Seaweed on the Street

by Stanley Evans

  Gottlieb was nervous. He said, “A carpenter’s on his way to fix things. A couple of days and nobody will ever know what happened here.”

  “What did happen?”

  “Gregarious George did it.”

  That sounded improbable. I said, “Did you see him do it?”

  “No. But I know it was George.”

  “How?”

  “I just know, believe me. George is the one, he did it,” Gottlieb said adamantly. “George and me, we’ve been having problems for about two years.”

  “Gregarious George has been having problems with everybody for about two years. What makes you so special?”

  Instead of answering, Gottlieb took a clean plastic garbage sack from a package and laid it on a chair for me to sit on. His chair already had a sack on it. “Go on,” he said. “Take the weight off your feet.”

  “I’d rather stand.”

  Gottlieb sat down and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. He said, “I won’t lay charges because George is nuts. I won’t add to his problems. But George took something and I want it back.”

  “What’s that?”

  Gottlieb shook his head.

  I’ve known Gottlieb for many years. This was the first time I’d seen him blush. He also coughed, sighed, hemmed and hawed, and finally managed to say, “It’s confidential, Silas. Very.”

  “Gottlieb,” I said, “you’re being disingenuous. It’s not like you.”

  Gottlieb was still flushed to the roots of his hair. He took a deep breath and said, “Two years ago, George sold me an earth dwarf manikin.”

  My heart jittered. Gottlieb’s words hit me right down to my toenails. I sat down without taking my eyes off his face.

  “An earth dwarf manikin,” Gottlieb said. “I didn’t know what it was at first. All I knew, it was old.”

  “You kept an earth dwarf manikin in this shop for two years?”

  “No. And like I said, I didn’t know what it was. Not then. George brought it in. It was obviously old, possibly valuable. I asked George how he came by it, what it was. George said he didn’t know what it was. He’d found it lying on a bunch of kelp weed on the beach at Gonzales Bay. George asked $100 for it. That’s what I paid him, I didn’t argue.”

  Gottlieb stopped talking. He was shaking. When he calmed down he said, “I phoned Peter Wool, asked him to drop in here and take a look at it the next time he was passing. You know Peter Wool?”

  “Sure,” I said. Peter Wool wrote the book on Coast Salish artifacts.

  “Right,” Gottlieb said. “Peter came in here and saw it a day or two later. He thought he knew what it was but wouldn’t commit himself.”

  I said, “What’s the manikin look like?”

  “It’s a slab of cedar, painted with red-earth pigment and creosote. About a foot wide, an inch thick, three feet high. The colour is very faint. You can still make out a wolf’s-head design on the front side. There’s a half-inch-diameter hole drilled more or less in the centre of the slab. There’s a wooden peg, about four inches long, projecting from the bottom edge. I took digitals of the thing and e-mailed them to the Smithsonian. I showed the same photographs to Theo Durksen at the provincial museum. Durksen said it didn’t even look Coast Salish to him. He suggested I bring the actual artifact in for a proper examination.”

  Gottlieb’s blush had faded. Now his complexion imitated Hamlet’s father’s. I waited.

  Gottlieb said, “That’s when things started to get weird. I left the museum, came back here to get the manikin and couldn’t find it. It had gone.” Gottlieb pointed a finger across the room. “I know damn well I left it leaning against that wall. Right there. I know I did.”

  “Somebody took it?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the hell of it,” Gottlieb said. He came out of his chair, opened the door to his office and asked me to check the lockset. There was a good Yale on the door, plus a TrustBankers lock with a hefty deadbolt.

  Gottlieb sat down again and said, “This is exactly the way it happened. I lean the dwarf against that wall, lock it in here and walk to the museum with my photographs. When I get back here that door’s still locked, but the dwarf isn’t where I left it. It’s gone. But that dwarf came back.”

  I thought I knew where we were going. I didn’t say anything.

  Gottlieb said, “I can still remember the number of every telephone I ever owned. I know my social insurance number, my library card number, and the licence number on the Hertz Rent-A-Car that I drove on my honeymoon in 1954. I know my children’s birthdays, my grandchildren’s birthdays, the birthdays of my entire extended family. I can recite the Old Testament, not excluding the begats. Plus, I’m one helluva bridge player. What I’m getting at, I don’t have Alzheimer’s. When I put things down, I remember where I put them down.”

  “I believe you,” I said. I meant it.

  “The next thing happens, George comes barging into my shop with the $100 I’d given him. He’s excited. Waving his arms, wants the manikin back. But George is drunk. He knows my rule, I kick him out.”

  I know Gottlieb’s rule as well. Every Native carver in Victoria knows it: if you’ve been drinking, even a little bit, he won’t do business with you.

  Gottlieb said, “It’s lucky George had been drinking, because I couldn’t have sold the manikin back even if I’d wanted to. Like I told you, it had disappeared.”

  Gottlieb spread his arms with a helpless gesture and looked at the ceiling. He shook his head, lowered his arms and looked at me with eyes that seemed to recede and diminish. He said, “My friend at the Smithsonian gets back to me. He’s excited as hell. He tells me it’s an earth dwarf manikin — there’s one that’s almost identical in their Myron Eells collection. My friend tells me another thing. That earth dwarf manikin is priceless. It’s one of a pair made by a Twana carver in 1858. Theirs is a moneyfinder manikin. Mine is a ghostfinder manikin.

  “In the meantime, Gregarious George is driving me nuts. He’s pissed from morning till night. He won’t give me a minute’s peace till I give him the manikin back. I can’t give it back because I don’t have it anymore. Two years go by like this. Then something happens.

  “Yesterday’s my regular day off. I’m at home, in my garden shed, taking out my mower. Ready to cut my lawn. So I take the mower out and check the oil level. I check the mower blade to see if it’s still sharp. Everything’s Okay. My mower’s a good one, it starts the first time I yank the cord. I leave the mower running and go back to the garden shed for my grasscatcher attachment. And there it is. The earth dwarf manikin. It’s leaning against the wall in my fucking garden shed.”

  I had been holding my breath.

  Gottlieb said, “I started to take the manikin into my house, but something stopped me. Don’t ask me to explain it because I can’t. I just didn’t want that thing in my house. What I did, I wrapped it in newspaper, taped it into a nice neat parcel and drove it downtown to my store. My store’s open, of course. My manager keeps it open seven days a week in the tourist season. I park my car on the street, take my parcel into the store, unlock my office and put the manikin on my desk. Then I turn around and there’s Gregarious George, drunk. He’d seen me get out of my car and followed me in. Wants to know what’s in the parcel. I tell George it’s none of his business. George calls me a thief. He reeks of booze. I gave him the same lecture that every drunk gets and he backed down, for once. Went out onto the street and staggered off. That was last night.

  “Today I’ve got no manikin, and no wall. What’re you gonna do about it?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Vancouver is British Columbia’s best-known and largest city. Victoria, B.C.’s provincial capital, is a city of about 250,000 people built on an island about 20 miles from the mainland. It’s been obvious for a hundred years that Vancouver is where the money and the power are, but instead of erecting new legislative buildings in Vancouver, B.C.’s legislators, after much deliberation, decided to leave the legislative buildings where the
y were and build the world’s largest ferry fleet.

  At 6:45 on Monday morning I drove my Chevy aboard the Spirit of Vancouver Island, left it on the lower parking deck and walked up three flights of stairs to the ship’s dining room. I found a window seat and looked up at the sky to the east, where the sun was rising above the Gulf Islands. One oddly symmetrical white cloud shimmered on the horizon. I narrowed my eyes. It was no cloud. I was looking at the Pallada, a magnificent full-rigged Russian sailing ship, en route to Victoria for a sea festival.

  Three and a half hours after leaving Victoria I was crossing the Canada–U.S. border at Blaine and heading south down Interstate 5. In the ever-changing pattern of southbound traffic, certain companion vehicles began to distinguish themselves as I passed them and they repassed me en route. One was a U-Haul truck driven by a bearded young man. Another was a Mazda Miata convertible driven by an older woman with grey hair and a long silk scarf fluttering from her neck. The third was a dust-covered black Buick with tinted windows. I lost the Buick and the U-Haul when I pulled into Mount Vernon for a rest stop. Mazda lady pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot right behind me and headed inside in a hurry.

  I lost the Mazda after that but overtook the Buick going through Everett. I caught my last glance of the U-Haul five minutes before I exited I-5 at the Edmonds off-ramp.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  The Astoria’s desk clerk needed a shave. He was a skinny old Mexican wearing a maroon-coloured beret, a soiled Che Guevara T-shirt and Dayglo suspenders. I couldn’t see below the counter but imagined blue jeans sagging at the crotch and greasy carpet slippers. I asked for Ray Smith. The clerk said, “Room 21.” As I headed for the stairs, the clerk remembered something and called me back. “Your name Seaweed?”

  I nodded.

  “Ray’s out of town for a couple of days. He left something for you.” The clerk reached into a pigeon hole, then handed me a piece of notepaper folded into a square.

  The note said, “mr. seaweed, i changed my mind on that marcia deal and point matlock. good luck, ray.”

  The desk clerk had picked up the sports section and was studying the day’s racing form. I rapped a knuckle on the counter to get his attention. His attention span expanded when I laid a five-dollar bill on the counter and smoothed it with my fingers.

  I said, “Half a sawbuck ain’t much, but if you put it on Sunny Lady at Santa ’nita tomorrow, something wonderful might happen.”

  “Sunny Lady?” the clerk said, contemplating the banknote as if it contained the answer to the meaning of life. “Never heard of her.”

  “When’s the last time you saw Ray?”

  The clerk scratched his chin bristles with nicotine-stained fingers. He said, “There’s 56 full-time residents live in this building. Coming and going day and night. How do I know when I seen Ray last? Sometimes he stops by the desk, shoots the breeze for a minute. I think the last time I seen him was two days ago, when he left your letter.”

  One or two or three resident old-timers were sitting in the lobby, watching soaps on a black-and-white tv. Empathizing with the romantic problems of wealthy society matrons and youthful surgeons. Nobody was interested in me or my problems.

  I went upstairs and along a dark, windowless corridor that reminded me of a jail. The only light came from a single naked light bulb; it was a strain to read room numbers. I found 21 and hammered on the door. Nobody answered so I beat another tattoo. That annoyed Ray Smith’s neighbour, a woman in a silk wrapper and hair curlers.

  She opened her door the length of a security chain, said, “Noisy asshole! Get back to the reservation,” and backed into her lair.

  A soft chuckle sounded behind me and a deep voice said, “Hey, pal. You got a light?”

  It was a big guy in a dark business suit. My brain was just registering the nylon stocking covering his face and the heavy elongated leather tear-drop dangling from his wrist when my arms were grabbed by a second man who materialized out of nowhere. The first man’s arm went back and the blackjack came swinging at my head in a big arc hard enough to kill a mule. I lunged forward. The blackjack glanced off my shoulders and maybe it clipped the guy holding me, because his grip relaxed. I lunged forward and upward and drove my head into the first man’s chest. His head snapped forward. My momentum was too much for him. I kicked his shins and he fell backward with a choking cry, but the other mugger had picked up the blackjack. This time the swing was accurate. It was a numbing blow to my head, just behind my right ear. I fell on top of the first mugger’s body. Lights came on in the corridor, lights were flashing inside my head, a woman was screaming. Then the roof fell onto my head and I passed out.

  When I came to I was lying on a bed. I felt nauseated and dizzy — it was as if I were enclosed in a slowly rotating cylinder. The woman in silk wrapper and curlers was sitting on the bed beside me, holding an ice pack to my head. The desk clerk was checking my billfold.

  I groaned and waved a weak arm. Weak, but strong enough to impress the desk clerk. He dropped my billfold onto the bedside table and said, “We ain’t took nothing, mister. We was just checking to see who you was is all.” He licked his lips and added, “I didn’t know you was no cop; you should of said.”

  I tried to get up from the bed. Silk-wrapper woman put a hand on my chest. “It’s okay, mister,” she said. “Whatever you want, it’ll keep. Take it easy.”

  I had a bad headache, but the vertigo was diminishing. When I closed my eyes it returned. I opened them again and focussed on a window sill. After a while my internal gyro kicked in and I sat up.

  The desk clerk backed away from me. “This hotel ain’t responsible for no damages, mister,” he whined. “We got a sign on the desk that says so. It’s established policy.” He went out.

  The woman said, “Pay him no mind. Manuel’s a little prick, scared he’ll lose his job is all.”

  She was about 60, a sallow, gaunt-faced woman as cute and shapely as a brick chimney. She had muddy eyes and a rasping voice and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, but right then she looked and sounded like an angel to me. The room’s furniture included a black-and-white tv. It was muted, tuned to the same soap opera I had seen downstairs. I realized that only a few minutes had elapsed since I had first set foot in the hotel.

  I said, “Thanks ma’am. When you opened your door and screamed you probably saved my life.”

  She said, “I didn’t do nothing. Your Crazy Horse act was more than them goons could handle. The one guy had to carry his partner downstairs.”

  I checked my billfold. Nothing was missing. I took out $100 in $20 bills and pushed them under a pillow.

  I said, “Those muggers. Was one of them a red-haired guy, looks kind of Irish?”

  She went across to a window and looked out, moving slowly as if her feet hurt her. “I think so,” she said. “Hard to tell in the dark.”

  “Tell me about Ray Smith.”

  “Can’t tell you nothing. I only been here a few days, just blew in from San Berdoo. Ray seems an okay guy to me. Pretty quiet.”

  I tried to cross the room and made it to the door at the first go. When I opened it, the woman said, “Say, mister. What’s your name?”

  “Silas Seaweed.”

  “I’m Mavis. Drop in, anytime.” A sound like a buzz saw came out of her mouth but maybe she was just laughing. “I’m sorry what I said to you earlier. You know. Calling you Injun.”

  “That’s what I am.”

  That buzz saw sound followed me into the corridor. The desk clerk was out there waiting. He lowered his eyes and backed up to the opposite wall. A bunch of keys dangled from his belt. I said, “Use your pass key, friend, and open Ray Smith’s door for me.”

  He shook his head and started another hostelry-etiquette lecture. Fed up, I grabbed him by the throat and shook him. When I let him go he opened the door to Room 21 and stepped aside. He didn’t follow me in. I don’t blame him. Ray’s was another sad little cubicle. The only difference between this one and Mavis�
�s was the odour of liniment instead of cheap cologne. Ray Smith’s clarinet case stood in a corner. It looked lonely.

  I went downstairs. The clerk vanished into some lair behind the desk. The tv watchers were still glued to their set, except for one gaunt, thick-shouldered old guy reading a newspaper by the window.

  As I crossed to the door the old guy looked up from his newspaper and grinned at me. “Seen your buddies leavin’ just now,” he said with a chuckle. “You gave the one of ’em a shitkicking, hey?”

  I stopped in my tracks. “You saw them leave?”

  “Yeah. The one guy was nursing his cojones with both hands.” The old man fished a cigarette from his shirt pocket and put it in his mouth.

  “Did you happen to notice their car?”

  “Sure,” he said, the unlit cigarette moving up and down in his mouth as he spoke. “It was parked down the block.”

  “Let me guess. How about a dusty Buick with tinted windows?”

  The old guy nodded.

  I had been outsmarted. A team using two cars and cellphones had trailed me all the way to Seattle. The other car had probably been a Mazda Miata.

  I self-medicated with 440 mg of Walgreen’s Aspirin and walked the downtown streets for half an hour until my aches settled down and my head cleared.

  The Astoria Hotel was near the waters of Puget Sound. I could smell ocean when I walked back to my Chev. I threaded my way up Seattle’s steep streets to Interstate 5, flipped my sun visor down and headed south, thinking about black Buicks, Mazda convertibles and a woman driver who might easily be a gorgeous blonde wearing a grey wig and a silk neck scarf to disguise her tender years.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Point Matlock Lighthouse was a white tower painted red above the keeper’s railing. It stood at the edge of cliffs above a drift-log–strewn beach, where flocks of small birds ran along the tide line pecking at delicacies left by receding waves.