by Thomas Hopp
We got out of my Mustang and climbed the mossy concrete steps of the front porch. McKean held up a hand and paused to listen. From inside came a slow Native American drumbeat accompanying a male voice singing in a high pitch - a tremulous wail of indecipherable syllables punctuated now and then by unfamiliar consonants: a “thloo” here, a “t’say” there. McKean nodded in thoughtful recognition.
“Lushootseed,” he whispered.
“Lu-what?”
“The local branch of the Salish language family. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
I listened a moment, thinking McKean’s definition of beautiful and mine might vary by a bit, but enjoying the song until it ended with three strong drumbeats.
McKean rapped three times on the cracked green paint of the weather-beaten door and soon we were greeted by an old, gray, short, and almost toothless lady in a flowered dress and wool sweater, whose round wrinkled face broke into a broad gummy grin at the sight of McKean.
“Ah!” she cried in a tiny but vibrant voice. “You! After so much time. Welcome!”
Hobbling and leaning on a short cane carved in Northwest Native American totem figures, she ushered us into a dim, crowded front room with knick knack laden shelves, carved Northwest Native artwork on the walls, antique-looking furniture, sheer-curtained windows and a mangy smelling old Persian carpet. A dilapidated couch was occupied by two old mongrel dogs that seemed too tired to lift their heads, let alone bark. And there, leaning forward in an overstuffed chair whose arms were losing their stuffing, sat Frank Squalco, holding a round tambourine-like drum in one hand and a leather-headed mallet in the other.
“Wi’aats!” he said, smiling up at my tall companion who nodded a hello.
“Peyton McKean!” the old woman remarked. “I was teaching Franky a song to call more salmon home and instead we called Franky’s old friend.”
She introduced herself to me as Clara Seaweed and offered McKean a creaking but comfortable rocking chair near the fireplace, relegating me to the only other seat available, a corner of the couch next to one of the almost hairless, spotted mongrels. As I sank self-consciously into the rank-smelling cushions, a set of rusty springs croaked.
Clara, despite her heavy limp, bustled into the kitchen and fetched a tray with three plastic glasses containing Cokes on ice, which she set between us on a small glass coffee table.
“I brought Auntie Clara some fresh-caught salmon this morning,” Frank began. “What brings you here?”
“I came to discuss red tide poison,” McKean replied firmly.
“I know you did,” Frank conceded, his congeniality fading. He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees, looking nervously from McKean to Clara, who stood in the kitchen doorway, eyeing him as expectantly as McKean did. He seemed to realize the only words possible in this room were truthful ones, and started without further prompting. “Shamans used to make a kind of potion from red tide.”
“How was that done?” McKean perked up like a dog on a scent.
“Don’t know.”
“But you know something. I could see it on your face the other day.”
Frank looked at the floor. “Yeah. I know something.” He looked up at McKean and said, “Henry George knows how to make the poison.”
“Perhaps he’s our murderer,” I remarked, to a resounding silence.
“Naw,” replied Frank. “He’s a harmless old geezer, part Muckleshoot and part Suquamish.”
“And all crazy,” Clara interjected. “Stays with folks on charity. Been under this roof a few times.”
“But he’s a real shaman,” Frank insisted. “Knows the old ways. Told me once when I was a kid about making red tide poison. I don’t remember much except you skim the pink foam off the water, then you make it into poison.”
“Where can we find this Henry George?” asked McKean.
“He sometimes stays down along the river in our village.”
“Village?” I questioned. “I didn’t see any Indian village down there.”
“Our village is gone,” Squalco muttered. “White folks burned us out in the 1890s - nothin’ left standing. Old longhouses used to be across the street from where they’re building the new longhouse.”
“Or,” Clara added, “try upriver at Terminal 107. Our village was all along there. Went on for a mile or so on the Duwamish riverbanks. You look for Henry anywhere in there. A lot of bushes and trees and places to camp.”
Further conversation brought little further insight, so after a pleasant morning we left to search for Henry George. When I remarked that it was nearing noon and I’d gotten hungry, McKean suggested we pick up a quick lunch at The Spud on Alki Beach, not far away on the west side of the West Seattle peninsula. We got two orders of fish and chips from the friendly counter staff, sprinkled with garlic vinegar and wrapped in blue and white paper, and two Cokes to go. I drove us to the parking lot at Herring’s House Park where we ate lunch in the car to avoid a drizzle and then got out to search for Henry George. After some poking around along the gravel trials that crisscrossed the wet undergrowth paralleling a meandering loop of the main river channel, McKean sniffed the air, then began following his nose until he’d pushed through some wet brush to come upon a large culvert through which Puget Creek emptied into the Duwamish River. Inside, we found the old man camped beside the trickling stream on the concrete floor of a dry side culvert in a lean-to he’d fashioned from sticks, clothesline cords, and some tattered blue tarps. He was scraggly-bearded, dressed in soiled blue jeans and a heavy cotton shirt and wrapped in a cape that appeared to have been woven from cedar bark fibers, and barefoot, despite the chill of a wet day. He sat near a small, smoldering little fire made of deadfall twigs.
“Poison?” he said with a bitter grimace that bared a gap where a front tooth had gone missing, when McKean explained our interest. “I got white man’s poison in me right now. Alcohol. Tide’s running against Duwamish people these days. We had it running our way a few years ago when Clinton signed a piece of paper saying Duwamish was a recognized tribe. Then Bush came along and crossed out every order Clinton made. Just like that. Swept us out like trash. A’yahos knows why.”
“A’yahos?” I asked, getting out a pen and notepad. “Who’s that?”
“The two-headed serpent spirit, like the river slithering first this way, then that way, with the tide. He brings strong medicine from the sea, but he can take away stuff too, like people’s lives. He’s part of the balance of nature. In, out, back, forth, everything moves in time to the tides. Someday the white man’s tide will go out.”
McKean scowled, impatient to learn what we’d come to find out. “Can you tell us,” he said, stooping to look George in the eye, “how to make red tide poison?”
The old man stared at McKean for a moment, then picked up a stick and poked at his little smoldering fire. “You take two canoes out on a calm day, towing one behind the other. You find some big eddy lines of the pinkest foam on the water. Then you take your paddle and skim the foam and put it in the second canoe until it’s full to the gunnels. Then you paddle somewhere people can’t see, like over on Muddy Island, and you mix the foam with sea water and some pieces of whale blubber.”
“Who can get whale blubber?” I asked.
“Indian people can get lots of stuff.” He flashed a gap-toothed grin. “After you soak up enough poison to make the blubber blood red all the way to the middle, then you put the blubber in a pot and add firewood ashes and heat it till it melts. Then you skim off the grease, and the water’s all dark red now. Then you dry it. It’s a blackish red powder. Don’t taste like nothing. Don’t smell like nothing. Just poisons folks real good. Lotta work, though. Takes all the foam you can get into a boat to make a few doses. Takes a lotta time.”
“Assuming you’re working alone,” McKean remarked.
“Shamans always work alone. You don’t ask your mother to help you gather poison. She’d tell everyone.”
McKean questioned George further but the
re was little else to be gleaned, especially as the old man sipped cheap wine from a pint flask until his face went beet red and his eyelids drooped. Finally he lay down and fell asleep next to his cold fire.
We left Henry George sleeping and headed back along the footpath toward the parking lot. Suddenly, in the densest part of the thicket, we found our way blocked by a young Indian man who stared at us angrily. He was dressed in a long black leather coat. His long black hair was braided on each side and he wore a deep scowl on his otherwise handsome dark face. Most ominously, he carried a woodsman’s hatchet in one hand.
“What you white folks want with Henry George?”
McKean responded without showing fear, though plenty was working inside me. “We’re here about a poisoning,” he said evenly. “You know anything?”
“Wouldn’t tell you if I did. You leave the old man alone.”
McKean sized up the young man. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Won’t tell you that either. Now you’d best move along.” He stepped aside to let us pass, pointing the way with his hatchet. We went on and he tailed us back to the parking lot, keeping his distance.
Nervous about his intentions, I hurried into my car and quickly fired the engine while McKean got in. As I drove away, the young man stopped beside a shiny black Dodge Ram pickup that hadn’t been there before, conversing sullenly with its occupant, a tall man silhouetted through a tinted windshield. I turned onto West Marginal Way and headed for downtown, slugging down some Coke to sooth a fear-parched throat. “Now what?” I asked.
McKean tapped his own Coke against mine in a mock toast and took a long pull. “Leave nothing but footprints,” he quipped, “and take nothing but pictures.” He held his cell phone so I could see the image on its screen. He’d snapped a photo of the man beside the pickup. “We’ll ask Frank to tell us who that is. Oh, and a bonus,” he said. “I got their license plate in the shot.”
Peyton McKean is, among other things, the inventor of a couple dozen widely used DNA forensic tests, so he’s pretty well connected for a man who doesn’t carry a detective’s badge. As I drove, he called an acquaintance who owed him a favor, Vince Nagumo of the Seattle FBI Office. Within minutes, Nagumo had identified the owner of the pickup as Craig Showalter, age thirty, of White Center. McKean asked him to look into the man’s background and Nagumo promised to get on it right away.
I had another sip of Coke and then set it down in its cup holder. “Do your lips tingle?” I asked McKean.
“I was hoping it was just the chill air,” McKean replied thoughtfully.
Adrenaline ran through me like an electric shock and I pulled to the side of the road, asking, “Have we been poisoned, somehow?” Without comment McKean opened his door, put two fingers down his throat and vomited. I followed suit, splattering the pavement on my side with a residue of fish, chips, Coke - and death.
“That may be too little prevention, too late,” McKean muttered. “It all depends on the dose. Can you drive, Fin?”
“To the hospital?
“No. Take us to my labs, quickly.”
I floored the gas and he got on his phone. “Janet, get all the mouse antiserum together. Get it ready for injection into two patients.”
“There’s not enough blood in a mouse - ” I began.
“You can dilute antisera vastly,” McKean interrupted as he clicked off his phone. “A little may go a long way.”
Panicky minutes followed as my car’s engine roared and McKean described the very symptoms I was experiencing. “Depending upon the toxin dose, the sensation of tingling lips progresses to tingling of fingers and toes - ” I felt my fingers tingle as I wrenched the steering wheel and skidded onto the ramp of the West Seattle Bridge; my toes tingled as I floored the accelerator and the tires screamed. “Next,” McKean continued as we streaked up and over the high-rise span across the Duwamish River, “you may lose control of your arms and legs - ” I struggled to keep on course as the Mustang rocketed through an interchange cloverleaf and northbound on the Alaskan Way Viaduct toward downtown. “Some victims experience a sense of floating or vertigo - ” My head swam and my vision grew hazy while I fought to keep from driving through the railings and dropping us fifty feet onto the railroad tracks.
“How about going blind?” I gasped. “I’m having trouble seeing the road. It’s all going red.”
McKean thought a moment. “Blindness is not a part of this syndrome. But seeing red is common when people feel extreme rage or fear.”
“I’m feeling both right now.”
“Is your heart pounding?”
“Isn’t yours?”
“Seeing red occurs when blood pumps so rapidly it floods the retina of the eye until one can actually see it. I suggest you keep cool, Fin.”
“Keep - ” I tried to protest but gagged on my pounding heartbeat. My vision grew redder as I turned off Highway 99 and onto the city streets. My hearing roared and McKean’s voice receded as he said, “Finally, the chest muscles become paralyzed and the victim stops breathing.”
Just two blocks from the lab, my vision went from red to black.
* * * * *
“Wake up, Fin.”
The angelic voice brought me back and I looked around groggily. “Wha - ? Where?”
“You’re with me, Fin,” Kay Erwin murmured, her pretty face coming into focus above me. “You’re at Seattle Public Health Hospital. How do you feel?”
“Better than yesterday,” I muttered, noticing Peyton McKean leaning over her shoulder, observing me like I was a lab rat.
“Better than two days ago,” he corrected. “You’ve been comatose for forty-eight hours. You took one more sip of Coke than I did. The antibodies barely pulled you through.”
“But your vital signs are great this morning,” Kay remarked. “No permanent damage.”
“How’d I get here?” I asked, struggling to remember missing events.
“You managed to get us to the lab, Fin,” McKean replied, “although just barely. Janet met us at the curbside and injected half the antibodies into each of us, and then called an ambulance. Kay tended us through the crisis. We’re both well on the way to recovery. My antiserum worked!”
* * * * *
The next day, as Kay signed my release papers, McKean rushed into my room. “I hope you’re up for a drive, Fin. Vince Nagumo just called with news. The police are after Craig Showalter. They raided his home and found a methamphetamine lab. Shot two of his henchmen dead in a gun battle. But Showalter’s still on the loose. He’d already hightailed it the evening before, according to his girlfriend.”
“So, what next?” I asked.
“Let’s go have a powwow.”
An hour later, we took our accustomed seats in Clara’s living room, joined by Frank, whom McKean had alerted by cell phone. When Clara offered us Cokes again, I waved mine off. “No thanks,” I resisted. “I’ve had more than enough Coke to suit my tastes lately.”
Peyton McKean, on the other hand, quickly picked up his glass and sipped from it as if to demonstrate good will and his trust in Aunt Clara. He then used his cell phone to show Frank and Clara his photo of the man beside the pickup.
Clara gasped, “That’s my nephew, Billy Seaweed. He can’t be mixed up in this! He’s a good kid.”
Frank nodded his head. “Billy comes around and helps out sometimes. Clara can’t get on too well without him.”
“I’m old and lame,” Clara complained. “My husband died from alcohol and the post traumatic stresses from his Viet Nam days. There’s no government support money for us Duwamish elders because the tribe isn’t recognized, so I have to get by as best as I can. Billy’s my angel. He cut up all that cordwood for me with his ax.”
“We’ve seen the ax,” I remarked.
“Billy’s a good boy,” Clara repeated. “Sold the tires and wheels off my old, broke-down car to get a little money for me to get by on.”
“Billy’s okay,” said Frank. “Got some strange
friends though, like that Erik Torvald guy. For a white guy, I suppose he was all right, but he was still a white man to the bone.”
“In what way?” asked McKean.
“All about money. He was using Billy’s rights as a Native American to get geoduck licenses. Nothing really wrong with that, but the way he used his big, hot-rod boat and his scuba gear and power siphons to tear up half the sea bottom when he took ‘em? That’s not like we used to do, dig ‘em at low tide with a cedar shovel and fill in the holes when you’re done. Still, Torvald was a lot nicer than Billy’s new partner.”
“Craig Showalter,” McKean responded.
“How’d you know that?”
“I’ve got connections. Vince Nagumo, FBI. He says Showalter’s a bad choice of friends. He’s got quite a rap sheet - ex con, home invasion robbery, drug dealer.”
“Oh, my,” gasped Clara, putting a hand to her chest.
“Some other things you should know about Billy,” Frank said. “He’s an internet addict and a kinda Indian Goth. He’s obsessed with darkness and apocalyptic stuff. I think he was frustrated ‘cause he couldn’t afford junior college to get some training that would get him a good job. Even got into drugs for a bit, maybe through that Showalter guy if what you say is true. But I don’t think Billy’s a killer.”
One scruffy dog came to its place beside me on the couch and began nibbling the bare patch at the base of its tail. I choked back my disgust until the dog abandoned itself to a frenzy of licking and nibbling, leaning against my elbow while it raised a mangy stench that nauseated me. I stood up to get some fresher air and tried to seem nonchalant by wandering to a back window and pulling aside the curtain to gaze outside while McKean continued his discussion with Frank and Clara. I stared at the trees overarching the house but then spotted something on the back drive that sent a chill through me: pulled up behind the car on blocks was a black Dodge Ram pickup exactly like the one at the park when we were poisoned. I was immediately certain it was Craig Showalter’s truck, so I made a small wave to catch McKean’s eye and then pointed out the window.
