McKean 02 The Neah Virus

by Thomas Hopp

  I cranked the ignition again but a chugging groan told me the carburetor was flooded. There was nothing to do but watch the bulldozer’s huge rear sprocket wheels move by me. I feared Pete might back up and crush me yet, but in his mad effort to run over me, Pete reached the brink of the embankment and the dozer plunged over the edge. Dumbstruck, I watched the huge machine topple forward into the bay. At the bottom of the slope its blade dug in where the beach met the embankment. With its forward and downward progress halted, the bulldozer went in the only direction its momentum would allow. The massive yellow chassis rose into the air, pivoting up and over the blade. After a moment of impossible balance in which the machine stood on end, it toppled forward, smashing the cab - and Pete - into the shallows of Neah Bay. The ground shook with the impact of its fall. Walls of white spray launched twenty feet on either side. Even then, the wreck of the yellow behemoth was still in motion. It rolled ponderously and smashed down onto one side, sending out a second wall of white spray.

  I quit trying to start the Mustang and got out and joined McKean and Curtis at the brink, among a gathering crowd of neighbors and canoe men, all staring at the toppled bulldozer. Circular waves moved out from it into Neah Bay. Partially immersed in the two-foot-deep water of an incoming tide, the engine hissed and steamed like a dying dragon.

  A loud sound from behind made everyone turn. A Makah Tribal Police car approached with the driver tapping his siren, making a whoop, whoop sound at ear-splitting levels. The crowd moved aside and the trooper nosed past my Mustang and pulled in where the bulldozer tracks went over the brink. A native officer in a blue uniform got out the passenger side, while the driver could be heard speaking into his radio handset. “Better send an aid car. We may have a serious injury here.”

  The first officer hurried down a footpath through the tall grass of the embankment to a narrow sandy beach with driftwood logs. Some of the crowd followed, including the canoe crew, Curtis, and McKean. Still trembling from my near-death experience, I tagged along behind the rest. The tide had turned since our arrival and had covered the mudflat with shallow water. Where the cab of the bulldozer lay on its side, the water was churning. “Look there!” someone cried. “It’s the driver!”

  Inside the partially smashed yellow roll-bar framework of the cab, Pete Whitehall was pinned beneath the wreckage. Far from being crushed as I had imagined, he flailed in the water, trying to free himself. The lead officer waded to the wreck and reached out a hand. Unexpectedly, Pete roared like an enraged animal and tried to bite the proffered hand. The surprised officer backpedaled, tripped, and splashed down butt-first in the water. He called back to his partner, who had threaded his way through the crowd, “Watch out, this guy’s nuts!”

  Pete raged in the water he churned up trying to free himself. Pinned by one or both legs, he could only raise his head by clutching a yellow roll bar and craning his neck to keep his face out of the water, which was muddied by his exertions. Horrific sounds came from his mouth - a strangling noise from deep in his throat, a sound that would have been grotesque even in less dire circumstances. There was a choked, chiding, desperate tone to it, like the cry of a cornered animal as death approaches. Part rage, part terror, the sound filled me with horror and pity.

  McKean stood beside me, observing the scene in his clinical fashion. “The tide,” he remarked. “It’s coming in at full flood.”

  I looked at the water around Pete and realized its turbulence wasn’t just due to his thrashing. The current swirled around him briskly, surging toward the beach.

  “He’ll be submerged in no time,” McKean concluded.

  “Come on buddy,” the first cop pleaded to Whitehall. “You gotta let us help you. The tide’s coming in.”

  Pete snarled and bared his teeth again. He clawed at the cop with one hand like he would rather rend the man’s flesh than be rescued. The canoe crewmen joined the cops knee-deep in the water and just out of Pete’s reach. With Andy Archawat in the lead, they pressed forward and grappled with Pete in the roiling water. After a moment, they straightened up with both of Pete’s arms in their grasp, tugging him despite his raging resistance. He gnashed his teeth at the hands trying to help him and, one by one, the would-be rescuers let go, leaving him floundering in the water again.

  “Let’s try this!” called Curtis, who’d gone back to the lot and fetched his shovel. He joined the group at the bulldozer and probed beneath the twisted yellow metal framework, trying to get at the muck holding Pete’s legs. But he reeled back when Pete lunged at him, snarling.

  Archawat caught one of Pete’s wrists and tugged hard, pulling Pete away to make room for Curtis to work. Curtis went in with the shovel again near Pete’s legs and came up with a scoop of muck, which he tossed aside and went in for a second shovelful. As he did so, Pete lunged hard at Archawat and sank his teeth into his arm just above the wrist. Archawat shouted in pain and let go, splashing backward in the now thigh-high water. Pete disappeared beneath the muddy surge momentarily, but broke the surface again and flailed at Curtis, driving him back before he could get another scoop of mud. Then he went down again. Muddy tidewater swirled over the spot where he disappeared. The whole crowd went silent. After a moment a line of bubbles rose and moved shoreward with the tide.

  “He’s drowning,” said the first cop, pushing past Archawat, who was cradling his bitten wrist with his other hand. The cop leaned near the spot where Pete had gone down, but caution kept him from reaching into the water for a few seconds. Curtis moved in and probed with his shovel tip once, twice, and then on a third try he touched something underwater. “There he is!” he cried. This time there was no thrashing. The muddy surface remained calm.

  “Come on!” cried the first cop. “He may still have a chance if we can get him loose.”

  Several canoe men and the two cops pressed forward and took Pete by the arms, raising his inanimate body while Curtis probed under the dozer with his shovel. Another man appeared with a shovel and they worked as a team. But Pete Whitehall - or Pete Whitehall’s body - steadfastly refused to come free of the wreckage.

  McKean and I stood among a growing crowd on the beach, watching the tide rise higher on Pete’s would-be rescuers. Given the speed with which the water had risen and Whitehall’s madness keeping them at bay, the outcome was no surprise. When the shovels finally freed his legs, Pete came up limp, his head still submerged. The two cops, Curtis and one of the canoe men hauled him to shore, one man on each arm and leg. They splashed onto the beach with Pete between them, his belly up and his head hanging limp. As they hurried past us up the hill, I saw Pete’s face was an ashen gray color and his eyes stared vacantly from purple-rimmed sockets. Water ran from his nose and mouth.

  They rushed him up the path to where a red-and-white ambulance van had pulled in with lights flashing. McKean and I followed the crowd up the bank to watch a pair of emergency medical technicians administering oxygen and doing CPR and heart massage on Pete. He remained lifeless. After five minutes, one of the EMTs went to the cab of the ambulance van and got his radio handset. “Afraid we got an unresponsive one here,” he said. “We’re bringing him in.”

  Andy Archawat stood by, holding his wrist with blood dripping from his fingertips. McKean said, “You’d better go along and get that looked at.” Archawat said nothing, but got in the back of the van. As it drove off with lights flashing and siren screaming, the crowd stood silently watching it go, each person no doubt reflecting on the confusing scene they had witnessed.

  I shook my head. “It’s been one hell of a day.”

  “If hell is made out of mud,” Curtis replied, “then you’re right. I can’t believe Pete’s dead.”

  “You knew him well, did you?” asked McKean.

  “No. I just met him three days ago when I got called into this.” He gestured vaguely at the muddy lot.

  “Was Pete an alcoholic?” McKean questioned.

  “Not as far as I knew. He seemed like a fairly regular guy.”

/>   “Drugs? Cocaine? Methamphetamine?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Odd syndrome, then.”

  “Odd?” Curtis put a gloved fist on his hip and gazed down at the bulldozer where the two cops, now waist deep in the muddy water, inspected the exposed part of the cab for clues to Pete’s demise. “I’d say it was downright terrifying.”

  We stood silently for a moment and then I asked, “Why did he fight off the very people who could have saved him?”

  Curtis shrugged his big shoulders, which were slumped in frustration under his yellow raincoat. He leaned on his shovel, looking weary.

  McKean stroked his angular chin with long fingers. “Answer: unknown,” he said, thoughtfully.

  “I know why!” a thin but piercing voice called from behind us.

  Old Gordon Steel stepped out of the crowd on the street, still wrapped in his bearskin cape. His long gray hair, now unbound, flew wildly about his head in the breeze. He chuckled malignly, looking McKean in the eyes with a scowl furrowing his weathered brow. He pointed a gnarled finger at the bulldozer. “What did you see down there, DNA man?”

  McKean hesitated a moment. “I saw a man die. An accident - “

  “No accident,” Steel grunted. “Fella lost his soul.”

  “His soul?” McKean cocked an eyebrow at Steel.

  The old man grinned derisively, the sparse gray whiskers on his chin jutting and his black, beady eyes fixed on McKean’s. “You ever heard the legend of the Lost Souls?”

  McKean shook his head. “The man was delirious. But as far as losing his soul - “

  “But - nothing!” Gordon Steel shot back, the corners of his wire-mustached mouth pulling down. “His soul was gone. He had a look in his eyes, same as the old legends.”

  “Modern medical science - ” McKean began, but Steel cut him off with a wave of his raven-headed walking stick.

  “No modern science. No DNA.” A sardonic smile spread over his grizzled face. He crowed in a mocking, sing-song voice, “Lost his soul. Spirit flew away.”

  His perverse glee riled me. “Why don’t you just shut up?” I barked.

  He turned and glared at me. At that instant, a raven that seemed to be following him called out, “Hrock! Hrock! Hrock!” Its deep and challenging voice sent an icy chill jangling along my spine. Steel glanced at the raven approvingly. “You see,” he said lightheartedly, “Ravens know.” Other ravens standing in the middle of the lot joined the first in a loud chorus. To my rattled mind, it seemed as if the natural world were adding its voice to Steel’s.

  Peyton McKean didn’t share my irrational reaction. “Not buying,” he said flatly to Steel.

  The smile drained from the old man’s face.

  Suddenly, Curtis charged onto the lot shouting, “Hey! Shoo!”

  Two ravens on the ground near the crypt entrance were tugging at something between them. As Curtis rushed toward them, a third raven hopped out from the crypt with a morsel of something gray in its mouth. It leaped into the air with its prize and flapped off on heavy wing beats. Curtis brandished his shovel and the other two ravens dropped whatever they were squabbling over and sprang into the air to join the first. The trio flew to the branches of a maple at the back of the lot, joining a mob of crows perched above where the bulldozer had been parked. The raven from the crypt landed on a waving branch, wolfed down its prize, and then joined the cacophony of chiding raven and crow voices.

  “Ah, shoot!” Curtis exclaimed, returning to us with the bit he had retrieved from the mud in one of his gloved hands. “That explains who’s been getting after the skeleton. I’ve had to keep the place covered with a tarp since the first disturbance.”

  He showed us the object the ravens had been fighting over. It was a white finger bone with gray flesh attached.

  “Ravens’s gotta eat, too,” Gordon Steel said.

  Curtis explained, “I already had to put some bits and pieces back in the coffin yesterday. They were scattered on the floor down there. I thought it was - ” he paused and looked at Steel.

  Steel stared back at him, and then broke into a peg-toothed grin. “I don’t mess with bones,” he chortled.

  McKean pulled his cell phone from a pocket and glanced at the time. “I want to extract the DNA from the sample this evening,” he said to me. “We’d better go.”

  “Gladly,” I replied, going to the Mustang and looking over the damage to the front fender. It was insufficient to hinder driving. “I’m ready any time you are.” I got in as McKean exchanged farewells with Curtis, promising to have a DNA result within two days. He opened the passenger door as I started the engine.

  Steel came near. “Know what happens after you lose your soul?”

  “Enlighten me,” McKean responded.

  “You die. Everybody who gets sick with Lost Souls disease goes mad like a dog and then they die. I think a lot of babalthuds will die like that bulldozer man.”

  “One case,” McKean countered, “does not constitute an epidemic.”

  “Just the same. More babalthuds will die. Legend says so.”

  McKean sat and closed his door.

  Fed up with the old man’s guff and not caring what his oblique remarks meant, I turned the Mustang and drove off. But Gordon Steel’s rasping, raven-like laughter followed us along the shore drive.

  Chapter 5

  I followed Bayview Avenue through gloomy Neah Bay with a welter of feelings in my chest. I asked McKean, “What’s up with that old man? Where’s he get off mocking Pete Whitehall’s death?”

  McKean shook his head. “I doubt he thinks it’s funny. He strikes me as a bitter man. I suppose DNA tests, bulldozers, and those whaling protesters all seem like threats to his old ways.”

  “But why be nasty about it? Hostile Indians are a thing of the past.”

  “Today proved otherwise, didn’t it, Fin? Old Steel obviously feels threatened - and the perception of a threat is often the source of anger.”

  “Threatened by a DNA test?”

  “Answer: yes. If the DNA test shows the corpse to be Spanish, then Steel’s objections will be overruled and Curtis is free to collect any or all of what lies in that grave. Furthermore, Steel’s upset can only be magnified by the presence of the anti-whaling protesters. They’re yet another force bent on disrupting the status quo here in Neah Bay and altering the tribe’s authority over its own reservation.”

  “But Steel is in a distinct minority. Most of the elders seemed fine with the DNA test.”

  “I am sure Makahs, like any other ethnic group are more diverse than people give them credit for. Some may be old-fashioned like Gordon Steel. Others are much more modern. Some may want to hunt whales while others don’t. Some are educated, some are fools. Some are criminal, some are as righteous as those protestors claim to be. Good, bad, indifferent, I’m sure you’ll find all types in Neah Bay, just like in Seattle.”

  “You’re urging me not to stereotype.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay, Peyton,” I said. “But that kind of hostility is inexcusable.”

  “It’s behind us now. At least we had the pleasure of seeing an enchanting dance by his daughter and her children.”

  “I can’t believe a beauty like her is any relation to that old buzzard.”

  McKean eyed me carefully. “Tleena Steel is very beautiful indeed, Fin. More’s the danger.”

  “Danger? I thought she was the least dangerous person we met.”

  “A danger to your heart, Fin. Are you sure you’re recovered from your last romantic catastrophe?”

  “I’m sure I am not. And I’m not even considering another romance.”

  In the same way we had traveled to Neah Bay via a succession of ever-narrowing and more primitive roads, we now returned by incrementally larger thoroughfares. We went out of town on a sea-cliff-skirting two-laner, which widened at Clallam Bay, and grew wider still when we reached forest-lined Highway 101, then grew to freeway size near the urban centers of Port Angel
es and Sequim. We departed the main Olympic Peninsula on the Hood Canal floating bridge, crossing the mile-wide span just after sunset. The day’s tensions melted as I watched in my rearview mirror while the Olympic Mountains and their framing clouds went from fiery orange to soft pink and purple. A sea fog hugging tree-blanketed headlands to the north took on the deep blue tone of twilight. We lapsed into silence for the remainder of the drive across the dark, forested Kitsap Peninsula and Bainbridge Island. We arrived at the Winslow ferry terminal just in time to catch the superferry Snoqualmie loading for her eastbound run. I pulled in at the end of a line of cars on the main deck just before the drawspan raised and the deck hands unfastened the ropes from their dockside cleats. The ship’s engines throbbed to life and the pier quickly dropped behind us. McKean and I went up the central staircase to the observation deck and got coffees from the snack bar. We strolled along the inside aisle while I sipped a double shot of espresso with sugar and McKean had a tall mocha. People sat in booths and at tables, reading newspapers, texting on cell phones, or gossiping with companions.

  “After all we’ve been through,” I said, “this all seems too normal.”

  “Indeed,” McKean replied vaguely, as if he hadn’t really heard me. I turned to find him leaning his lanky frame over an empty booth on the inner wall of the ferry, looking over a blown-up sepia-toned photograph hung there. “Interesting, isn’t it?” he asked as I doubled back to join him.

  The picture was a reproduction of an old photo taken from within a dugout canoe like the one we had seen at Neah Bay. The canoe was at sea with a huge swell on her bows, and the photo looked over the shoulder of a man at the front of the boat. He was dressed in a long bearskin cape that flew in a headwind. His long, bushy black hair also blew in the wind. His right arm was held high and in his hand was a harpoon raised for a strike. His target, just off the canoe’s bow, was the back of a sounding whale. Given our encounter with such a whaling crew just hours before, the sight of the picture sent a tingle along my spine.