The Angels Will Not Care

by John Straley

  I’ve lived in this particular house for seven years. It is built out on pilings over the steep rocky beach. I grew up in an old hunting lodge in Juneau. The home of my child­hood was sold years ago. My mother lives in Santa Fe. Our family house is now a bed-and-breakfast. I stayed there some years ago and even slept in my old room, where I had carved my initials on the molding around the closet door. I looked for them but the molding had been replaced. The room had little baskets of sage on the bedside table and strange-smelling candles burned in the bathroom. This was my childhood bedroom and now there were old copies of Archi­tectural Digest on a rosewood nightstand next to the frilly four-poster bed.

  For better or worse my real life is here in Sitka now, with my roommate Todd and Jane Marie DeAngelo. Jane Marie moved from Juneau, nominally to be with me but the pres­ence of humpback whales in Sitka Sound in the late fall and early winter helped. Jane Marie is a research biologist and the chief executive officer of Playing Around Enterprises. This was her day job so that she could fund her research. Playing Around Enterprises published a journal called, natu­rally, The Playing Around Review, which featured news, infor­mation, and advice on games. Jane Marie was a specialist in games: board games, card games, parlor games, even games to play in a car or boat during a long trip. The review created positive cash flow but the real money came from her cata­logue of games and supplies. She took orders from all across the north: Alaska, the Yukon and even into eastern Canada. She specialized in finding the right games for individual so­cial and cultural climates. She had games suited for Chris­tian families living on the prairies of Saskatoon, and anarchist fishermen on the coastal islands of Alaska. She sold game supplies to the arctic villages and software on the latest com­puter games to kids all over the north. Although whenever she was given a chance, she would try to steer children out of the virtual world and back to the real one. Games, Jane Ma­rie insists, are best played against another human, and suffer when played against machines. She currently has a friend helping her get started with shipping games to the Russian Far East. Games, Jane Marie says, are the way people sort their lives out and how they learn to appreciate the balance in all of their human relationships. As a species we have become so “over-evolved,” entertainment is no longer the subtext of our daily lives but the reverse has become true. Our lives are the subtext of our entertainments. She maintains that this has been true for a very long time and that it is not just true for those of the idle rich but for all of those people who labor during the long days of summer so that they can survive the long northern winters.

  I opened the door to my house and noticed there was a strange coat hanging on the rack in the entryway. The house, which could usually be counted on for some manic strange­ness, was quiet but for adult voices speaking in a sober tone upstairs in the living room. I carried the dead chicken up­stairs by the throat. I had forgotten why I was carrying it but supposed I needed it for some evidentiary reason.

  When I cleared the stairs a well-dressed young man with extremely straight teeth and a nice haircut stood up and strode toward me with his hand outstretched.

  “Well here he is, the sleuth himself. Hiya, Cecil, I’m Sonny Walters from Great Circle Lines. Gosh, I’m sure glad to meet ya. You know, I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  I stepped back and foolishly tried to hide the dead chicken behind my back. Jane Marie spotted my awkward moment and came to my rescue.

  “I see you’ve been successful.” She flashed a buttery smile and reached around my back. “How our winged thoughts have turned to poultry,” she added, then took the pathetic bird and disappeared downstairs toward the utility room.

  “Mr. Walters wants to talk to you about a case, Cecil,” Jane Marie’s voice floated up the stairs.

  “Gosh . . . a case!” Mr. Walters grinned foolishly and shrugged his shoulders as if he were a child star about to go into his tap dance routine. I sat on the chair that was nearest the woodstove. The stove was cold but the chair was the clos­est to me and would force Sonny Walters to sit opposite on the couch.

  “Well, it’s really not a case, I don’t think. I suppose it’s just a little problem we at the cruise line would like to have . . . oh . . . I don’t know . . . fleshed out.”

  “Then you work for a cruise ship?” I said, and I realized that he had already told me that and so to cover I brushed imaginary crumbs off my lap. I was becoming more and more self-conscious of the dead chicken smell clinging to me. I knew the Great Circle Lines; their ships had been disgorging travelers onto the streets of town in growing numbers the last few years. Tourism was booming in the island communities of southeastern Alaska. Most of the towns on the coast were changing over from the culture of resource extraction—logging, mining, fishing—to the culture of tourism. The seedy little boardwalk towns were becoming gaudy with the rust and gold of big money. Leisure was Alaska’s new resource.

  “You know, you’ve got a super place here,” Mr. Walters said, looking around the upstairs of my house. There were dishtowels scattered on the arms of the couch and my room­mate’s laundry was sitting in a heap on the table near the kitchen alcove. I nodded and said nothing, not sure how to acknowledge the “superness” of my living environment.

  “Well, here it is, Mr. Younger . . .” Walters turned to me and his voice dropped a couple of businesslike octaves.

  “The main office of Great Circle Lines in Miami has authorized me to hire a local investigator. But first I have to ask: Have you been approached by any other cruise line or shipping company to work for them in the past five years?”

  His shift in tone caught me off-guard. I shook my head in the negative to indicate either that I hadn’t been hired by anyone else or that I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about.

  “Good.” He went right on. “I just want to make sure: Have you been approached by Empire Shipping, out of Singapore?” He stared at me. Waiting.

  “No.” I stumbled. “I mean, should I have?”

  “Oh no. No.” Mr. Walters waved away the thought. “Empire is the company that owns our ship. I was just making certain we weren’t, you know, reinventing the wheel here.” He stopped again, waiting, but this time there was no thread for me to follow.

  “Oh,” I said conclusively.

  “Well, Mr. Younger, the Great Circle Lines wants you to help us in sorting out some complaints they’ve been re­ceiving over the last few seasons. We need it done, well, you know, discreetly . . . I’m sure you are used to this kind of thing.”

  “Sure.” I said it too loudly and too confidently. This was sounding like a real job with a genuine paying client. The thought gave me something of a nervous sugar rush.

  “Sure,” I repeated. “Oh yeah. Discreet.” I bit down on my tongue just to stop yammering. “Tell me what you need, Mr. Walters.”

  “Oh, call me Sonny. Really, you know,” he looked nerv­ously around the room again, and I looked too, just trying to be helpful, “I mean my . . . father was Mr. Walters.” He laughed nervously and I responded nervously. I knew why I was nervous, because I needed this work, but I had no idea what was making Mr. Walters twitch.

  “Well, anyway, the main office has had some complaints about the medical services on one of our ships. It’s the West­ward, I suppose you have seen her. She really is a lovely ship, really. A converted steamship. I mean an old cargo ship that was refitted in the seventies. You know, this is a ship with a real soul. The soul of a world traveler. A fine old ship, not just a glitzy hotel. There is a beautiful main salon and a won­derful reading room and a small gaming room, a gym, and a classic old theater down belowdecks . . .” Mr. Sonny Walters was off and running, having found a comfortable topic.

  “The Westward is just beautiful, really. Clean. And a great staff, of course. We have a terrific time on her. Of course, there is a lot of work and that really comes down to me and my staff.”

  I handed him his tea if for no
thing else than to create a pause in the action.

  “What is it you do, Mr. Walters?”

  His young square face lit up. “Why, I’m the Cruise Di­rector, Mr. Younger. My staff and I are in charge of the enter­tainment. I worry about your vacation so you don’t have to.”

  I studied his face to see if there was any sarcasm creep­ing into the conversation but so far I could detect none. Sonny Walters appeared to be a cruising true believer.

  “Sounds dreamy,” I said and sipped my tea.

  “Oh yes. Oh yes.” Sonny went on haltingly. “We’ve had a terrific season so far but . . .”

  “The complaints . . .” I offered.

  “Yeah . . . Well, I frankly don’t think there is anything to them. You know, we do all we can. But still the main office wants an independent investigation.”

  “Are people getting sick?”

  “No, not really. I mean, there are problems. Heck, we have eight hundred passengers and three hundred crew members. There are bound to be some illnesses out at sea.”

  “Then?” I held my palms up in front of me. I was starting to lose my enthusiasm for this case already, and I hadn’t heard the first fact.

  “There is just a bit of controversy surrounding our ship’s doctor.”

  I waited. Sonny looked down at the wooden floor. He did not go on. Outside I heard the low mutter of a fishing boat passing by close to the house. From the kitchen I could hear Jane Marie sharpening a knife on a whetstone. There was a rhythmic shiver to the sound that made me shrug my shoulders and take another sip of tea. I decided to wait Mr. Walters out.

  “The company wants you to come on board and see for yourself,” he said finally.

  “Are you going to tell me any more?”

  “Well, here’s the deal on that.” Sonny looked at me and smiled again with his “Old College Try” kind of con­fidence. “The company—Great Circle, that is—just wants you to come on board the ship and see for yourself, Mr. Younger. You can poke around all you want, enjoy yourself and experience all of the facilities—”

  “Including the infirmary?”

  “Of course. The infirmary and the ship’s doctor, and if you cannot come up with any problems or anything, then . . . Well, then, I guess their concerns were unwarranted.”

  I took a deep breath. Of course, there were many things I needed to ask. I could have ticked off a long list of things I knew Sonny wasn’t telling me.

  “Sure, I can do that for you. No problem” was what I said instead.

  Downstairs the door banged against the coatrack and I heard the even, heavy footfalls of my roommate upon the stairs.

  Toddy came into the room with both arms filled with envelopes from the film-developing store. He’d been work­ing all summer long at two jobs and it seemed that most of his discretionary income had gone into film processing. Todd was forty-six years old and he had just received his first camera. This may have explained his lack of discrimination as a photographer. It seemed that he was trying to document every visual element of his life.

  He had lost his job at a local restaurant when, accord­ing to the manager, Todd had spent too much time engaging the customers in protracted philosophical discussions when he should have been doing salad prep. Now Todd worked as an aid for the local veterinarian, and for a landscaping com­pany, where the most minute details of each yard, lot, and trimmed sidewalk had been documented photographically.

  As a local kid from the neighborhood once noted, “Toddy ain’t dumb, he’s just smart in his very own way.” I am his official guardian and I have long ago stopped trying to reconcile our differing intelligences.

  Sonny Walters stood up as Todd came into the room and Todd stopped short. The envelopes of prints cascaded from his arms and scattered across the floor. Sonny looked alarmed at the scattered photos but Todd smiled and ex­tended his hand as if nothing of concern had transpired.

  “Why hello,” Todd said, thrusting his massive hand even closer to Sonny.

  “Hello,” Sonny said tentatively. “Would you like some help with that?” he asked, simultaneously shaking Todd’s hand and nodding to the envelopes on the floor.

  “Oh no. That’s okay.” Todd smiled again, stared at Mr. Walters and said nothing. For several long moments Todd just stood and kept staring while he continued to rock back and forth on the balls of his feet. This, I think, was impressive to Sonny Walters.

  Todd is just under six feet tall but his height is not that noticeable because he often stands with a pronounced hump in his back. Today he was wearing mustard-colored polyes­ter trousers and a flannel shirt. The trousers were held up well beyond his waist by a pair of red suspenders that had the words Alaska Logger written on each one. Todd has what used to be called a crew cut before it was adopted by the young people in black who work in the bookstore coffee shop downtown. But the fashion feature that had defined Todd over the years was his thick black-framed glasses that had broken at the bridge some years ago. His father, who has long disappeared into the taverns of Ketchikan or Aberdeen, effected a repair with two stainless steel screws and a tiny plate that had a sharp edge on the outside corner. To mitigate the plate’s sharp edge Todd had taped the joint with differ­ent layers of industrial tape over the years. The whole effect lent Todd the look of a damaged New Wave paperboy, kind of the friendly Road Warrior image favored by some urban youth. Only Todd didn’t know that, of course.

  Finally Todd bent down and picked up his photographs. He was humming “The Sheik of Araby,” for some unknown reason.

  “So then, do we have a deal?” Sonny slapped his hands together, turning away from Todd.

  “How do you want to handle the travel? The ex­penses . . .” I paused and held my breath for a beat, “. . . and my fee.” There, I had said it.

  Sonny smiled like a man flush with cash, which I like to see.

  “Well, the travel will, of course, be fully compensated. Food, stateroom, bar tab, would be covered by the ship, and I thought we’d just sign you on as an escort and pay you what­ever your fee—in cash, of course—as long as we can come to some . . . reasonable understanding.”

  “Of course . . .” I smiled. “What kind of escort?”

  “Ah . . .” Sonny said professorially as if he were about to begin his lecture on the finer points of living. “Many of our passengers are older women. Women, as you know, are longer-lived than men, and many women who like to travel are forced by circumstance to travel alone. The cruise line likes to provide escorts for them: men of good conversational ability, witty companions, and good dancers. It’s a completely honorable thing,” Sonny added seriously.

  “Ah . . .” I said in return in what I hoped was a worldly way. The thought of an open bar tab and foxtrotting the North Pacific with the sporty heiresses of America’s indus­trial wealth was beginning to brighten my spirits.

  “Mr. Walters . . .” Jane Marie’s voice came into the room like a clarion call. “Do you know why males are gen­erally shorter-lived than females?” Jane Marie had blood on her hands and there were feathers clinging to her denim apron. Her dark eyes flashed. Poor Sonny shook his head. By now Todd was sprawled out on the floor reviewing the photographs in one of the envelopes. Jane Marie stepped over him.

  “The males of the species are generally shorter-lived because they expend so much of their reserve energy in trying to mate every possible female they come in contact with. Some of this energy goes towards display . . .” Jane Marie walked ever closer to poor Sonny with the bloody knife in her hand and Sonny tried to take a step backward but was stopped by the woodstove. I stayed put in my chair.

  “. . . Some of this display energy goes into activities you mentioned.” She stopped, and, holding the knife in her hand, placed her fists on her hips. Her eyes were sparking now. “Dancing, card playing, joke telling . . . these are all forms of mating ritual and subjects of male display. Then
, of course, this male energy is funneled off into aggression when the males are forced to compete for the attention of the females.” Jane Marie was smiling sweetly now.

  “But truthfully, Mr. Walters, do you know why men are generally shorter-lived?”

  Sonny, being no fool, shook his head in the negative. Jane Marie let out a long breath and held the bloody knife to his face, still smiling as if she were presenting him with a diploma. “It’s because the males often die as a result of their dangerous breeding behavior.”

  There was a pause and again Sonny said, “Ah.” Then another long pause and then, “So then you’re suggest­ing . . . ?” Sonny drawled.

  “Your company would benefit greatly by having Cecil accompanied by his mate,” Jane Marie replied sweetly. “And, of course, Cecil will benefit because if he goes on a cruise without me, I’d be forced to kill him.” She held the knife tightly in her fist and batted her eyelashes.

  So, telephone calls were made, along with some veiled threats and cajoling, and my little nuclear family was off to Vancouver, British Columbia, to board the SS Westward.

  Actually, it had worked out as a bonanza for Sonny Wal­ters. After Jane Marie put the knife down, he’d remembered that he was shy one lecturer for the cruise. Jane Marie had made a powerful impression with her knowledge of biology, and when he realized she also specialized in game strategy, he offered her a berth for one-half of what my salary was to be, which turned out to be more than the other lecturers were going to get but worth it if he could take it out of my pay.