
The Irish cop pulled the horse pistol from the holster.
“Made before the Civil War. Junk. They sell better at the trading company.”
“I was just stepping that way,” the farmer said. “Got to price new harness.” He turned and walked across the muddy street, his shoulders shaking with fear or fury.
“How much are you supposing?” the Irish cop asked.
“Starling’s never been with a woman since his mommy dumped him off her lap.” the skinny cop said, more morose than ever. “At least not with a live one—maybe a naked picture, maybe a woman cast in plaster. I’d bet a million.”
“Still, a lass is missing.”
“Probably shanghaied. Maybe dead. Maybe the hayseed will kill Starling, all to the good. But I’ll lay odds Starling has never been with a living woman.”
“He’d ought to do something about it abruptly.” The Irishman grinned. “It looks like he’s in for a short evening.”
At the trading company, coils of line and the brass fittings were loaded aboard wagons bound for the city’s wharf. A gaggle of Chinese came from the trading company. They surrounded the ebony coffin like lilliputian pallbearers setting out to inter an elephant. They wrestled the coffin onto a wagon, their golden skins wet, the wagon standing grayly, knowing, as it did, not a single word of Chinese.
“The press-gang stagecoach,” the skinny cop said. “How long does Starling think he can smuggle shanghaied sailors past the customs in a coffin.”
“As long as he pays off customs officers.”
“At least,” the skinny cop said mournfully, “he could use a different coffin once in a while. It’s beginnin’ to look familiar.” The wagon squoozed along muddy streets as lamps burned bright in The Fisherman’s Café. The Chinese pallbearers looked like mourning shadows.
A smelly logger flew through the doorway of Janie’s Tavern, rolled between the cops, bounced off the hitching post, regained balance, and sat on the edge of the wooden sidewalk. He looked putrid, his color emerald. He looked like Paul Bunyan with a bald head, a shorn green ox.
The Irish cop tsked. “It’s that last load of drippings,” he said, “turns the customers mossy.” He bent over the man. “What vile word did you say that got you thrown out?
“——,” the man muttered.
“Shame be your lot,” the cop said. “For Janie will ha’ none of that.”
“I can get drunker,” the logger said with convincement. “I’ll yard myself down to Annie Wier’s cathouse.”
“That’s a good lad.” The cop turned to his partner, looked through windows of Janie’s Tavern. “Shall we persuade our man toward home? It’s been just sip, sip, sip. And we linger here in mist and rain. ‘Tis time to step inside.”
Janie’s Tavern, when the two cops entered, gave a homey feeling of nineteenth-century charm. Cut-glass chandeliers twinkled like fairies, or like elvish sparkles in the Irish cop’s eyes. Gentlemen and harlots murmured, sitting at tables, elegantly tasting fine red whiskey. Large billiard tables were attended by a Chinaman who chalked cues for gentlemen, dusted tables, whisked small speckles of lint, cigar ash, and crud from wool suits. A poker game card-flapped quietly. At the bar August Starling whispered to a Chinese messenger.
The cops watched the messenger shadow his way past them. At the end of the bar an old Indian named Maggie muttered to herself.
“Maggie, me darlin’,” the Irish cop said. “What can a lady such as yourself be doing here with chippies?”
“You’re a sweet-speakin’ Mick.” Maggie smiled a toothless smile. Her face—at least when her mouth was closed—was as beautiful as an old book. “Thank God my mother never lived to meet the Irish.” Wrinkles on Maggie’s tan face showed as much intelligence as could be found in a whole library. She was a small woman, Skykomish tribe, and she knew about tides and winds and moon. Maggie knew nature so well she might have been nature’s mother. She knew about medicines and the bark of trees, about childbirth and house cats and cougars. She knew about elk and halibut, homesteading, berry picking, how to strip cascara. She knew how to light fires by talking to the wood, and she knew what salmon gossiped about as they came upriver to spawn. She could not be sandbagged by poetic Irishmen.
“Yonder man”—and she nodded to August Starling— “is about to fold his hand.” When Maggie made a prophecy, her prophecy always came true.
“Yes, indeed,” the skinny cop muttered. “A hayseed is gonna shoot him.”
“That ain’t the way it’s gonna happen,” Maggie said. “Too easy.”
“Welcome, officers.” August Starling’s voice bubbled approximately like champagne, and took the tone of one accustomed to being kind to servants. Starling’s boylike face beamed cherubically in sparkling lamplight. His slight figure, dressed in wool suit and stock, stood dutifully erect. To the bartender he said, “A taste for these fine minions.”
“Make it a water glass,” the Irish cop said, “and wet a tad-bit more than the bottom.”
At the far end of the bar, Janie talked to her bouncer. Janie was redheaded and was dressed in a purple gown. Her lips could press together in a ladylike pout, or open to raspiness. Janie was—according to sailor standards—“a gorgeous piece,” but it never did any sailor any good to know that. Her bouncer looked like a tugboat with arms.
Large and polished mirrors behind the bar reflected dancing lights, and August Starling’s eyes shone liquid with romance. Jani
e watched Starling, hid a snigger behind her hand, belched genteelly. Starling turned from the bar and walked to the front window to look at his trading company.
The sidewalk in front of the building was empty, the coffin safely horsing somewhere through the mist. Starling turned, his face flushed with anticipation. “Everything comes to he who minds the main chance,” he said to no one in particular.
“I wouldn’t know,” the skinny cop said dolefully. “I spend too much time mindin’ my own business. That, and delivering gentlemen to safety.”
“It is honorable employment.”
“It’s a job,” the cop said. “Will we be leaving soon?”
“How long since the coffin left?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Soon,” August Starling said, “but first I wish to stand drinks for this establishment. Today is consequent. Darkness lifts. Sweet light of the celestial orb illuminates my passage as I don pure and flowing robes of domesticity. I drink to my new house.” He turned, beckoned the bartender. “And now my dear wife can join me . . .”
“All the way from Boston,” the Irish cop muttered. The cop looked helplessly to Maggie. “How flaming many times have we heard that? Suppose he breeds. All them little Starlings, flocks of ’em.”
“He won’t,” Maggie said. “In the first place, he’s a goner. In the second place, he ain’t got a wife, except in his imagination.”
“No wife?”
“No wife,” Maggie said, and she was positive. “In the third place, you can’t breed if you don’t know where to put it. In the fourth . . .”
The Irish cop was mildly shocked. “Can this be Maggie talking?” He chided. “Shush, for if Janie hears such language—”
“There isn’t a redheaded Presbyterian born that makes me fear,” Maggie told him. “In the fourth place, if you lie about something long enough, you believe it yourself. Starling, he’s a savage.”
The Irish cop shook his head with admiration. “Maggie, Maggie, is there anything in the world you don’t know?”
“I don’t think so. I know the past, the future . . .” and Maggie grinned in a toothless way. “I know you are one year away from a shotgun marriage. You will have six children, twenty-seven grandchildren. One will be a girl named Collette.”
“’Tis a sweet name,” the Irish cop said, “and may what you say be true, for me bed is lonesome of late.”
“Anyway,” the morose cop said mournfully, “it won’t make a bit of difference in a hundred years.”
“Yes it will,” Maggie told him. “In a hundred years there are going to be high times around here.” She sipped her liquor, pointed toward The Fisherman’s Café. “In a hundred years a red-hot preacher will be running around here together with a confused sawbones. Five people will sit yonder at The Fisherman’s Café writing a book about all this. It will make a heap of difference.”
“Not to me,” the skinny cop said, his mournfulness a great contrast to the giddiness of August Starling. “I won’t be here.”
“I will,” Maggie said. “I’ll be here. I’m sticking around to see the fun, and to make sure those people get my name right in their book.”
Chapter 10
“What year is it?” Joel-Andrew asked, as he and Kune entered the Starling House. “I know you warned me about the servants’ entrance. Plus, I don’t see any electric lights.”
“I’m afraid it’s 1888,” Kune told him. “It’s 1888 again, oh, dear.” He turned yellow eyes toward Joel-Andrew. “I do not want you confused,” he said. “This is what has happened. I told you about 1888. As I told about 1888, we walked into the Starling House in 1973, but we came through the servants’ entrance. The house likes to fool around. Maybe it even tries to please me. At any rate, we are now in the Starling House in the year 1888. The story I began telling you has stopped being a story. It is happening right now.” Kune spoke with the mournful certainty of cholera.
Joel-Andrew, pleased with powerful forces, was also pleased with the brand-new Starling House. Walls shone pristine white, ceilings glowed with ormolu. Intricately carved banisters framed a curving staircase rising into night. No servants were present, but lamplight caressed crystal and lay warm across new and highly polished Victorian furniture.
Kune tried to settle a moral principle. “What happens next is not something a preacher ought to see. Let’s get out and come back some other year.”
“I’ve spent time in the Haight,” Joel-Andrew said. “Nothing the nineteenth century shows is likely to do me in.”
At Joel-Andrew’s feet, Obed stirred, his ear cocked, as if trying to pick up diction of far-off Chinese whispers. At the same time, Obed seemed randy.
“If my theory is correct, all we do is look through windows of the tower to watch the story unfold.” Kune climbed the curving staircase resolutely. “You’ll remember,” he said, “we left August Starling in the company of two cops. The cops were to escort him home. An ebony coffin already left Starling’s place of business on a horse-drawn wagon. If we hurry, we may see the wagon arrive.”
Joel-Andrew had known space travelers of many dimensions, including one freak who stirred mystical mileage from peyote buds by using a Waring blender. But this business about time was new. He climbed to the tower while Kune filled him in.
In 1888, while August Starling talked to the cops, the wagon bearing the enormous ebony coffin left the trading company and passed over the muddy street. The gaggle of Chinese murmured, at first in dismay, then chattered question marks as the wagon continued past wharves where it normally would have stopped. Chinese padded behind the wagon, shook their heads, argued, fell silent as the driver turned the horses onto the road leading uptown. The coffin jiggled. Chinese teeth chattered like bamboo chimes.
High on the hill, not far from the original site of The Parsonage, a church bell heralded Wednesday evening services. A clank from the belltower of The Parsonage answered. The black horses leaned into the harness. At a muddy spot the Chinese pushed the wagon. In a few minutes the wagon reached the top of the hill. The driver headed for the Starling House.
Kune and Joel-Andrew stood in one of the towers of the Starling House, staring into the night.
Somewhere a dog howled; a cat yowled. Obed tried to concentrate on his Chinese, but was losing it.
“I see a man with a rifle,” Joel-Andrew said. He pointed where lamplight fell through the window of a nearby house. “Just crouching. That’s the man you told me about.”
“A farmer,” Kune said. “In a few minutes, August Starling’s press gang will get him. Back in the tavern, Starling spotted the farmer and sent a messenger. The farmer will be put on a ship called Covenant, will desert in Cuba, and make his way back to town by 1918. He will remarry. He is Bev’s father, and she will be born in 1920.”
“Can’t we stop it?”
“Probably,” Kune said, “but then he would not be shanghaied. He would stay here, maybe marry someone else. If he married someone else, then Bev would not get born.”
“What about the Irish cop?” Joel-Andrew asked wistfully. “What about the morose cop? Did he ever find happiness?”
“The Irish cop became a medical mystery,” Kune said. “He went on a bender and attained a condition we physicians describe as ‘pickled.’ Been pickled ever since. Frank keeps him in an old coffin in the back room of Janie’s Tavern. Frank brings him out for display on Halloween.”
“And the morose cop?”
“He never found happiness,” Kune said shortly. “He got kicked in the head by a horse. His ghost manifested in the basement of City Hall. It is the morose cop who beats The Sailor to death every Wednesday at 4:00 PM.”
“Oh, dear,” Joel-Andrew said. “I’m not sure how much of this a man can bear.” Joel-Andrew thought of ugly acts of evil. Then he smiled as he thought of plain, common, and pretty forces of the Lord.
The wagon came closer, and beneath a wan moon Kune and Joel-Andrew could distinguish the ebony coffin. There came a muffled sho
ut: the sound of the farmer being clubbed by August Starling’s press gang.
“The ship Covenant was a bucket,” Kune said. “An old clipper redesigned to sail like a toad.” He pointed toward the road leading up the hill. “If you look yonder, you can just make out August Starling. The two cops are seeing him home.”
The wagon pulled up in front of the Starling House. It took nearly ten minutes for the Chinese to get the coffin up the broad front steps and into the house.
Obed’s tail stood straight up, shivered, and he made faces. He sniffed the air, thinking naught of history, because Obed thought of jubilation. A cat yowled. Obed’s tail shivered.
“Your cat is horny,” Kune said with some dismay.
“He’ll abide close by.” Joel-Andrew was content that Episcopal discipline had persuaded Obed to a higher manner of life.
“You may know lots about a lot of things,” Kune told him, “but you don’t know catnip when it comes to cats.”
There was scuffling, thumping, the hard breath of labor from downstairs as Chinese arranged the coffin on a low set of teak sawhorses. The front door slammed. The team of horses nickered, stomped. The wagon disappeared into mist as Chinese followed, fading like small and ancient echoes. August Starling’s approaching voice sounded tinkling and gay. Then, in more somber tones, he quoted poetry:
But ah! a cloud on swift wings passed,
And all the sky was overcast,
And then were wrecked, alas! too fast,
My freighted treasures, Rosalie.
I can not twine my fingers now
In thy soft hair, nor kiss thy brow,
Nor hear thy gentle accents flow . . . .
A bell clanked dully from The Parsonage. From the tower of the Starling House, Joel-Andrew saw three figures beneath nightshadow of Starling House turrets. The skinny cop trailed like a mourner behind the lightly built Starling and the husky Irishman.
“’Tis a nice lament “ the Irish cop said about the poem, “but it has some whiskey in it.”
“One of our better modern poets,” August Starling said in his boyish voice. “You are a gentleman of culture.”
The Off Season Page 6
