THE MOUNTAINS WERE staring down at me like my parents. My head hurt so much I couldn’t tell if I actually saw them or was vividly dreaming in the process of waking up.
I was sitting on the bull rail of the municipal dock in Juneau staring out to the Gastineau Channel with a cup of coffee in a paper cup in one hand and a toasted onion bagel in the other. Miraculously, my duffle bag with my clothes and papers was sitting on the dock. I was dangling my feet about fifty feet above the water, and a raven was staring at me as if he were from the Temperance League. I had no clear memory of the events of last night and of the days before. In the foreground was Mrs. Victor in her chair and the story of the woman who married a bear. I also knew with what felt like an emerging certainty that I was supposed to meet Walt Robbins here. Meet Walt, meet Walt, that was clear. It was not just an appointment but some sort of imperative. I was still struggling with a new form of accounting but I kept running into the exposed blade of my headache.
It was not raining, but the air was thick with moisture. There was a swirl of cloud in the middle of the channel that rested ten feet from the surface. The cloud moved slowly in wisps, floating on the imperceptible waves of heat radiating off the water. It moved in on itself and away; it was translucent, and when the sun broke briefly from the mountains on Douglas Island it rose in a curtain of mist and disappeared into the dense atmosphere of water and light. I thought of a roomful of silken veils, and Hannah dancing as the heat began to rise. There was a curtain beaded with glass crystals and a tropical wind swirling through the room. There was a glass of milk on a long bench and Dizzy Gillespie was lifting his horn to his lips. I watched him close his eyes and pucker way down in his weird distended, bullfrog neck, then I heard the blast of a boat’s signal horn cutting through my dream and I saw Walt Robbins’s troller coming through the mist to tie to the lower floating dock. Walt was in the wheelhouse and was waving to me to come down the ramp and prepare to take in the bow line.
I looked around for someplace to set my bagel. I stared at the raven, gave up any thoughts of guile, and offered it to him. He took half and stepped off the dock into a clumsy, heavy flight, alighting on a lower piling where he ripped into the bagel like a bear into a salmon, chuckling and cackling, apparently to himself.
I balanced my coffee down the ramp and made it to the edge of the dock about the same time the Oso did. The diesel engine was thrumming at low RPMs. About six feet from the edge of the dock, Walt put the drive train into reverse and gently eased the boat in. He came out the side door of the wheelhouse onto the narrow deck and threw the bow line the two feet to me. He gestured toward the forward cleat. He then went directly to the stern, grabbed a line and hopped onto the dock, took a wrap on the cleat, and slowed the boat to a stop as I began to tie the bow line.
“My God, but you look rough, son.”
“Not so bad. When do we have to pull out? Do I have time to make some calls?”
“I guess you can make any calls you want. But we have to get going to make the best tide.”
The Oso was an old-style trailer with a small wheelhouse that was bolted onto the massively built wooden hull. It was bolted on so that if it was swept away in green water the hull would be mostly intact and the small hole could be plugged. The stern was long and swept under to the waterline where she was driven by one propeller. The engine sat amidships right next to the deckhand’s bunk. It was small and dark inside the hull. The oak ribs and the cedar planks were unpainted and deeply stained with the carbon of diesel stoves and years of oil lamps burning at the heads of the bunks. This was a workboat: a floating tractor. Not built for romance, but now romantic in its old age.
“I’ve got what gear you’ll need below: boots and such. I don’t want to rush you, son, but I think we really should be going.”
“Okay. Just one thing.”
I turned and set my cup down on the bull rail and walked up the ramp again. There was a man in a clear plastic raincoat speaking to a woman in German. They were trying to frame a picture of the Oso to include me as I walked up the dock. The closer I came, the further back the man moved until finally he stumbled and nearly fell backward. The woman gestured wildly and said something that sounded like a command to him in German.
I went to the pay phone, called the hospital in Sitka, and asked after Todd. Fluids, infection, fever. If the fever didn’t go down by tomorrow they were going to have to go in again and irrigate the wounds. I hung up.
Then I called Duarte and asked him if he would take Toddy’s fish tank over to the hospital and I asked him to check the house to make sure the windows weren’t leaking around the frames, and to pick up my mail. Duarte was grouchy that I’d waked him up, and he acted at first like I had asked him to dig the Panama Canal, but he lightened up when he figured he would get a shot at my refrigerator. I hung up.
The German man was inexplicably trying to get another shot of me, and his wife now had a tissue in her hand.
I felt okay about asking Duarte to run errands for me. If he said he was going to do something I could count on it. It was the things he didn t mention that I had to worry about.
I made one last call to a friend at the Sitka flight service and asked her to double-check some things. I dug into my pack and looked through the file and found the phone records from Emma Victor’s house on the night Todd was shot. There was no record of a call to my house on that evening.
I turned from the pay phone and bumped squarely into George Doggy’s chest.
“You’re looking rough, Younger.”
“You’re looking very large, Doggy. What the hell are you doing standing on my shoelaces?”
“Younger, I heard that you were around and I thought I just had to see you.”
“I got a boat to catch, Doggy. Listen, I’m staying out of trouble. Unless this is official.”
“Oh no, nothing official. A citizen turned up last week and said you stole some of his money and threw him down the stairs for sport.”
“A misunderstanding.”
“I also heard that this same citizen was supposed to get a wad of cash for shooting you with a large-caliber handgun. And he didn’t collect until someone dropped at least part of it by the hospital.”
“Can you beat that? I’ve got to go.”
“Listen, Younger, I’m sorry about getting on you like I did at the hospital. I… hell, I’m not going to try and be nice to you, it’s just I’ve got something you should see.”
He handed me some papers and I recognized forms from the Sitka Police Department.
“It’s the police reports on the gun theft. Do you want to guess who the witness was?”
I shook my head.
“Giving phoney names can backfire, if someone sees you or you need to backtrack on your story. The Sitka witness used her real name because she was afraid someone in town would recognize her. It was Emma Victor.”
I looked down at my shoes. Again, I was trying to think of some dazzling quip to let Doggy know that I fully understood the implications and was on top of everything.
“Wow. Whaddaya think?”
“I don’t know, for certain. But Emma Victor isn’t at her home, and neither is her plane. I know that you and Robbins have something cooking and you’re going out to the cabin in Prophet Cove. I thought I’d warn you that it’s possible you’re going to have company.”
“Do you know what Walt and I have cooking?”
“No. But I want you to tell me.”
I grabbed Doggy by the shoulders and swung him around toward the water. I put my right arm around him and yelled over to the German couple, “Picture. Picture.” The man immediately lifted his camera to his face and snapped one. Then he waved a clumsy wave of appreciation and said, “Very good photo—very handsome” as I turned and walked down the ramp.
“Be careful, Younger. I’m retired. I don’t need any more business. Particularly if you wash up on some beach somewhere.”
I waved over my shoulder. “Very good photo—very handsome.” I didn’t look back to watch him go.
Walt had the bow line untied and was standing at the stern holding the line looped around the cleat. I had a sense that it wasn’t only the tide that rushed him. He was staring inward and down at the water. His jaw moved slightly as if he were grinding his teeth. He was untying an emotional knot that had been cinched tight years ago. He was working, working it, his mind and his hands rubbed raw by the effort.
As I walked down the ramp he gestured for me to hold the stern line and he made ready to go to the wheel. Walt was a man comfortable in motion, and knots, hard implacable knots, irritated him like a drop of gasoline in the eye. I waited until he was at the wheel and put my weight against the hull. I pushed away from the dock and stepped high up onto the gunnel. She was perhaps fifteen tons of dead weight but she floated free of the dock like an airborne seed. I looked to the wheelhouse. Walt was scanning the channel, and although he was tapping his foot he didn’t appear to be grinding his teeth.
It was going to be a ten-hour run to the hunting cabin near Prophet Cove. The clouds were low and the water would be smooth, at least until we rounded the point and turned to the west. If I was going to get any rest, the smooth water was the time to get it. Walt gave me earplugs and headphone ear protectors and still the sound of the engine near the crew bunk vibrated my blood vessels. I wadded my coat under my head and pulled a sleeping bag over my legs and closed my eyes.
These morning naps can bring vivid dreams, but on that morning the motion of the boat and the constant grinding of the engine slipped me into a blurred atmosphere. I floated on the thin surface, and below there was a dark world of tiny-eyed crustaceans. I only had a vague sense of the blooms of the algae and euphausiids, clouds of nutrient with droplets of herring and drifts of salmon, but I could feel their presence as if they were restlessly tapping on the hull of the Oso to remind me to stay awake, stay awake.
Wake up, son. You better take a look at this.”
I had no idea how long I had slept but the engine was idled down and the drive train was out of gear. I climbed the ladder to the cramped wheelhouse. Walt had a cup of tea in his hand and he gestured out the side door.
“Go forward and look about twenty feet off at two o’clock.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, just go take a look.”
I wasn’t completely sure if this was a prank, a test, or more of the dream seeping into my awakening. I ducked my head and went forward by the anchor winch. I squatted down and looked out at two o’clock.
The Oso was two hundred yards offshore and I could see the lead gray rocks blend to the mat of moss and spruce and hemlock forest. There were three eagles perched in the trees, scanning the water. I turned around and looked at Walt and he smiled and nodded back. Eagles? I thought. He woke me up to show me some fucking eagles? I looked back toward the shore. There were quite a few gulls and I noticed four sea lions curling through the water. Then about ten feet from the hull I saw a bubble the size of a cantaloupe break onto the surface and then another and another, arching out into a circle toward the shore.
I never feel my body in my dreams, it’s as if I have no biology in my subconscious. In my dreams my emotions are—just there—in the atmosphere of the dream, like rain or background radiation. One good clue that I’m not dreaming is when my body sends me specific messages. As I watched the bubbles start to close in a perfect circle about forty feet across I could feel the hair standing up on the back of my neck. My breath was short and my eyes started to tingle.
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 lead 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.