Cold Water Burning

by John Straley

  Several weeks later one of the grand jurors came up to me in line at the grocery store and, although the juror had sworn not to discuss the case with anyone, he pulled on my coat and whispered, “I would have drowned the fucker.” He bagged his own cigarettes, gave me a thumbs-up and walked out the automatic doors.

  All of us were relieved, of course. The secretary at the prose­cutor’s office said the DA had been pressured to take the case. “But still,” she said, “you should be a little more careful next time, Cecil.”

  Jurors love photographic evidence, and somehow they like to think the truth is there. Of course the whole truth is no more on a piece of film than it is in one bloodstain or one statement uttered in a lockdown cell.

  One image from Todd’s film floats to the surface with eerie clarity for me. Just as he is aware that his body weight is pivoting toward the water, Kevin Sands’s face surrenders to us. I’m holding his back, George is pulling on his shirt, and Kevin is a child, wanting nothing more than to be rescued. His eyes are wide and beseeching, he is holding the baby out toward Jane Marie’s arms mouthing the words, “Take her, take her,” and for the briefest mo­ment there is gentleness and concern. This could be seen only in the slightest flicker in his eyes when the film was slowed down frame by frame. When he releases the baby, you can clearly see me forgetting about Kevin and letting him go. He tilts backwards, his head drops and his feet fly up.

  I don’t know. I try and replay these events in my mind and I think: I could have saved them—Kevin, Patricia, young Sean and George Doggy. I don’t know how, or how saving one might have changed the others, but I can’t shake the feeling that I could have helped them somehow, and I’m wearing that feeling now, even on the warmest summer days.

  Later that fall, Gary managed to get Paul deLay to town and the big harmonica player from Portland, Oregon hit Sitka, Alaska like another storm. We had just gotten the news about the grand jury decision, and Jane Marie had convinced me we should go out dancing.

  “You can’t hide out in this town, Cecil. You know that. People will think whatever they want, but you should make them look at you while they’re thinking it.” Jane Marie wore a soft velvet dress and had her hair combed back off her face. We had arranged to have her sister baby-sit Blossom, but she backed out at the last minute. We don’t ask Todd to baby-sit, so we tried to talk Toddy into coming out with all three of us to hear the live music.

  “No, thank you,” he said, as he pored over the list of garage sales he was planning to hit early in the morning. “I believe my time would be better spent in preparing for my morning to­morrow. I’m going to be looking up the street addresses and making sure we have a proper schedule. Besides, I have never been particularly adept at dancing to modern music.”

  “That’s only because you haven’t tried,” Jane Marie said, as she draped her bare arm over his shoulder. A necklace of silver and lapis lazuli glittered on her neck, she was wearing a dark shade of lipstick, and her ancient, glittering eyes were gay. “You can do whatever you want, but if you decide to come I want to be the first to dance with you,” she said to him, though he was staring down at his paper.

  “Yes,” he said, “I suppose I would dance with you if I were going to dance with anyone.” Todd looked up briefly, amazed at the very thought of that, then went back to the paper.

  We agreed the bar would be too smoky and loud for Blossom, so one of us would stand outside with her. The bar had an awning over the sidewalk and on all but the worst evenings the sidewalk was the preferable place to listen to loud bar bands anyway.

  First came Blossom’s clean diaper and then the tiny cotton shirt. Then I zipped her up into some fleecy hooded jammies, then some bag-like contraption with yet another hood, and finally our daughter looked like a bale of fabric with her face peeking out of the top. I think she knew we were going to a party though, for her eyes darted around expectantly, and she smiled as she chewed on one end of her hood string.

  “You are a needle in a haystack,” I babbled to her as I zipped up the last zipper and hefted her into my arms.

  We walked down the street to the bar. I was dressed in my woodcutting jacket, T-shirt and canvas pants as I carried Blossom in my arms. Jane Marie looked like a movie star.

  As we left the house she grabbed a beautiful silver bracelet Dave Galanin had carved for her in trade for some of her whale photo­graphs. Now the bracelet glittered on her slender wrist. The outlines of her hips and waist were in parallel motion as we walked together arm in arm. She was as beautiful as a sunny morning with steam rising off the ground.

  The fat dachshund was sleeping in his little house and the wind was calm on this night. Stars salted the sky above the narrow street. We could hear the band preparing for its first number as we crossed the street: the drummer hit the snare a couple of snaps and a harmonica moaned out through the cracks in the crowd noise. Jane Marie was about to hop the curb to head into the bar when she turned and threw one arm around my neck and the other hand she placed on our daughter’s well-padded head.

  “You have any money?” she asked.

  I reached into my pants pocket and took out one of the soft and frayed hundred-dollar bills I had been saving all summer long and gave it to her.

  Jane Marie held the bill in her hand and stared at it. For a mo­ment there was a shadow of sadness across her face. But then someone opened the door and music swept out on the sidewalk. She kissed me, then her daughter, turned and skipped into the clatter of the crowded bar.

  Blossom and I stood outside with the underage bar crowd: the street kids and the others who had been forever banned from going inside. Matt was there talking to someone about fishing regu­lations. Larry drove by slowly in his ancient Saab with the two kayaks permanently attached to the roof. Nels and Bob stopped to listen out on the sidewalk. Pirate Ron was there. Davey, Lisa and Shannon were all dancing together. As the music thumped out into the evening, the sidewalk filled up. Nita, Walt, Carol, Tory, Preston, Mark, Nancy, Jim and Lynne all arrived eventually. Some were gossiping in the darkest corner under the eaves near the back door, some were dancing, but all of us were crowding under the awning, for miraculously it had started to rain. We laughed and joked as they asked about Blossom. No one mentioned the shoot­ings or the grand jury. No one wanted to. Someone offered me a drink from a plastic bottle in a paper bag, which I declined, and it occurred to me that I didn’t have to worry about this story of my life and what to bring with me, for it was finally dawning on me that I am not the sole author of this story of my life, and that all my luck, both good and bad, will follow the lay of the land.

  This was fine with me because on this night I was surrounded by friends outside the bar and we were all dressed for the weather.

  I peeked in to see the band. Gary was standing in his usual corner. The great Paul deLay was next to him, a large, large man with a gravelly voice and powerful lungs. The Screaming Love Bunnies counted off the first number. Paul deLay lifted his har­monica to his lips and blew a squall of blues through the crowd.

  Out on the sidewalk we danced and moved and bumped into one another while Paul deLay sang about love and misery, going to jail and getting out. Blossom cooed and laughed in my arms as deLay played twisting and unexpected riffs, rising and falling, sometimes a saxophone, sometimes an organ line. We all spun and danced and felt as if we were floating above a hole in the street. Gary smiled and smiled watching his bandmates play until Paul deLay asked him to come up and take a solo and we cheered. Then Jay played a guitar solo, and we all cheered again. The spinning dancers spun and the awkward dancers clumped around. The watchers watched and all of us were smiling. Jane Marie came outside and we danced on the sidewalk together, her arms around my neck as we held on to Blossom cooing and laughing at the noise and the lumbering motion of the ride. We danced that way until a fisherman cut in and I stood in the gutter watching the rain blow like a torn curtain through the light abov
e the fish plant.

  Two days after the dance, Bob and Nels would be surfing on the outside of Kruzof Island and would find the spine, rib cage and skull of a human being tossed up above the drift line of the beach. The bones would be tangled in the laces of some waterlogged but unworn sneakers. There would be only faint traces of flesh on the bones, and the eye sockets would be scoured clean by the small crabs and sand fleas. The cartilage would be sparkling white in places, but the bones would be a slick grayish tone. Other than the shoes, there would be no trace of clothing near the partial corpse. The surfers would find bear scat nearby with some gray bone chips in it. Bob and Nels would then wrap the rancid skull and piece of torso in a plastic bag and bring it to town. Two weeks later, the coroner would identify the remains through the dental records. This was Richard Ewers, my client.

  Even though it was impossible, I already knew it. Standing outside the bar as the guitar cut through the cool wet air, I knew somehow that Richard Ewers was lying on the beach entangled in shoes and rubbery strands of kelp. I shuddered, as if God were reaching back from the future and tapping me on the shoulder. I remember feeling the strange rise of a storm within me, as if I were back out to sea.

  I turned to Jane Marie, who was dancing with the bear-like fisherman. He was wearing a dirty white cap and a wet wool coat, which smelled equally of mildew and diesel fuel. Jane Marie cra­dled our daughter in her arms and when I touched her shoulder, she turned toward me looking up with a wide and crooked smile.

  The sight of her, as it always does, took me by surprise. “I hope this is what Myrna Loy still looks like in heaven,” I thought stu­pidly. The fisherman tugged on his beard, mad, probably, at losing the most beautiful dance partner on the island. He scowled at his feet for a moment, then laughed and lumbered down the street.

  I wanted to tell Jane Marie how I felt about walking away from all the people I had loved and watched die. I wanted to tell her something urgent and complex, something that took in the shapelessness of my guilt and the giddy rising of my relief, but I couldn’t find all the words.

  The music stopped, someone laughed, then broke a bottle on the pavement, and as the storm sank away in my heart, I pulled my collar up against the rain and realized there were only three words I could think of: grateful, grateful, and even more grateful.

  Author’s Note

  This book is a work of fiction. I have drawn a few details from ac­tual incidents in which boats have burned and lives have been lost, but the characters, motivations and events portrayed here came di­rectly from my imagination. Anyone looking for clues to Alaska’s unsolved mysteries will be disappointed. All of the characters in­volved in either crime or law enforcement in this tale are fictional. I know this for a fact, because I created them.

  There are real people who walk through this story. If you come to Sitka and spend enough time you could find Gary Gouker and the members of the Screaming Love Bunnies. You might also be able to recognize some of the people Cecil encountered while hitch­hiking. I included them here because they represent my strange and invigorating town as well as any characters I could make up.

  My thanks too go out to The Island Institute, a nonprofit arts and humanities organization here in Sitka, for their inspiration early on and for their continued support.

  Paul deLay appears in the story because I’ve seen him play in Juneau and I want him to play a gig in Sitka. Here’s hoping.

  I also have to acknowledge the help of Dr. Bob Klem, Tory O’Connell, James McGowan, Nita Couchman and Marylin New­man for their counsel and advice along the way. Carol Price Spurling, of Old Harbor Books, was an invaluable assistant and friend. My debt to her is immeasurable.

  Finally to Jan, Finn and all the people on my daily “trap line.” Cold Water Burning turned out to be a long journey through tough country and was only possible because of their love and friendship.

  Continue reading

  for the next

  Cecil Younger Investigation

  Baby’s First Felony

  If it please the Court: Your Honors, I stand before you today to tell the story of what happened. My words are not to be offered as any form of excuse, not even as an explanation, but I want to tell you the entire experience as it happened to me. Then, of course, you will be free to decide what you will.

  It was the year of a hundred and six consecutive days of rain, and I had lost my daughter to her cell phone. The rain began at the end of summer, but the days were indistinguishable from late fall, each blending one to another in a slurry of rainfall, brightened only by a sunbreak a few minutes each day. The first completely dry day did not occur until December, when we had a cold high-pressure system move in that brought freezing temperatures that turned Swan Lake into a mirror of ice.

  People’s moods in Sitka, Alaska, were irritable both during and after the rain. This story starts in September before the darkest of the dark days had hit. This was still during the period of the jokes and well before the deaths and mayhem.

  Todd had been asking me about the meaning of the Buddhist concept of “right relationship.” Now, Your Honors, I know you might think I’m already beginning to drift, but bear with me, for this turns out to be one of the more slippery of the foundational stones of the eight-fold path—not that there are any real bodhisattvas in this cast of characters. But there are, as they say, many ways to get lost in this world, and “wrong relationship” is one of the most common.

  As you may remember from the previous briefing, Todd lives in my house and has for many years. He was involved in the circumstances of this crime, a fact that I still regret. He and I are both now in our late fifties, and we relate to each other as brothers, even though there was a time when he was my ward, and I essentially had legal custody of him after his parents passed away. Todd rests comfortably on the solidly affected end of the Asperger’s scale. Recently he has been learning to tell jokes as part of his occupational therapy. Joke telling, it turns out, helps create a kind of ready-made emotional relationship for people with autism. They say funny things, people laugh, display emotion and the autistic person laughs in response to the other person’s laughter and presto: without having a clue of what an inner emotional world is like, they have entered into an emotional relationship.

  Todd has lived his life with a series of obsessions. He has been fascinated with the patterns on manhole covers and the mechanics of how whales swim across the ocean. He has memorized the populations of all the major cities in the world and knows the make and model of almost every audio recording device ever manufactured. He loves animals and children, and his current interests include Buddhism and telling jokes.

  Todd and I were walking back from work. I had walked from the Public Defender Agency, where I worked as a criminal defense investigator. I had stopped off at the jail to see one of our clients who had been locked up, and then I went over to the senior center to pick up Todd from his job in the kitchen. The rain was easing up to a light pebbling on the lake, and a few ducks were waddling in the middle of the street where someone had dumped a full bag of chips out of their car. This was irritating to the drivers along Lake Street but not enough for anyone to blow their horn, because it appeared that most everyone still enjoyed watching the ducks.

  “Cecil, what is a right relationship?” Todd asked.

  I took a deep breath. I was in a kind of peevish mood. The man I had just seen in jail was someone I had known for years who had stolen glassware out of a chemistry lab. He was found curled up in the gym where he had passed out after drinking the pure grain alcohol he had run across in the lab. He had fallen on the beakers several times as he made his way to the gym, so the linoleum floor was smeared red with blood, and his clothes sparkled like sequins when two cops and a dispatcher hoisted him into the booking area. This would be the first time he would be tried as an adult for burglary. His father was dead from walking drunk off a dock, and he had broken his mother’s
heart so many times she had tough-loved him out of the house as a life-saving measure. I don’t like to use real names for anyone not named as a codefendant, so I call him Sweeper, like the clown who sweeps up the spotlight. He is hard to help.

  “I don’t know, Todd. I don’t know what a right relationship is.”

  “Don’t you and Jane Marie have a right relationship?”

  “Well . . . Yeah . . . I think so . . . I used to think so. But nothing is perfect.”

  “It’s ‘right.’ Not ‘perfect,’” Todd said as we walked. He is bald now. His glasses are his only hairline. Still he walks with a tottering flat-footed walk of a trained bear.

  What irritated me about trying to explain religious concepts to Todd was that I wanted to tell him the truth, even though he would have no idea if I was being accurate and would take it on good faith. This bothers me.

  “There is an old story about a man the Gods doomed to push a rock up a mountain. Remember that one?”

  “Sisyphus,” Todd said. He had gone through a long Greek and Roman obsession. “Yes.”

  “I think, we are all like that, buddy. Life is like that. Pushing that rock up the hill. What you are looking for is the person who understands your particular punishment, a person who will not pester you about rolling the rock up the hill. If you are lucky you find a person to kiss the bleeding callouses on your hands, and one for whom you will do the same.”

  “Oh.” He stopped and looked at me. The raindrops on his glasses trembled as if they were Christmas ornaments swinging behind the windows of his thick lenses. Finally, a man in a pickup truck honked his horn, and the ducks scattered in a squall of feathers. Todd had a quizzical look on his face, and I could tell he was running the whole idea of sharing God’s punishment through his mind like a vending machine trying to process a well-made slug.