The Angels Will Not Care

by John Straley

  Jane Marie turned to me and folded the collar of my coat out. “Don’t ask questions in front of Mr. Calbran, Cecil. I’ll tell you what I heard later. Just don’t give anything out in front of the Mate because I don’t think we can really trust him.” She bent and kissed me. “You smell funny. Where have you been?” She wrinkled her nose at me.

  “I just need to do my laundry again,” I told her and she blushed as she went down the hanging stairs on the outside of the ship.

  It was a gray day on a flat green-gray sea. The ship lay in a narrow inlet along the edge of a rain forest’s shore just around the corner from the open coast. There was a swell running through the inlet and the outer rocks were break­ing white. Cyril stood at the helm of the little boat and an­other seaman was busily pumping up a small three-person raft. The plastic oars banged around under the row of seats in the tender as if they were children’s toys.

  Both Jane Marie and the Mate scanned the near shore with their binoculars.

  “Look for birds,” Jane Marie said over the engine noise. “They’ll be looking for a meal.” The Mate took down his glasses and made a sour face.

  “It’s true,” Jane Marie shrugged.

  “Was there any life ring or buoy deployed?” I asked.

  The Mate scanned the shore and spoke slowly and de­liberately. “In one version of the story there was no life ring thrown. In a later version, there was a ring thrown and there is a ring missing from its position. That is all I can tell you.”

  The Mate stood next to Cyril and pointed to the shore. “It looks like we can come in just to the west of that point and put them ashore at that gravel beach. You see?” The Mate looked at Cyril and then pointed to the shore and to the chart propped in front of the wheel. Cyril looked at the chart and then said only, “Yes, sir.” He never looked at either Jane Marie or me.

  The clouds were low in the sky and the light was streaking up the edges of those clouds in the southeast. The coast of the island showed ragged treelines against the sky: Spruce and hemlock forests that had stood sentinel over this coast for centuries.

  The first Russian explorers had put boats ashore near this very spot. Their crews who had survived unbelievable hardships in the crossings watched their shipmates paddle through the fog into one of these unknown inlets. Those first boats had never returned and no trace of the Russian sailors has ever been found. The Tlingits had called those first explorers, “the people who came from the foot of the clouds.” The Europeans were so strange and ghostly white I’m sure they were killed at first out of pure curiosity, the way collectors from the natural history museums later would kill specimens of unknown birds.

  Eagles were perched in the trees back from the crescent gravel beach. Their white heads shone like new golf balls hanging in the branches. The water was smooth here and the beach was deep enough to carry a lot of water for the tender, but there was no fathometer on board so the Mate kept well off the beach and away from the gray-green rocks that were showing through the garlands of kelp.

  The little raft was flopped over the side and the Mate pointed to the shore. “You can walk from here to that last point to the west then?”

  Cyril had a long coil of rope in his hands. The end was tied to the raft so he could retrieve the raft back to the ten­der. He was looking at me but I knew better than to answer. Jane Marie had the expertise and experience. “Yes,” she said loudly to grab back the Mate’s attention. “We will cover this shoreline and meet you back here. You will give us a radio?”

  “That will not be necessary.” The Mate said it disdain­fully as he motioned for us to go over the side. “You will not need a radio. You need to walk this shore. We will meet you back here in three hours in any case. If we should be coming early you will hear one long voice of the ship’s whistle then. Understood?” He held Jane Marie’s elbow as she sat in the doorway of the tender as she began to lower herself into the tiny raft. She reached back and grabbed her small day pack.

  “We need a radio,” I said with as much authority as I thought I could get away with.

  “There is no radio,” the Mate said firmly.

  Cyril looked at me and shook his head silently. I couldn’t interpret the specifics of his expression but I knew we would be getting no radio. I lowered myself into the trembly little rubber raft.

  As we paddled to shore, Jane Marie spoke. “I’ve got my own gear, Cecil. I have some survival packs, and a can of bear spray. As long as we don’t do anything dumb we should be all right.”

  “Why am I not reassured?” I said as we stood on the beach watching Cyril pulling the empty little raft back to the tender.

  The waves heaved long gravelly sighs up and down the beach. Each wave turned over little stones. As the tender left the cove, a calmness rushed in, numbing my ears and chest.

  Gulls called in their broken two-toned voices and one of the eagles lumbered into the air, the empty spruce bough it had perched on bobbing up and down in its absence. Stand­ing on this rocky beach my inner ear seemed to keep swaying to the rocking of a hull. I followed Jane Marie up the beach, our feet chomping into the gravel like shovel heads.

  The beaches were littered with drift logs, spruce and hemlock mostly, that had escaped the floating rafts pulled by tugs to the mills. Each of the logs was worn smooth and free of bark. They piled parallel to the shore, in uneven rows, one tucked under the other and some crossed like pick-up sticks in a heap. Looking to the south we could see three coves, each progressively more rocky and steep. The last had just a few logs, splintered by the force of the ocean swells against a vertical cliff.

  We could hear the swells booming on the outside and this played counterpoint to the whisper of the waves in our quiet cove. Another eagle took to the air and headed south briefly, then circled back to land on another branch already occupied. Jane Marie and I sat on a slick spruce log. We watched as the two large birds bickered.

  Jane Marie was digging through her pack. “They never called the Coast Guard, Cecil. Mr. Standard found his son dead. Early this morning. He went to Dr. Edwards and when the doctor refused to give him any direct informa­tion about Paul’s death there was a fight. Apparently the fight moved out to one of the decks and the doctor went overboard. The ship’s crew, the captain and the first mate want to cover this up. I heard them talking about it. They haven’t called the Coast Guard at all, Cecil. They don’t want us talking on the radio because they don’t want anyone to overhear.”

  “Do you think the doctor really went overboard?” I asked her.

  She took a very old candy bar out of her pack and broke it in two. The wrapper had once been dark brown but was now rubbed tan with the lettering indistinguishable.

  “Oh I have no idea, really.” She handed me my piece of chocolate as she unwrapped her own. “I just know they wanted us off that boat. My impression is they don’t really think we’ll find anything and they can take care of everything nicely while we are off the ship.”

  “You know that weird saxophone player?” I asked and broke a piece of the crumbly chocolate with my teeth.

  Jane Marie looked down at her lap, thinking. “Saxo­phone player? You mean the guy in Margie & the Navigators, the one with—”

  “He’s a spook,” I interrupted. “He owns a fancy private investigative firm in San Francisco. I bet he makes a thousand bucks a day.”

  “Get out of town!” Jane Marie sat up straight. She looked thoughtful. “A thousand dollars . . . but he is such a bad sax player,” she said to herself. “I thought he was trying to pick me up. He did ask a lot of questions about you. You know, I told him you were an investigator. He seemed so nice I just couldn’t lie to him. I’m sorry.” She pulled a long black strand of hair away from her eyes. “Did I screw things up?”

  “Naw,” I said and I held her hand. “I took care of that.”

  We decided to work our way to the south just to stretch our
legs. We would let them put whatever they had to back in the closets on board the Westward. We climbed over the first windrow of logs and down to the barnacle-covered rocks and worked our way toward the outer beach.

  This part of the coast gets more than one hundred inches of rain a year. Shadow is never very far off and today the clouds spread evenly with the daylight across the sky. It may have been sixty degrees by the time the sun finally tore away from the southern ridge line. The air was damp with the dual flavors of rain and salt water.

  The tide was going out and with each moment more of the beach was exposed. There was no great rush, for the longer we waited the easier the walking would be. Deer tracks nibbled the sand and disappeared into tall grass under the forest canopy. There were river otter tracks and the faint etchings of gulls’ feet on the tiny patches of wet sand that lay between the slick gray rocks. Some of the fallen trees were stripped clean, with thin roots bleached almost white in the air. Jane Marie walked low on the beach and scanned ahead with her binoculars and I clambered around in the piles of drift near the shore.

  Between the logs I found bleach bottles and gas cans, hundreds of plastic floats from fishing nets. There were oil filter boxes and plastic hard hats. Tangled around one chunk of what looked like red cedar was a great mass of yellow buoy rope. There were red bag buoys and deflated yellow ones. Dried sea urchin shells as delicate as eggs wedged in the logs. The husks of tiny crabs and bits of shells. I saw metal gas cans and a single tennis shoe. A hockey glove and three small plastic bathtub toys: a red beaver, a green frog, and a yellow duck. The toys sat in the grass back behind the sand as if they were in conference. I slipped and stumbled over the logs. I found more floats and plastic bottle cartons, rusted aerosol cans and even several Japanese lightbulbs. There were or­phan flip-flops and disposable butane lighters. Lumber bent to fit the hull of a broken ship. Pieces off the transom of a fiberglass skiff. Twisted bits of cable wrapped around a six-foot piece of Styrofoam float. Some logs had chains and sta­ples; some had traces of bark still attached. I found a Bible. The ink on the pages had mostly worn away, but what writing was left mostly looked to be Japanese. Behind a long yellow cedar beam I picked up a plastic baby doll with one leg miss­ing and the stuffing gone from her ripped torso. I climbed down over a massive spruce log and I saw a bearded man’s head: porcelain-slick skin and spiky curls of wet hair. I shook my head in disbelief as if I could shake the image into focus. The man was dressed in torn blue pajamas. He was tucked into a fetal position. When I yelled at him, he did not move.

  11

  The Bear

  There are some problems which are not possible to solve. Considering these problems is like sucking on a pebble, and expecting it to dissolve like hard candy.

  I thought of this as I looked down at the body of the doctor curled like a child in a nest of sticks. There was a ship’s life ring near his head. He had apparently lived for some mo­ments after making it to shore. Near his feet was a tiny patch of sand that showed the ripple of impressions his toes had made as he shivered himself to death. In death, his lips were curled above the gums; two of his teeth were broken off and I noticed chips of broken tooth on top of the sand to the left of his head. An adult eagle perched in a spruce just above Dr. Edwards and me in the beach fringe. Its call caused me to shudder and cross my arms.

  Jane Marie clambered up the logs from the lower beach. She sucked her breath in as she saw the corpse. With only a slight hesitation she jumped down and touched his face.

  “What should we do, Cecil?” Her voice was trembling. “He’s very cold. His heart is not beating.” With some effort she pulled the doctor’s hand away from his face and above his head. The arm stayed suspended there stiffly for a moment, then slowly eased to the sand.

  “He’s very dead,” I said as I jumped down beside them. The doctor had been dead a short time but his joints were beginning to stiffen. Ravens gathered in the bushes under the eagle’s perch. The ravens chattered and growled to each other, agitated by this new presence on their beach. Another eagle settled on a perch above.

  Dozens of tiny crabs had attached themselves to the skin on the doctor’s face and neck. Sand flies worked in and out of his nostrils. His eyes were closed, yet his countenance did not seem restful. It appeared that he had unbuttoned his pajama tops and had tried to slip out of them. Hypothermia victims in the last stages often feel a burning heat as the last of their reserves run out. He had a crust of blood in and around his right ear, this perhaps from his fall from the ship, but I couldn’t say for certain.

  “We can’t leave him here uncovered, Cecil,” Jane Ma­rie said to me without taking her eyes off of the corpse. Some crabs scuttled away through the sand and others pulled themselves up into his hair.

  “Okay. Let’s get him up off the beach anyway,” I said and we began the chore of lugging him across the slick logs to the damp mossy ground just under the trees.

  Dead people are hard to carry. Their weight shifts all over, seeming to pour itself out of your grip. It’s as if the dead are refusing to be carried another foot. But with a minimum of fumbling and shin knocking we lugged Dr. Edwards above the high tide line into the shady beach fringe.

  Jane Marie got him settled beside a grassy hummock and we both found ourselves wiping our hands together in a nervous gesture. Jane Marie sniffed at her fingertips, hunting, I suppose, for the smell of death.

  I watched her for a moment and in an odd, out-of-body sensation felt how lucky I was to be with her just then. In this terrible situation we were troubled but not panicked. There was no sense that we were about to rush off into one of those frantic domino-effect rescue attempts that usually come to grief for us. Her dark eyes were steady and her breathing was calm. Every moment with the corpse reminded us that we were alive. This had a calming, if not numbing, effect.

  I reached out and rubbed the back of my hand across her cheek. She curled into my hand and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again she snapped to attention, looking out beyond the trees.

  “My God, Cecil! They’re leaving us!”

  Her arm jerked up and pointed out to the inlet where the Westward was under way, moving slowly to the west with all the tender boats on board.

  We ran to the beach and waved our arms and yelled. Of course, this was foolish. Only a few people stood on the back decks of the Westward and they were tiny specks to our na­ked eye. Jane Marie scanned the ship with her binoculars and saw some crewmen talking on the lower stern and a steward serving morning coffee on the fantail to a group of people huddled in their warm jackets and smoking cigarettes. No one was looking in our direction.

  “They can’t just be planning to leave us,” she said angrily.

  “I don’t know. You were the one who said they didn’t want us messing with this business.”

  “Oh I know, but Cecil, they couldn’t just leave us here. I mean really. That would be kidnapping or something, wouldn’t it?”

  “No. I don’t know. Murder, maybe.” I started walking back to the trees.

  Jane Marie said nothing for a moment. Eagles and gulls wheeled above us in silent entangling circles. Then she called out after me, “Don’t say those things!”

  It was perhaps sixty degrees. It wasn’t raining at the moment but there was no guarantee about that. The tem­perature would drop into the low fifties in the evening. Our clothes were dry for the moment. We were warm. Looking through all of our supplies from my pockets and Jane Marie’s day pack we had four plastic garbage bags; a pressurized can of caustic peppers, used theoretically to discourage a charg­ing bear; a whistle; two pocket knives, mine and hers; a packet of waxed matches; a butane lighter; four balls of pitch and some pieces of waxed milk carton for a fire starter; six pieces of gum; two candy bars; a pair of binoculars; a bird identi­fication book; some brochures for day trips in Skagway that had been jammed in my pants pocket; a quarter of a roll of toilet paper; a
nd the keys to our stateroom.

  We were on the northern shore of Yakobi Island. Re­alistically, we were a few miles from the town of Pelican, to the southeast, and Elfin Cove, to the northeast. Just over the hump of the island were three cabins in the tight anchorage of Greentop where a community of old bachelor fishermen had homesteaded in the fifties. But the towns were inacces­sible because of the inlet between Yakobi and Chichagof is­lands. Greentop was a possibility we would have to consider, although overland travel is difficult in the best of circum­stances, and sitting abandoned on a beach with the body of a man who had presumably been murdered struck me as being a long way from the best of circumstances. Clearly, it would be better to build a fire and hunker down in our garbage bags and wait to see who came by in their boat. This was a busy stretch of water. With any luck we could attract some attention.

  We spent most of the morning and early afternoon beachcombing and building a tiny shelter of drift lumber back into the mossy bank under the trees, about fifty yards from the body. Using strips of netting we untangled from the driftwood, we were able to tie wood together. We dug out the side of the hill and jammed planks of various lengths onto a frame. More netting went on top of the planks and then moss on top of that. We had a four-foot-by-six-foot hobbit hole by three in the afternoon.

  About one o’clock one skiff went by and although we waved our float coats we were unseen. Most of the boat op­erators would be watching the rocks coming up and choosing their course for the outside passage. As the evening wore on Jane Marie gathered edible seaweed and intertidal animals for our supper. I found a small stick of red cedar back in un­der the trees, which seemed light and relatively dry, and was sitting down to whittle shavings to start a fire when she came back with her raincoat full of dinner: Gumboot chitons and sea slugs curled in a bed of black seaweed. They moved slowly and laboriously, twisting in the air like swollen tongues. She had also gathered some smaller mussels, chitons and one small abalone. She was beaming.