by John Straley
The band was Margie & the Navigators. Margie was of indeterminate age but definitely prewar. She wore black slacks and a maroon sequined jacket. She played the piano and her silver-blonde hair bobbed just out of her eyes. She had a lit cigarette in an ashtray and a glass of water next to her piano. The other Navigators were a smattering of different eras. The drummer looked as if he could have played for Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. He was an old white man with great big square glasses. The bassist could have sat in with Erect Nipples—the band, not the condition. As natural as Margie looked in her gig clothes, the bassist seemed uncomfortable, as if his tuxedo was giving him a rash. The saxophonist’s skin was drawn tight over his skull and he kept time with his chin while he played with an irritating tone that felt slightly out of tune. He seemed the most confident onstage, as if he were in a deeply stoned dream, but his playing seemed stiff, and in several places resembled honking rather than song.
Margie & the Navigators played “I Had a Dream, Dear,” which had been one of my father’s favorite songs. I had never known that it was a real song actually performed by other people. I had always assumed my father had just made it up. I saw a hand waving in my direction. Jane Marie sat near an aisle on the far side near the bar. Todd sat next to her, and on the other side of her sat a slender, and very well dressed, black man.
When I worked my way over there, neither Jane Marie nor her companion offered to get up. Todd took his eyes briefly off the Navigators and squeezed closer to the center. I was able to sit with half a cheek on the couch, one man away from Jane Marie.
The woman I had assumed was in love with me whispered across the chest of the black man. “Cecil, this is Nigel. He’s an investment banker from London.”
“Hello,” Nigel said in an irritating Denzel-Washington-doing-Shakespeare kind of way.
“Nice to meet you,” I replied and cast my eyes down at his soft leather loafers and his tailored cuffs.
I was in the mood to hate every second of Sonny Walters’s act. I figured he would play up the irony. Try and stay hip both ways; Bill Murray doing his lounge singer routine with a few tearjerkers from Les Miserables or Cats thrown in.
Sonny walked out wearing a lemon-yellow sports coat and a pale blue silk tie. His teeth were straight. For some reason I still held that against him, maybe because he had the kind of handsomeness my mother always wanted me to have when she picked out my clothes.
Sonny in fact was an extraordinary singer. He sang a series of ballads in an unsentimental baritone. He looked at each member of the crowd and he didn’t fake a thing. His voice didn’t waver with phony longing. He didn’t have to oversell a single lyric. There wasn’t an ounce of self-awareness or cheap sentiment. He was giving his audience exactly what they wanted without apologies. He sang old songs about complicated love and longing. I didn’t know I had missed these songs until I heard them.
As he sang, Sonny leaned against a high stool and he did not loosen his tie. In the quiet passages of the tunes the women in the audience did not move, they did not breathe, only drawing deep breaths when Sonny did, as if he were pulling the phrasing of the song through his lungs and theirs. When he ended, the applause was urgent. They needed him to sing one more. Always. One more.
A waiter came close to my left side. He offered me a champagne glass and I took it. The ball in the middle of the room was turning: Threads of light spidered around the room, flecking every surface. Sonny was singing “Make Believe,” his voice reassuring as a flannel quilt. I jumped slightly as I heard the voice of the waiter, crouched close to my elbow.
“Sir. Excuse me, sir.”
When I turned, his face was close to mine. A thread of the light cut across his ebony skin. He had a clipped British accent. His expression was grave.
“I’m sorry, sir. But I have a message for you.” He took the bottle of champagne out of the slush of cubes. “I know nothing of this. I have just been told.” The young waiter was breathing deeply and for a moment I thought he might hyperventilate.
“I’ve been told to tell you . . . to forget what you saw.” The waiter held my eyes with his. He had strange gray eyes, the whites masked with a thin film. He did not say anything more. I was confused. I was about to speak when the waiter looked down into the mouth of the silver ice bucket. So strong was his hold on my eyes that I looked down, too.
“Just forget what you saw, sir,” the waiter repeated in a whisper.
The ice cubes had a dull glitter in the bottom of the ice bucket. Buried down in the cubes was a human hand. The pale white palm faced up as if it were scooping ice out for a drink but at the wrist was the shaved nub of bone surrounded by tattered skin and red meat. Severed tubes of the blood vessels hung limp in the water. Stray light scattered around in the ice and my head felt strange as if I had just now noticed the movement of the ship for the first time. The hand was like a glowing ingot banked down in the coals. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. When I started to reach for it the waiter stood up and walked quickly away. Sonny finished his set and took his bows. He held his microphone in his right hand and blew kisses with the left. The crowd clapped and clapped and clapped.
6
Ketchikan
In the early morning the Westward docked in Ketchikan. The ship was tied to the dock in the middle of downtown. The downtown area of Ketchikan is cradled against the side of a mountain. A stream flows down the center, breaking the view into a “Y.” There are some new dockside tourist buildings that could exist on any dock in any tourist port of call, but one block back from the water are the soggy wooden hotels where loggers and fishermen still pay by the week, and several of my friends have been known to pay by the hour.
The passengers of the Westward were scuttling forth into Ketchikan like an invading army. Plastic raincoats were buttoned up tight; those without a hood were pulling their collars up over their heads. They held cameras in their free hand as they took off to find that perfect memento, under twenty dollars, that would bear witness to their adventure. The rain came down as hard as unwanted manna. Great skeins of water pearled off the clogged roof gutters.
I was watching the scene from the concrete bunker of the court building. Tourists spread, grouped, and moved like drops of water forming into streams. Some were off to the old-fashioned salmon bake, others would paddle kayaks. Many would walk the streets and gawk at the old houses that had been bordellos back in simpler times. Today, chunky white women wearing feather boas and red garters passed out handbills for the old-time whorehouse gift shops. These women were happy to have their pictures taken kissing your husband’s bald head, or to mug provocatively for your camera. In the stream the salmon were pushing up the river to spawn and die. At low tide the river hissed over the rocks and the sound of water rolled downhill and collided with the rattle of buses and the crying gulls.
I actually love Ketchikan. It may be one of the friendliest and least pretentious towns in Alaska. It’s also a great town for crime. Its citizens have a certain passionate, brawling kind of drunkenness that sometimes spills out into the streets. Sitka, on the other hand, seems much more uptight. There, our drunken brutality stays decorously at home. Despite my affection for the working-class vibe of Ketchikan, however, Jane Marie wasn’t getting off the boat. She was not only attending to her lecture notes but was helping set up a tournament of Alaskan Charades in which teams would act out various animals, geologic and natural features of the Alaskan coastline.
Todd was staying on the ship, too. I think he knew he might run into his father in one of the waterfront bars, and as little emotional insight as Todd had at times, I was certain that prospect went into his decision to stay on board and watch the video presentation of Ketchikan on the ship’s closed-circuit TV.
I was mulling all this over as I stared over the downtown area from the court building. I was being verbally abused by the local coroner and I wasn’t listening. Instead, I watched a y
oung woman in a tank top weave unsteadily in the rain from one bar to another. It was nine in the morning.
“Get a grip, Younger,” the coroner said as I stood on my tiptoes to watch the young woman turn and shake the wet spikes of her hair under the eaves of a bar. Her shirt was soaked clear through and she laughed, throwing her head back as she turned and entered through the swinging doors.
The coroner was a woman in her early fifties. She had black hair and was attractive in a disarming way that is peculiar to many women in Ketchikan. For some reason women in Ketchikan always make it seem that anything is possible, given the right combination of events. They are game in the ways that more delicate or urbane women usually aren’t. Perhaps that was why I watched the wet woman disappear into the bar. I wanted to imagine what would come next. I tried to get her out of my mind as I made an effort to listen to the coroner.
“No, I didn’t actually see the body of the girl brought off the ship,” she continued. “Christ, I’m not a ghoul. I have the doctor’s report. I have the family’s request. I have the ship’s officer’s report. I just sign off on the death certificate and then release the body. The death happened out at sea. I have no real jurisdiction to order an inquest, even if I thought there was cause for one.”
“What she die of?” I was still standing on my tiptoes at the window.
The coroner sighed. She looked down at the papers. “Cecil, I’m not supposed to talk to you about this but . . . Christ . . .” She rifled through the papers grumbling to herself.
The coroner was an old client. I had worked on her divorce case years before when she had been an attorney in Juneau. She had been a contract lawyer and had been married to the Governor’s special assistant. There had been a young daughter who had been the apple of both parents’ eye. The case was noteworthy for its slow-building ugliness. When wealthy young professionals divorced, no matter how much they protested their amiability, it was usually good for lots of billable hours. Anyway, I had been loyal, and had listened with sensitivity. I had also produced the pictures that allowed her to keep the kid, so I deserved at least a little confidential information.
“It says she died of respiratory failure as a result of her ongoing medical condition and treatment,” the coroner said.
“Ongoing medical treatment?” I turned away from the window.
“She had AIDS, Cecil.” The coroner’s eyes were beseeching me to let this thing go. “She was very sick and stopped breathing.”
“Did she have both her hands?” I asked.
“Oh, for Christ’s sakes. It says nothing about her hands.”
“Just look, will ya?” I said, then added, “Or just let me look, if it’s too ghoulish for you.” I sat down across the desk from her.
She scowled, again reviewing the papers. “Left hand or right hand?”
“Are those my only two choices?”
She looked at me with a kind of peevish glee. “I’m asking because there is a note here that says there was a ‘medical artifact’ on her right wrist. That usually implies that some surgical or emergency treatment was used when trying to treat her. Emergency tracheotomies or something like that. I have to admit I rarely see anything like that noted about the wrist. But if she had collapsed veins from her other treatment they could have tried to stick her anywhere when they attempted to resuscitate her.”
“They never tried to resuscitate her.”
“Well, the doctor on board said he did. He claims he treated her at eight-thirty a.m. ship’s time yesterday morning. That is the time of death.”
I had seen the pale girl much earlier than that in her stateroom. She had been dead then. Eight-thirty was about the time that Rosalind and I had caught a glimpse of her being zipped into the bag. I didn’t mention this to the coroner. I wasn’t sure an official investigation would help me, or my clients, at this point.
“What was her name?” I asked instead.
“Her name was Traci Lord. With an ‘I.’ She was from Virginia.”
I sat up straight. “Come on—Traci Lord? Like in The Philadelphia Story Traci Lord? Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart . . . remember?”
The coroner smiled and looked at me, her brown eyes cloudy with memory. “Yeah, I loved that movie.” She made her voice quaver in a passable impression of Kate Hepburn’s Yankee drawl. “‘Remember, Mike, with the rich and mighty, always a little patience.’” Then she snapped out of it and stared down at her papers.
“Anyway, that’s what it says. Traci Lord,” she said.
“So where is she now?” I asked.
“She is at the funeral home. Her family has been notified.”
The funeral home was also headquarters for a cab company. The back lot of the warehouse looked like an automotive graveyard. There were rotting minivans and station wagons sinking up to their axles in the mud. There was an incredibly ugly dog chained to an engine block by the corner of the metal shed. My friend Felix, the mechanic, and occasional hearse driver, was cuffing this creature and talking baby talk to it. I interrupted him.
“What the hell kind of dog is that?” I asked as I stepped on top of the rusted hood of a Buick Regal that was floating in the mud.
“Cecil, you wouldn’t believe it, man,” Felix said, oblivious of the rain. His large moony face showed piano-style gaps in his teeth. “This old dog has made me a shitload of money this summer. I tell people off the ship he’s a wolf. They go apeshit, man. They pet him and have their picture taken and I get ’em to charter tours in my cab. I’ll have a string of two-hour tours just because this old butthead is sitting in my front seat.”
“Is . . . it . . . a wolf, this butthead dog of yours?” I asked, not wanting to seem even more stupid and effete than I already had.
“Fuck no, man. I tell you, I bred this malamute bitch . . . Well, you know, I didn’t breed her.” He smirked. Felix ran with a crowd that got a lot of mileage out of dog-fucking jokes. Of course, I did too, so I listened intently as Felix went on, “But I had her bred with a . . . now get this: This is the genius part of the deal . . . I had her bred with a big fucking RAT!”
“Felix . . .” I said slowly, standing in the rain. “You didn’t have a dog bred to a rat. It’s not possible.”
“Nugh huh!” he said loudly. He had his head cocked to one side and he looked blankly at me as if he could not figure out how the universe had spawned someone as dumb as I was.
“Anyway, Felix . . .” Then I paused and added parenthetically, “You might be right,” because I was going to ask him a kind of touchy favor. “You’ve got a new corpse that came in the front door, off the Westward.”
“Yeah . . . ?” he said, drawing it out and looking suspiciously at me.
“I need to take a look at her, Felix.”
“Yeah, sure. No problem.” He stopped playing with his dog and started walking into the back shed. I jumped across what looked like a shoe-sucking mud hole and followed.
Once inside we crossed behind a wall of chainsaw posters and several file folders that were mysteriously turned on their sides. Felix stopped short and grabbed my arm.
“Hey, wait a minute!” he said as if I were putting one over on him. “Are you going to have . . . sex with her?”
I knew he was serious by the way he had used the words “have sex with.”
“With whom?”
“With her . . . You know, the package off the Westward.”
“I wasn’t planning on it, Felix,” I said slowly, letting each word sink in. “Why, does that change something?”
“Naw,” he said as he kept walking, waving his hand distractedly above his head as if he were fending off thoughts. “Oh, naw. I had a guy come in here once and offer me two grand for that. I just thought . . . you know . . .”
“Anyway, I don’t have two grand, Felix,” I said.
“Well, you know, I just thought I’d ask,” Felix said
in a very businesslike manner. He rubbed his hands against his elbows. “Burrrr. Man, I feel cold all of a sudden. Wonder what that’s about?” Then he turned the light on.
Coffins on their metal stands were scattered around the concrete garage like Foosball tables. A polished mahogany one near the garage door and a white child-sized one near the sink by the radiator.
Felix looked around, agitated. He peered into a shiny gray coffin that had pink filigree around the hinges. Then he scratched his head. “Hey!” he yelled into the dark hallway that leads to the front and more formal part of the funeral home. This was an area into which Felix was never allowed to set foot unless he was in his driver’s uniform.
“Hey!” he yelled again. “Where’s that package from the Westward? The green bag on the gurney?”
The voice of a woman came floating out of the dark. “Jesse drove it out the road. They wanted it taken care of pronto. Had to get it on the next plane. Extra money in it. Jesse took it out the road, soon as it came in.”
“Hey, man.” Felix shrugged at me. “She went out to the crematorium. They burned her. Sorry.” He shrugged again. Then he added, “You want another look at my dog?” He offered it with a kindly tone in his voice and I know he just wanted to make up for my disappointment. Felix is a good guy.
But I declined. Just to cheer him up, however, I halfheartedly inquired about having sex with his dog, saying that I’d always wanted an heir. But Felix was not amused. I could tell he took my question as a sign that I doubted his story about the rat.
Sonny Walters was in a fuchsia jogging suit. He was pedaling a stationary bike by himself in the shipboard exercise room. During the port call in Ketchikan, he could stare out through a square port and look down toward the mouth of the channel where float planes crisscrossed their wakes in the pelting raindrops.
“I’m telling you, Cecil,” Sonny puffed, “there is no one on the ship’s manifest named Traci Hepburn.”
