by Bill Granger
“I know,” Devereaux said.
“What the hell do you want, man?” And Holmes felt the same edge of fear he had felt when the knife was at his throat. He looked at the knife in his hand and looked at the gray man across from him. “Answer me, you sonofabitch.” He was afraid and it made him shout.
“Henry McGee,” Devereaux said at last. “I want to talk to you about Henry McGee.”
Holmes took a step back. “I dunno nothing—”
“We’ll talk about Henry McGee until you remember everything,” Devereaux said.
And Holmes shivered then as if the knife was being drawn across his throat.
2
HENRY MCGEE
Nels Nelsen met Henry McGee the year before in Anchorage. It was exactly a year ago, first day of spring, and everyone waiting for breakup.
Nels had cleaned and repaired his trapline and he didn’t have the dogs anymore for company so he had taken a ride into Nome, sixty miles west of his cabin, and flown down to Anchorage. He had a few good days of drinking behind him when he met Henry McGee in the Polar Bar down on Fourth Avenue. One thing led to another and they talked about trapping. Trapping wasn’t what it was; hell, Nels even took some welfare aid from time to time, just like a goddamn Indian. It wasn’t like it was all right, Nels Nelsen complained, but he had enough to drink and enough to fly down to Anchorage when the winter made him crazy and waiting for breakup was never going to end.
Henry McGee was a good listener and never said a word when it wasn’t needed. He was also a gifted talker. He could hold the whole bar in his hand so that the fat woman on the boards behind the bar turned down the television set to better listen to him. She had heard everything twice but Henry surprised her with his stories.
It was spring and bright and cold and everyone edgy waiting for breakup. That’s the way March and April are, empty bright months of waiting. But Henry McGee took the edge off.
The days were long now, starting around three in the morning and lasting until after nine at night. The mountains were white and some of the glacier passes would stay white and frozen all during the bright summer. But in some of the streams, the water was moving beneath the ice and the fish were flowing with the water and the whole thing was breaking up, cracking winter and sliding down to the sea.
Henry McGee said he went out with an Eskimo flotilla one year to hunt the seals off Little Diomede and damned near ended up riding the floes across to Siberia and what the hell would he have done then?
As it was, Henry McGee said, they got a couple of Siberian dogs that got trapped out on the ice. He spun the story along, talking about the differences between Siberian dogs and the bigger and stronger Alaskan dogs and the whole bar became quiet and they could actually see it after a while, see the butchering of the seals on the floes and the Russian boat that came out from Big Diomede in the straits, coming right after them.…
Good stories and good company and Nels Nelsen felt better than he had all winter. The dogs were gone, all sold off or killed a long time, and you can’t talk to a snow-go machine. He had the radio but it made you sick after a while, talking about things you didn’t have and didn’t need and telling you how much you really needed them so that you got to the point where you thought you really did need them. He was an old trapper, doing things mostly in the old ways, and in the dark months when the sun barely lifted to a dull line of red glow in the southern sky, he talked to himself and heard the wolves speak in tongues. He read the Bible for company and also John D. MacDonald.
Henry McGee was mysterious in a good-natured way. He talked about his past in terms of stories but the stories all had ends. The spaces between the stories were kept black. It was all right with Nels Nelsen.
Nels thought it was Henry who had brought it up but it had been on Nels’ mind as well. The trapping was thin but it was a lot of work and maybe they could make more of a go of it by doubling the labor and doing more hunting. Maybe Henry suggested it and maybe not. They talked about it and they thought they both could get along with each other.
“ ’Sides,” Henry said. “I’d just as soon go into the bush for a while, maybe a year or two, hunker down a little, get away from places.” It was the closest he had come to talking about the blank spaces between his careful stories. Nels did not press him; everyone in Alaska had a past and a lot of them never wanted to talk about it.
Breakup came in little separate explosions.
First it was the Yukon River, here and there along its ice-choked spine; and then the Kobuk and the other rivers and the thousand little unnamed lakes; and then the sea itself in early May, the wide and shallow Bering shuddering and cracking and opening itself all the way to the straits between the tip of Alaska and the tip of Siberia. The ice began to retreat a little on the North Slope and the race was on, up from the Pacific toward the Beaufort Sea.
It was a time of frantic activity when the supply ships and fishing boats from Seattle raced north and fanned out from Haines to Anchorage, from Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians through the straits to Deadhorse and Barrow. The top-heavy ships raced along the shallow, freezing northern waters with washing machine parts and snowmobiles and tanks of gasoline and kerosene and hydraulic drilling machinery and the thousands of things the North wanted to survive the next winter. The ships came low in the water because of all the things people wanted to make next winter more civilized.
After breakup was the time for fishing salmon and the other creatures of the northern seas. The salmon season was very short because there were fewer and fewer salmon but the flotilla of fishing boats struggled up from Seattle and Vancouver and from Japan and the Soviet port at Vladivostok.
The ancient Bering Sea was alive with fishermen and supply boats and factory trawlers from the Soviet Union that sucked up all the fish from the smaller boats and processed them in bloody machines right on board. Everything must be done fast, against the clock, against the brief window of bright summer between the breakup and the freeze-up.
Henry McGee and Nels Nelsen went back to the traplines and the cabin and lost themselves in the wide wilderness.
The Alaskan bush stretched around them for hundreds of miles in all directions. The bush was full of silence so that they sometimes could hear nothing but the loud knocking sounds of their own hearts. They fished the Yukon and salted the cache and sold some of it and ate their fill. The summer stretched twenty-four hours a day and the dusty brown tundra began to turn a light, hesitant green. At the end of the brief, bright summer, they would go out and kill the caribou, which went up to the mountains again. They would kill the caribou easily because the caribou were stupid and ran in a brown river, thousands and thousands and thousands. Caribou was the meat for the winter and when they had skinned the beasts and divided the meat, they would put it in the meat cache on the roof of the cabin.
They worked hand in glove. Henry and Nels had silences between them and that was company as well. They listened to the same good music on the radio. Nels talked about his father coming from Norway. Henry just told stories and never filled in the black spots between the end of one story and the beginning of another.
It seemed Henry could turn his hand to any task. He sewed and cooked—cooked better than Nels had ever tasted—and he played a mandolin sometimes and sang old songs they both knew. Henry was a rangy man with wide shoulders and modest eyes. He knew how to laugh. They went into Nome now and then to get their supplies off the lighters from the big boats waiting out in the shallow harbor. They got drunk at the Board of Trade bar and they picked up a couple of Indian girls there and had a good night with them. They walked along the stony breakwater that was over the old beach where the gold rush had started a long time ago. Henry told him a little about gold and he seemed to know what he was talking about.
“Gold is not real to me,” Nels said. “I never had enough of it to make it real to me.”
“It isn’t even real when you find it,” Henry agreed. “It’s like the oil business but only more useles
s.”
“You worked the pipeline—”
“One hell of a year. And there’s gonna be another pipeline, too, in our time, coming out of the east of Alaska. And gold. There’s still a lot of gold in the country, but it doesn’t mean nothing because the getting of it makes it not real. The old-timers hit the Klondike and then went on to Nome and they were shoveling the gold dust into their pokes and for what? Go to town and pay ten dollars for a caribou steak and a hundred for a woman when the Eskimo would share his wife with you for friendship? Everything you read about it, you wonder where the hell the gold went. And then you realize, the gold was never real.”
“You spend your life looking for gold, you end up not finding any, then what the hell did you do in your life?”
“Looking for something that wasn’t there,” Henry said. “Everybody does that. Not just about gold.”
“I’m satisfied,” Nels said.
“Yes. I saw that the minute I laid eyes on you in that bar down to Anchorage,” Henry McGee said. It was like a compliment.
“You looking for gold still?” Nels said.
They had been very drunk, sitting in the midnight sun on the breakwater of the Bering Sea that runs behind the main street in Nome. They drank out of the whiskey bottle and felt the wind. The wind never let up, even when it was warm.
“Stopped looking,” Henry said in a soft voice. Nels could hardly hear him. “What is worse than looking for something you can’t find? Finding something you didn’t want to find. You look for gold long enough, you never really want to find it.”
“That’s crazy,” Nels said.
Henry had looked at him. “Yeah. I guess you’re right.” And the story was over—if it had been a story—and the blank spot was reached and Henry had nothing more to say until the next story began.
The cold started suddenly that year. It snowed in Nome on September third. The supply boats raced across the Arctic Ocean—across the Beaufort Sea and the Chukchi—for the Bering Straits, trying to beat the ice back south. The sun dropped in the southern sky and was less and less each day. As suddenly as spring light had pierced the black heart of the Arctic winter, the fall back to blackness. The ice crossed from the Soviet Union to the tip of the Seward Peninsula. The summer roads shut down. The ships that had not made it were locked in ice and the supply barges were beached along the barren wilderness of the North Slope. The glaciers in the mountains crept between the peaks, and the snow came and the wind and the cold and, last of all, the darkness.
The darkness came over the northern sky and reached to put out the last of the sun in the southern sky.
Nels worked the west traplines and Henry worked the north. They would be gone for four days a week, out of each other’s company. Henry killed two wolves the first time out and the trapping for martens went better as a result. They had plenty of food and when they met again on Friday night after all week apart, it was like a celebration.
First man back boiled snow in the black pot and threw in the meat from the frozen cache above the cabin. But it was Henry who did the delicate cooking touches. Nels loved to eat a meal made by Henry McGee, and sometimes on the trail, in the dark silence of snow and black sky, he would think about the weekend meals to come.
And the talk.
The stories took on richer ornaments. Henry would tell him about the commonplace things that had happened that week on the trail, and they were the same things that had happened to Nels but Nels had never really seen them. Henry could observe things and made them different and new. On those Friday nights in the darkness, in the dancing light of the kerosene lamps, Henry McGee made his stories and sometimes they went on all night long.
On Christmas Day, Henry played Christmas songs on his mandolin and they decided to go to Nome and find women. They got drunk in Nome for three days and then sobered up and went back to the cabin.
Like all of the bush rats, they did not curse winter or darkness or wind or snow or wolf or bear. They feared fire, dying alone and nothing else.
Then one morning, the southern sky was purple for a moment. They saw it together—it was a Saturday—and they drank to the purple. And the next day and the next day, the light came a little more and then it was as though the light was racing north. There were illusions in the sky, formed by ice and light and snow and the sheer, blinding clearness of the air.
Everyone north knew of the illusions. Sometimes, on a clear morning in Anchorage down at the spit of land in Cook’s Inlet, a person might stand on Fifth Avenue and look north and see the slouching power of the Denali Range of mountains seem to loom over the town, though they were more than a hundred miles north. The face of Mount McKinley—an amiable, ugly huge mountain with a long skyline—might seem to appear right behind the Captain Cook Hotel. The illusions formed in the northern lights that scraped the sky above the Arctic Circle. The illusions were magic and the Indians and Eskimos and whites all agreed on this; the magic was so powerful that it could not be spoken of, merely witnessed.
The two old trappers worked hard together. With their crescent-shaped knives, they scraped skins clean of gristle and blood and sinew. The skins were stored in the cache. Two men could do more, even if they had to share.
Each day, through March and into April, the days stretched more and more and the southern light made other lights dance in the darker northern sky, reflected by clouds and ice.
On the first day of spring, Nels Nelsen returned to the cabin after a week at the trapline and put on the water and threw in the meat and waited for Henry McGee. They had known each other a whole year.
Nels puffed his pipe in the cabin and read a long chapter of a murder mystery set in a strange place called Miami Beach, Florida. He had been back to Norway once, to see the village of Tromso, where his father had been born, but he had never been to Florida and could scarcely imagine the place, though he had seen it on television in Nome.
On the second day of spring, Nels took down his rifle and the medical kit and drove the snow-go up the northern trapline to look for Henry.
The line extended out a hundred miles in the snow, along tundra and into the frozen river valley and into the stunted hills beyond. The roar of the snow machine made the silence more profound. The earth was covered with silence that was as immense as the sky. The day was flat and gray and there was no magic to see.
He found Henry sitting on a hill, looking down at his snow-go at the bottom of the hill.
Nels put the machine in neutral and climbed up the little hill.
Henry stared at him with his modest eyes and the small, crooked smile.
Nels got down on his knees and opened the parka and saw the blood, and all the while, Henry McGee seemed to be staring at him. Except he was dead.
Nels felt the immense and profound silence of earth and sky. The world was gray and white, without perspective. It was flat and it was also the depth of the universe.
Nels picked Henry up and carried him down the hill. Henry was frozen solid. He put Henry on the snow-go and tied him down. They rode off together back toward the cabin, just the way they had ridden off together to Nome at Christmastime.
In the cabin, Nels put on the water and put Henry McGee down on a wooden kitchen chair, at the table where he always sat and told his stories. Nels took his parka off and then took off Henry’s and hung them up to dry. When the water was ready, Nels made tea. He put a mug in front of Henry.
“You want tea, Henry?” Nels said.
The silence had penetrated the cabin as surely as the cold. Nels felt very cold.
“You probably want whiskey but there ain’t any whiskey left and I’m damned if I’ll go sixty miles to Nome just to buy some whiskey for you,” Nels said. He sipped his tea and found it good enough; but Henry wasn’t drinking tea.
Nels stared at Henry awhile.
“Well, what held you up on the trail? How was it you didn’t come last night? I put on the beef and waited for you all night.”
Then Nels thought he heard t
he dogs howling outside the cabin. He went to the door and looked out. The wind was up and he thought he heard the dogs above the wind but he couldn’t see them. It was still light outside and there wasn’t a tree all the way to the horizon.
“Damned dogs,” Nels said. “Get rid of the whole damned team and get me a snow-go.”
He went into the cabin and closed the door. He looked at Henry just sitting there. And then he knew the dogs were all gone and that Henry was dead. It had just taken him a little while, as though it might have just been a mistake or a dream. He had to call up Nome on the shortwave and they’d get a plane in here from the state patrol.
“I love you, Henry, goddamn it to hell, why did you let yourself get shot out there?”
Henry didn’t say a thing.
“Whiskey is what you want, Henry,” Nels said. There were tears in his eyes but he was smiling. “All right, you want it, it’s all right with me. We’ll take a day and go down to Nome and get some women and whiskey. You liked that last time well enough, Henry. Just let me get a few things together and we’ll close her down and be in Nome in two hours.”
He dressed Henry up snug and tied him down in a sitting position on the snow-go. It was getting dark but he knew the trail. He felt the power of the machine whir and he was gone then, through the snow, with Henry sitting behind, swaying in the turns. The machine prowled the frozen Yukon River. As they got closer to Nome, Nels saw or heard other machines.
“Have a good time in Nome tonight,” he told Henry. But Henry just held on through the turns and did not speak at all.
It was nearly nine o’clock at night on the second day of spring before the two men from the state patrol took charge of the body strapped to the seat of a snow-go parked in front of the Nugget saloon at the far end of Front Street. It was quite a sight, seeing a dead man frozen in a sitting position, and the Indians were gathered around and were telling jokes about it and about Nels sitting in the bar, drinking whiskey alone. The police ignored the Indians and they talked to Nels a long time and then they unstrapped the body of Henry McGee from the machine.
