by John Straley
An almost subsonic groan percolated up from below and the surface of the water broke. Giant ovoid forms heaved up out of the water, abstract at first, ten feet of curve, texture, and confined space. The water boiled with little silvery fish dense on the surface like a trillion dollars in quarters spilling onto a sidewalk. Then, the surface of the water actually bent as the huge bulk continued to rise and the two forms closed together combining into one, slippery gray-black monument. There was something familiar at this point, and my mind began to condense around a recognition. There was a massive exploding breath and the damp smell of fish and tideflat; a cloud of vapor drifting away. As the form tipped to the side and lay in the water, a narrow rubbery wing lifted out of the sea and slapped the surface: curved and scalloped, knobby and limber. It popped the water and the form lengthened as it tipped to the plane of the horizon, as if it spilled out of itself. Then, an eye, an eye the size of a Softball. And it’s not until you see the eye that the parts, the forms, become whole, and the realization wells up that this is an animal, a warm-blooded creature whose heart pumps gallons of blood a stroke and whose eyes see as you are seeing, whose lungs exhale as you are exhaling now, relaxing with the return to familiar form. Whale. Humpback whale, feeding on herring.
There were two whales idly swimming toward the southern point of the beach. They traveled slowly. They threw their flukes to the surface and dove slowly. Then, in moments, one of thern would begin to blow the ring of bubbles that, as they rose to the surface, acted like a net bunching the herring up. Both whales would then move up underneath the ball of herring with their mouths open, gathering them in and herding them against the surface. After they broke the surface and snapped their jaws shut, they strained the water out through their baleen and swallowed the herring.
After we’d watched about four dives Walt put the engine in gear and raised the RPMs. He went back to his course and I moved around the deck. There was a raft of old-squaw ducks sputtering along behind the whales, picking up on the herring that were stunned on the surface. The sea lions looped through the brine offish and ducks to scavenge their fair share. The two whales left vapor clouds on the surface and I turned my back to them and walked into the wheelhouse.
Back inside, Walt didn’t mention the whales, he just looked down at the chart and steered toward the new compass heading. He was smiling. I watched the steam from the kettle on the oil stove flutter as the Oso swayed into her new course. The whales would feed all summer long and then be off to warm water for the breeding season. I was thinking about where I might be next spring.
Once we were steady on the new course, Walt set the automatic pilot, leaned back from the wheel, and looked at me.
“You think she knows about what we’re up to?”
“You mean Emma? I don’t know. I’ve been going round and round about that. I’ve got some people at the flight service checking out some names for me. She flies a plane. If she tells me that she can’t, then that will make me worry. I want to know if she’s filed flight plans coming in and out of Sitka. If she was up to something, I doubt that she filed any plans at all.”
“She loves her children, and you know it’s crazy, but she loved Louis,” Walt said. “She was fierce in the way she loved him. Fierce. Almost like anger, she loved him so much.”
“The night Todd was shot she called me, but not from her house. She may not be the killer but she knows something. She knows something about her husband’s death. What do you think? Could she have flown in, killed him and flown away in her airplane, without anyone ever suspecting?”
“I don’t know. Emma is odd. I used to hold my breath around her. Sometimes when I was standing close to her I just found my hand coming up and moving over to touch her. Just my hand—like I couldn’t do anything about it. I would move away from her but that was no good. I would be reading a magazine or listening to the radio and I would find myself stopped, just looking at the pages and thinking about her. I think I loved her so much sometimes I wanted to wrap her around me like an animal skin. But I don’t think I know her.”
He was embarrassed. He stood at the wheel apparently listening to something. Then he came back. I handed him his tea.
“What about the old lady, Louis’s mother. She acts like she knows everything. Do you think she does?”
Robbins tilted his head toward me and smiled. “The old lady knows a hell of a lot. I’ve had a feeling for a long time that she knows everything, but then—she could just know the end of the story and want us to fill in the rest.”
He put down his tea. “You want something to eat?”
We ate sandwiches and drank milk out of heavy white mugs that had circular coffee stains in the bottom. Periodically, he gave me a new course to steer and I watched the compass and turned the adjustments on the automatic pilot to match the numbers that he gave me. We were moving to the southwest now. The mountains came down steeply to the beach and as the thin fall light began to fail, the forests appeared thick and textured like the folded robes of a sitting monk. A thin trail of diesel exhaust spindled out behind us and dissipated with the long wake of the vessel, stretching in the widening V.
It was dark by the time we finished setting the anchor in Prophet Cove. On the outline of the shore I could make out the haze of alder branches and leaves scattered on the tufted beach fringe. After setting the anchor Walt turned off the engine; the quiet at first rushed into my ears and then spread out across the water. On shore there was a slight swell, and the rocks hissed as it broke gently on the beach. Walt lit a kerosene lamp and turned off the two electric bulbs near the lower berths. I stood on deck and peed out into the water. Two mergansers paddled by: watchful—watchful—their bills darting like an ant’s antenna, and I could see the white head of an eagle perched on the low overhanging branch of an alder tree.
Set in from the beach fringe, the mountain rose up and appeared almost black in the wild tangle of barren salmonberry brambles and overgrown mossy rootwads. I could make out the pale fallen leaves of the devil’s club. They were damp and matted against the mossy floor. There was one ancient alder tree that must have been four feet at the base, whose trunk went two hundred feet up and spread in silhouette against the steep wall of the mountain rising. Its major limbs arched up from the point where they split from the trunk, arched up severely in the gesture of a child being held forcefully by the wrists. The smaller limbs were a wild tangle of fingers that spread out and down toward the black mirror of the water. At the base of this tree I could see a vague shape of a straight line and then the intersection that formed a right angle. In the center I saw four ghostly white rectangles floating in an unnatural form. Then I saw the jagged straightness of steps and I recognized the cabin where Louis Victor had been murdered.
The mergansers eased past again, worked their way down the hull of the Oso, nudging along the waterline, then past the stern and out of sight. As I zipped up my pants, I could hear their squeaking exhalations and the wet beating of wing’s as they gained speed and flew.
I remembered Eli Hall, who murdered his girlfriend down in Craig. They had been drinking and he stabbed her in the chest. When he came to in the morning he loaded her body in a skiff and took it around the corner to one of his favorite crabbing spots and dumped it over the side. He knew it must have been two hundred feet deep. He slung her over the side and she sank about four feet below his skiff and then held there, neutrally buoyant. She was facedown, drifting as if on a meat hook, her gingham housedress moving slightly like a sea anemone caught in the light. When he reached with his oar and poked her, she rolled and the air escaped her lungs like a bellow and she sank in a swirling garland of bubbles and tentacles of light brown hair falling away. As he sat in jail he told me he didn’t care how much time he got, he just wanted that picture of her sinking beneath his skiff out of his head.
Murder is about the death of memory. I had forgotten that, until I saw the little cabin in the tangle of the mountain. More than two years ago Louis Victor had l
ead driven through his skull and everything he knew spilt out of him into the ground and was lost. What I had investigated so far was the faint heat of that explosion, but here, now, I was at ground zero. I was in place, if not in time, and I had to dig the ground for whatever memory was left. All I had was my fuzzy senses, a man I at least half trusted, and the story of a woman who had married a bear.
SIXTEEN
IT WAS RAINING on the deck above my head when I awoke in the darkness. I could hear the drops running off the gunnels and into the water. I could hear the water breaking on the rocks. I felt the roll of the hull at anchor. I opened my eyes and saw Walt lighting the lantern in the first granite light of a wet October morning. I rolled back over and dug my feet down to find the warm pockets of air in the sleeping bag.
Walt hung the lantern above the narrow stairwell that led to the wheelhouse. Its light gave the cabin the sepia tone of an old photograph: oiled wood, shadows, and the incessant rain overhead. He started an alcohol stove and put a pot of fresh water on to boil. He set the old blue enameled pot on the stove and after a few seconds it began to rumble.
I took my jeans out of the bundle that I had used as a pillow, dragged them inside the sleeping bag, pulled them on over my legs, and wiggled around to button them up. They were dishearteningly damp and cool. As I stretched up to pull my socks off the rack above the oil stove I could see my breath in a damp spume of vapor.
Walt, who had not spoken yet, handed me a cup of tea even before I had my shirt buttoned. The tea was fragrant with oranges and I let the steam roll up into my eyes as I sucked up the first sip. Walt watched me and saw that I was ready to be spoken to.
“What do you think? What should we look for?”
“Well… I might just look around. I don’t know … for anything … out by where they found the body. But you could see if you can find a place where he might have hidden a rifle. You think there might be a place like that in the cabin?”
“I would bet my life on it. He had little hidey-holes all over. Places that no one else ever knew about. When you escort drunken hunters, you take charge of their weapons at night. Louis knew about guns. He said they weren’t any good to you if they were in the wrong hands. He always kept control of them. Always. That was the rule.”
“So you go look for that and I’ll look for anything else that might be around. But only after breakfast.”
We ate oatmeal with raisins out of the same cups we had had our tea in. I put on my down vest and rubber boots and grabbed my wool cap and rain gear and stood by the ladder. Walt looked at me. He had his deer rifle slung over his shoulder. He held out a small .44-caliber five-shot revolver with a rounded hammer in a small leather holster.
“You want to carry this?”
“No.”
“You want a drink?”
“No, I guess not.”
He smiled at me as he pulled on his rubber raincoat and pocketed the revolver.
“You look a lot better to me today. Even so, I’d give you the whiskey or I’d give you the gun, but I sure as hell wouldn’t give you both.”
“Smart man.”
“Yeah.” He smiled. “Smart.” He lifted the weight of the revolver in his pocket and his smile dimmed a little.
Above his trolling pit in the stern he had a platform slung between the posts for his gurdies. We hauled an aluminum skiff down off the platform and lowered it into the water. Then Walt unbolted a five-horse engine from the inside of the pit and handed it down to me in the skiff. After I screwed it to the transom of the skiff, he handed me the rest of the gear. The daypacks, the fuel tank, and the oars. I held on to the stern and steadied the skiff as Walt hung his legs over and climbed in. I pulled on the cord until the engine turned over once and then I reset the choke. The engine fired on the first pull. I sat down and steered toward shore.
The rain was gentle now, coming from heavy low clouds that showed their wet bellies to the water. We were in a long inlet on Admiralty Island. From our anchorage we could look out to the west to the main coast of Admiralty. Two peaks to the south showed through the overcast. The fresh snow on the upper slopes mixed with the light overcast near the sun and the gray of the rocky coastline mingled with the green gray of the water. I took in a deep breath and imagined the inside of my skull as a gray-green landscape, perfectly suited for this world.
Old-squaw ducks paddled on the surface, pushing forward, the hulls of their bodies gently rocking as they pushed, their eyes alert and their heads darting back and forth in a continual scan of the surface. To the south a quarter mile, some humpbacks were breaking the surface, and the ducks were making their way in that direction.
As we came into the shallows I lifted the engine and we eased into the shore, which was large cobbles of granite. Walt and I stepped out into the shallow water and pulled the skiff up onto some drift logs near the tide line. The tide was high and just beginning to go down. We could carry or drag the skiff back down to the water when we needed to go. Walt played out a bow line, tied the skiff to the trees, then squatted down and began fishing around in his pack. He found cartridges for his rifle and fed them into the magazine of his gun. He was quiet and there was an important sense of purpose to his acts. It was clear this was not a hunting jaunt or a mere work trip.
We had agreed he would inspect the cabin first. I would walk around the area, head out to the small estuary where the body had been dragged, and see what the country looked like. We didn’t speak, but walked north up the stony beach. Walt turned up the path through the beach grass toward the cabin and I continued another fifty yards up the beach before cutting through the thick fringe of low alder trees.
Walking through the alders, I saw that the ground was matted with fallen leaves turned almond brown in the first stages of decay. They were slick and limber, beginning their seasonal compost. I pushed my way through the thinning limbs into an opening covered by a canopy of older trees. Here, the floor of the woods was a thick mattress of moss, dotted with ground-cover plants with heart-shaped leaves, and the walking was open. There were just a few scattered blueberry bushes, but they were bare. This fringe area was maybe twenty yards wide before the slope rose up steeply. On the slope the moss sloughed away slightly and rocks showed through. The spruce and hemlock trees were fat at the stump and did not seem to taper until high out of sight into the upper stories of limbs. It was quiet. I could hear the low-lying wheeze of the stream ahead of me and the light breathing of the saltwater back through the alder on my left.
I was following a narrow path that came from the cabin. The path was made by use, soft footing worn down through the moss. Here, where the skin of the forest floor was broken, I could look down to see the mass of roots and organic soil that lay like musculature under the covering of moss. The roots twisted and intertwined in one continuous fabric the entire length and width of the floor. You would be hard-pressed to single out one distinct plant from the whole growing mass.
Crows hopped in the blond stubble of beach grass and rocks to my left. They called and flew up in brief loops, taking mussel shells into the air and dropping them to try and force them open. I heard the continual chatter and clicks of their feeding as I walked into the forest. Periodically, I came across the dried broken shells of sea urchins and crabs. Otters had taken them from the tideflats up into the protection of the trees to eat. They left the shells on the moss like discarded toys.
The shelf narrowed as I approached the stream. The slope became a rocky bluff to my right, and I was left with a forty-foot path between it and the alders. I came across one ancient spruce tree that must have been twelve feet across at the butt. I stood next to it and looked up its length and all I could see was the thick limbs coming off the trunk several hundred feet above me. The trunk itself was twisted and gnarled and the bark was uneven. About eight feet up from the ground there were large gouges or wounds that showed black down into the sapwood and were weepy with pitch. Large amber and white cakes of pitch ran toward the bottom of the tree
and claw marks raked down the bark. At the foot of the tree I found the matted and strewn carcass of an eagle: long hollow bones, thigh and shoulder. Intricate curved architecture of the wing; the gray-green of feathers and mold. Several large feathers from the wing. There was no skull, no talons. I heard the first sizzle of wind several hundred feet above me in the upper limbs of the ancient tree.
I could sense no rain under the canopy, but as I pushed out from it through the alders again I stepped into the maritime weather. The rain was thick upon the estuary and swirled like a young horse cantering around a corral. Much of the tall grass had been laid flat by wind and heavy rain. The tide was still high and the water was deep, moving up the channel from the bay, becoming the channel of the stream. The water swirled languidly with foam and spruce needles forming gentle arches in the mud like crushed shells on a coral beach thousands of miles away. I pulled my hood up. The rain spattered down and the rings on the water widened and crossed in confused patterns until all there was was the drops bouncing back up through the surface tension of the water as if they were trying to hop back up into the sky.
To the west and out to the inlet the mud flat extended into rocky tidelands. An immature eagle walked clumsily along the mud and flattened eel grass. He waddled, muscular and hunched, like a self-conscious young athlete. The crows had given up their mussels and were pestering him, taking short, swirling dives at his back and veering away. The eagle plodded on toward a midden of clam shells and elephant-colored rocks.
I walked along the edge of the meander, below the grass line and in the soft mud. I stepped into firm green bear scat wedged into the angular cut rocks near the water’s edge. The salmon run in this stream was over but there were rotted corpses of pink salmon. Ugly, with hooked jaws and deformed backs. None had eyes in their sockets. Some swayed in the shallows of the brackish water, rotted white, with skeins of sloughed flesh twirling into the current, their mouths agape and grotesquely jutting to the surface. The air was thick with the smell of tide and pitch and dead fish in the soft mud.
