by John Straley
The bear stood above us, a dark muscular outline in the shadows of the trees. This animal seemed as big as a compact car, and it made me shiver to see him hop lightly onto a gray drift log on the beach fringe. He seemed to shimmer with the same power that had lit the mountains the night before. Every inch of him rippled with energy held in reserve. He did not move. He did not sniff or scan the air in front of him. He appeared to be staring directly at Jane Marie.
“You go on, motherfucker!” The pilot’s voice was gaining intensity and starting to crack. “Go on, get the fuck away from here!” He was fumbling under his seat where I could see a leather holster for a large handgun.
“Stop it.” Jane Marie said it loudly, but without shouting. “Stop it now.” She turned and burned her eyes into the pilot and repeated herself to make sure he knew she was talking to him.
“Stop it. Just get the poor man loaded and I will get our things.” Then she turned to me. “I’ll get everything, Cecil. I think we need to get all our stuff out of here. Don’t let him use that gun. And try to get him to clean up his language.”
We piled the doctor into a narrow cargo space behind the rear seat of the helicopter. Todd looked at me with questions in his eyes but he was not distressed. Sonny, on the other hand, was distressed. He couldn’t bring himself to touch the corpse. He kept covering his mouth with his hand and watching the woods where the bear stood motionless, watching as Jane Marie walked away. When she was out of sight, the bear disappeared.
Todd, Sonny, and I piled into the backseat and fumbled for the seat belts. The pilot put on his headset and began pumping on the levers. The whine began to build and the rotor blades started turning slowly.
“I’m not going to fuck around here with this woo-woo, nature bullshit!” the pilot yelled above the engine noise. “If she’s not here by the time we’re ready, I’m not waiting around.”
I patted him on the shoulder and spoke with as much fake confidence as I could muster. “Everything is going to be fine. Give her a couple of seconds.”
Helicopters always feel unreasonably flimsy when I sit in them. The body of this one began to shake as the rotors gained speed, and the blades began to hum. The bear appeared back on the log near the beach fringe. The limbs of the trees blew in a wild frenzy. The bear’s fur flattened in swirls like windblown wheat. The pilot began to pull back on the stick. I reached over across his shoulder and gripped his forearm as hard as I could. His whole body was shaking. With my other hand I lifted up his earpiece. I spoke as calmly as I could straight into his ear. “If you leave her here, I’ll crash this bird. I am dead serious. It’s not worth it. Just a few more seconds and I’ll get out and get her.”
The pilot didn’t relax. But he did ease the engine back down.
Jane Marie came running. She held her rain gear and her day pack bundled like a baby in her arms. The pilot opened up the passenger door. Jane Marie threw in her gear and stood on the pontoon. “Just one more thing. Only a second,” she yelled and jumped back out. The pilot yelled after her: For a minute I thought he was going to cry. I pressed my hand back on his shoulder.
Jane Marie walked up the beach, ducking her head far away from the swirling rotors. She walked straight toward the bear. She squatted down, holding her dark hair away from her face. Occasionally, she gestured toward the bear. She was speaking and shaking her head. Then she leaned over slightly. She spread her hands, palms up, and stayed that way for a moment.
Then she ran back to the helicopter.
We were in the air even before she had her seat belt on. The walls of the chopper vibrated and the engines complained and we pulled straight off the beach in the thin plastic-and-aluminum bubble as if we were in a carnival ride.
“Thanks,” Jane Marie said to the pilot, who had a sour expression and pretended not to hear her. “I just had to take care of that one last thing,” she added and then let it go. The pilot began talking on his radio as he scowled at Jane Marie. She sat back in the seat, took a deep breath, then took her binoculars out and looked out to see what we had been missing out on the water.
I can barely tolerate flying in planes. The fear that grips me is one that reason cannot answer. With most of the fears I encounter, if I talk through the reality of the situation I can see reality is much more secure than my imagination. I can talk through relationships or fear of bears, but this does not work with flying: Particularly in a helicopter, for the truth is much weirder and more dangerous than even my imagination could devise. The truth was we were encased in a flimsy plastic cage hung some twelve hundred feet above the earth. None of the reality comforted me, not the lift under the cutting edge of the rotors, not the flammable nature of the fuel that would spill over our clothes once the tanks ruptured, not the seat belt holding me inside the thin cage as the flames flickered just over my shoulder. Some people say I worry too much, but I consider myself a realist.
I closed my eyes and tried to dream of angels. A woman’s face and her strong arms lifting me above the steep-sided fjord. But for some reason, I kept thinking of that soft-eyed dog in Sitka holding the dead chicken in his mouth. I thought of the feathers that can’t fly and the ice sculpture on the fantail of the boat; maybe they had carved dead chickens out of ice. Sitting in that clattering deathtrap I couldn’t gain purchase on the image of an angel, no matter how hard I tried.
The helicopter fluttered up and down into the strong headwind coming down Lynn Canal. I opened my eyes as we passed the town of Haines and wished we could have set down there. I opened my eyes again as the pilot throttled back and the helicopter banked to the left in a strange push-pull motion of slowing down in the air to land. The Westward was moored to one of the two docks in the tiny city of Skagway. There were two other ships in port. Hundreds of people loitered on a field as a narrow-gauge train backed close to the side of the ship nearest the dock. Three other helicopters sat near a giant “H” in the field, their rotors turning. Next to the helipad stood both an ambulance and a police car.
We came down to them in a shudder of dust. The cop turned his back to us and held on to his hat. Across the field I could see the captain and the first officer of the Westward walking briskly in our direction.
The airship put down with a bump and the turbines whined lower and lower as the pilot slowed the rotors. The cop took a step forward and opened the door for Jane Marie.
I hopped out on the other side and was intercepted by the captain.
“I am certainly glad to see you are all right,” he yelled over the turbine as he grabbed me by the biceps and led me out from under the rotor.
“We found your ship’s medical officer,” I told him.
“So I understand.” The captain’s eyes locked on mine and his bushy eyebrows furrowed. He did not blink and for a moment he did not say a thing.
“We were informed by the pilot,” he said finally. “It will be a relief to Dr. Edwards’s family that you were able to locate his remains.”
“Why did you leave us on the beach?” I said as calmly as possible.
The captain looked genuinely puzzled. “He should have told you.” He gestured to Sonny Walters, who had climbed out of the helicopter before Todd could do so. “He insisted that we not upset our passengers. We are, after all, in the vacation business.” He smiled at me ruefully.
The ambulance attendants unloaded the doctor’s corpse. Sonny Walters was speaking angrily to the ship’s first officer and Todd took a picture of the helicopter. The cop was talking to Jane Marie and as he did she brushed the tangled hair from her eyes. The young cop nodded and wrote in his notebook.
I turned to the captain. “I have quite a story to tell the cops,” I said and I tried to match his gaze. “It has to do with murder and with a cover-up. It has to do with your lack of concern for US authority and with tampering with evidence.”
The captain smiled again. “I think it would be a mistake
for you to tell this story, Mr. Younger. For I myself have a rather interesting story of murder and tampering with evidence. In fact, I have been advised that here in Alaska it is a felony to tamper with a corpse.”
Jane Marie began walking away with the cop and the attendant slammed the back door of the ambulance. The rotors of the helicopter had stopped turning.
“The doctor’s body was mauled by a bear,” I told the captain. “That will be easy to prove. There are plenty of witnesses and the physical evidence will be conclusive.”
The captain nodded to his first officer as we walked toward the Westward. The first officer cut short his discussion with Sonny Walters with a chopping motion of his right hand and then he turned and walked toward us. “Of course, of course. But then we have other bodies to be concerned with now, don’t we?” the captain said without looking at me.
I was not to be interviewed by the Skagway police. I’m not sure whose arrangement this was but as far as I was concerned this was a plus. I was a long way from actually wanting to go on record with what had been happening on board the Westward. The first officer walked over to me and took a firm hold of my biceps. I was clearly being taken aboard. I tried to jerk away from the first officer’s grip but was unable to.
“Please,” the captain said gently. “There are passengers watching us. If you will cooperate with us for just a bit longer, Mr. Younger, I believe we can reach a satisfactory agreement.” The captain patted me on the shoulder and I stepped up onto the aluminum gangway leading into the belly of the ship.
I was met by David Werdheimer, who smiled like a hairdresser at his movie-star client. The Captain passed me off to him saying only, “Please. Make him comfortable. Get him something to eat.” Word nodded.
Food was brought to a small room just off the crew mess. There was a metal table and two black plastic ashtrays screwed into the top. There was a tape machine and three worn decks of cards piled next to a wire rack holding salt, pepper, soy sauce and some vile-looking green condiment with seeds and fleshy peppers suspended in it.
Word was a handsome man but his features were strangely equine. He stood next to the door and let the steward in carrying a shrimp salad and a thick steak sandwich. Then Word moved to sit across from me at the table. He stirred four spoons of sugar into his iced tea.
“Cecil, you are kind of a scamp, you know that?” He didn’t look at me and I didn’t say anything in return.
We sat in silence and I dipped a fleshy shrimp into the cocktail sauce. Word continued stirring his tea and said nothing. I suppose he figured me for a talker. So he’d made a vague, half-joking accusation and was waiting for me to spill my guts so he could like me again. Either he was really slick or he was just an ordinary flatfoot wannabe who didn’t know what else to say.
“Could you hand me one of those crackers, please?” I asked, pointing with my salad fork to one of a pile of wrapped saltines next to the salt and pepper by his elbow.
“Cecil, how did you get access to Paul’s body?” David Werdheimer said as he moved the basket of crackers closer.
I looked up at him, genuinely puzzled. “What are you talking about?” I picked up the sharp steak knife to cut into my sandwich.
“Come on now, Cecil,” Word said. “We’re in some real shit here. We got the cops outside. We don’t have a doctor. We can’t turn Paul’s body over to them. Hell, we can’t even let his father see the body. We’re running out of explanations.”
“I wish I could help you,” I shrugged.
Word leaned over and took the steak knife out of my hand. He held it lightly by the tip.
“I really don’t want to do this, Cecil. I mean, it is sloppy and frankly kind of, I don’t know, complicated, but I’m going to turn you over for killing Paul.”
I stopped chewing. “What are you talking about?”
“Cecil, I’m serious. You are in deep trouble, man. I can help you if you’d let me.” Word’s voice was soft and cloying, kind of like his sax playing.
“I don’t know what the fuck you mean.” My heart was pounding because I knew he was right. I was out of my depth and a long way from home.
“I’ll show you.” Word motioned me toward the door.
He had a key for the cooler. He snapped the light on and unzipped the bag. He jerked down the rubber fabric and immediately I saw how big my problem was: Paul’s throat had been deeply cut with a serrated knife. The light inside the cooler glared down on the musculature in his neck. Sliced blood vessels curled out and crusted dark red on the ends; the trachea was laid open, bone-white and slippery-looking.
“This is bullshit,” I said, gulping in my breath. “I saw this body yesterday and that cut was not there. Hell, they will be able to tell this was done postmortem.”
Word came in behind me. Then he closed the door softly.
“I’m glad you’re starting to talk about this, Cecil.” He reached into his jacket pocket and fumbled for something and I knew he had turned on his microcassette recorder.
“So you admit you were in this cooler tampering with Paul Standard’s body. But to what purpose, Cecil? I mean—why you’d do it?”
I shook my head. I took two deep breaths and zipped up the bag. I was not going to go on record confessing to a murder I didn’t commit. I started to walk toward the door.
Word blocked my way. He had dropped my steak knife into a plastic bag. Now he dangled it in front of my eyes. “Cecil, I know you did this. I know you cut up Paul’s body. If you give me enough time, I’ll figure out how you threw the doctor over the side.”
“You really figure that?” I asked him.
Word shook his head sadly and he spoke slowly in an effort to make himself clearly understood. “Cecil . . . what I really think is always subject to change.” And he stared up at me with a genuine ferocity. “But I know that I can make you take the fall for this and it will fuck you up for a good long while. You’re right—in the end they won’t tag you for the murders, but that will take a while. I don’t think the Skagway police department is very sophisticated in their forensic analysis. We’ve got you. We’ve got this knife. And we’ve got one of the crew members who let you into the cooler.”
Suddenly, I felt relieved. He was fishing. He wouldn’t have bothered with the theater of the steak knife if he really had a solid witness. He wanted the crewman’s name and he was betting I was going to give it to him.
“Who talked?” I said slowly, letting my shoulders slump as if I had been beaten.
“This game’s over for you, Cecil. He talked, he’s giving you up. I’m telling you the crew down here in Freetown doesn’t give a shit about your white ass. Give up the other one and I’m in the position to get you off this boat without any more questions. Give him up and you go home. Keep your mouth shut and this will be over.” Word put his hand on my shoulder in his best Father Flanagan pose. I reached up and put both my hands on his shoulders for support. I took deep breaths building to sobs. I moved in close to Word and whispered into his face.
“Where is Mr. Standard, Paul’s father?” I asked softly.
Word smiled broadly, shaking his head in deep sympathy for me. “Don’t worry about other people’s problems, Cecil. Mr. Standard is fine. In fact, he’s upgraded. I think he understands the situation much better than you.” His voice was melted butter.
“You’ve really taught me a lot, Mr. Werdheimer. Thank you.” I gripped the shoulders of his jacket. “You’ve taught me that a detective can be decisive and powerful. I can see now why your clients pay you as much money as they do.”
Word smiled sympathetically, nodding at the irrevocable truth of what I was saying. Then I broke his nose by slamming my forehead into his face. Blood spattered over my neck and shoulders and the green rubber bag covering Paul Standard. I spun him around into the door and he clattered down, spilling boxes of vegetables across the dirty
tile floor. I stepped out of the cooler and placed the padlock back into the outer hasp, clicked it shut, and walked to the dark metal stairwell.
I heard only a vague commotion behind me in the stairwell and then nothing at all as I stepped out of Freetown and onto the Acapulco Deck. The gray-green carpet and walls seemed to smother out all of my concerns. I quickly took a corner and grabbed the door of the elevator just as it was about to close. The two ladies standing there were dressed in halter tops and had silk jockey hats on but I didn’t ask them why.
The Horizon Deck was awash in silver and gray. On the starboard, windows looked out to the mountains: Gray stone and blue sky, the calm green water lathered by the wind. A single gull struggled upwind. I walked toward the inside port cabins. If I were going to be “upgraded” in order to keep me happy and away from the police I would expect one of these cabins.
Four doors were spaced across the width of the upper deck. I was poised to knock on the first one I came to when the starboard door opened and a steward came out, pulling a sturdy food cart. The cart was covered with a white tablecloth and had one large covered food dish and an ice bucket with an open bottle of white wine resting inside it. The steward looked at me and I fumbled in my pocket as if looking for a key. Then the steward said, “Thank you, sir” to a person inside the stateroom and dropped something into his pocket. The door closed and before the steward rolled the cart to the elevator he checked to make sure the door he had just come through was locked.
I mumbled something about having forgotten something down in the bar and started to walk away. When the steward rolled around the corner I walked quickly to the starboard door, knocked softly, and said, “Mr. Standard?”
Mr. Standard’s eyes were bloodshot and his thinning gray hair stuck out in wild spikes from his head. He had not shaved. When he opened the door he looked puzzled and ran his hand through his hair.
“I’m sorry but no one’s here. It’s just me, I mean,” he said and he stepped away from the door back into the sunny stateroom.
