12
I thought I stayed awake all night, as the fire burned down and the sky began to lighten. It might have been so, but I also believed that this night both Jane Marie and I had turned into bears. We were curled against each other’s thick brown fur deep in a burrow. Snow had piled around the mouth of our cave and our warm breath had crystallized on the roof. Outside a great storm was clattering, blowing pieces of my house back in Sitka around and around like the twister in The Wizard of Oz, but in our burrow we were warm and safe. Our breath was sour with mice and skunk cabbage, dead salmon, and seaweed. Our hides were thick and knotted with burrs and tiny flecks of fish bone. I curled in deeper toward Jane Marie’s body and when something kicked at the sole of my foot I lunged forward with my fists clenched.
Toddy stood in the ashes of our fire. He was kneeling down, peering in. He looked vaguely startled but stood his ground.
“Excuse me, Cecil. I don’t mean to disturb you, but I was concerned that you might have succumbed to the effects of hypothermia.” He said this very carefully.
I rubbed my eyes and shook my head, trying to shake the sleep out of my brain.
“No. No. We’re fine, Todd. Listen, I’m sorry we . . . you know . . . didn’t let you know we were going to be gone for a while. I hope you didn’t worry.”
“Actually, I wasn’t all that concerned,” Todd said and he reached out and shook my hand as if we were meeting for a business lunch. He was wearing his nice traveling coat and his low-cut leather shoes. He pumped my hand and went on, “No, in fact I wasn’t aware that you were off the ship. I just assumed you were enjoying one of the many entertainment options that seem to be offered on the Westward.” There was not a trace of irony in Todd’s voice. This is one of the most unnerving things about Todd: Irony and sarcasm are unknown to him.
Jane Marie crawled toward us on her knees, squinting into the clear morning light. Sonny Walters walked up behind Todd.
“You’re all right then?” he said. It sounded like an accusation.
Sonny was wearing a snappy blue windbreaker and his spotless leather Top-Siders. He had a ball cap on and for some reason he reminded me of an actor playing one of the Apollo astronauts.
“You missed me. I can tell, Sonny,” I told him.
Sonny Walters grunted as if the idea of this was too absurd to even consider.
“Listen, you two,” Sonny said as he took off his ball cap and patted his hair. “First, I’ve got to say that neither I nor Great Circle Cruise Lines had anything to do with leaving you here on this beach overnight. I was not told of this situation until late last night. I was told by the first officer that you were searching for evidence. They would tell me nothing more. I don’t know what is going on.” Sonny’s voice was building in pitch. “Several of my passengers are extremely agitated. The medical staff apparently has shut down the clinic. We’ve got rumors galore and apparently Dr. Edwards has been disciplined or is sick himself. And frankly, I don’t know what in the Sam Hill is going on!” His voice reached a peak. “I’ve got shore excursions happening right now, and a gold rush revue supposed to take place in two hours, and I’m out here looking for you two.” He glared at Jane Marie and me as if we were tardy for school. “Just what in the hell kind of evidence were you looking for?”
I took a deep breath. I was thinking about how to launch into the explanation when we heard a voice yell down the beach.
As we came around a tall pile of drift logs on the beach where the sand lay below the tide line, I could make out the words, “Hey! Hey! You go on! Get out of here, you son of a bitch!” It was a man’s voice, deep and very agitated.
There on the sand sat a helicopter with its rotors stopped and the engine turbine whining down. The pilot had one foot on the rubber pontoon and the other inside the aircraft. And he was frantic. “You see that son of a bitch? You see him?” He was pointing up to the woods. But the rest of us were looking down at the sand some six feet from the chopper. We all stopped and stared stupidly at the scene.
The doctor’s body was naked. He was bent with his head under his chest, as if he were a rag doll thrown down stairs. The flesh across his shoulders and his abdomen was punctured. Several chunks of flesh were missing; a bone protruded from the forearm. The pilot’s eyes were wide and he appeared to be hyperventilating.
“That son of a bitch just carried it out of the woods and threw it down! He just threw it down here! He’s still up there in the trees. Get in! Get in now! I’m getting this damn thing in the air.”
“Oh my God in heaven,” Sonny said as he began to choke. Todd was about to ask a question, but I put my hand on his shoulder and pointed.
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.
“Do you remember me, Mr. Standard? I’m Cecil Younger. I spoke to you the other day back at the Hubbard Glacier?”
Mr. Standard paused and I could tell he was trying to think back a lifetime, his dead son’s lifetime, yet it had only been two days. He furrowed his brow and pulled at his hair absently.
“Yes. Of course. Come in.” And he gestured into the room.
I entered a sitting room that had an oak table for six and a leather couch near the wet bar. There was a globe in a wooden stand next to a bookshelf and near the window was an antique brass telescope with a heavy counterbalancing arm. Forward and to the starboard were floor-to-ceiling windows. I paused to look up the valley where the miners of the Klondike had once struggled up the pass.
“I’m sorry to hear about Paul,” I said as I walked to the couch. Mr. Standard sat on the opposite end. He sat with his shoulders hunched and his hands down between his knees.
“I was expecting it, of course,” he said and then he said nothing more. Far up the valley we heard a train whistle echo off the mountain walls. Helicopters came and went like dragonflies.
“He had said he would see me in the morning. Paul said he would see me in the morning. I knew what he wanted to do . . . But I wasn’t ready . . . I don’t think Paul was ready either but . . . I don’t know.” Mr. Standard’s voice quavered. He opened his mouth and he tried to speak, but nothing came out. Then he started to cry.
There was a pile of papers on the table in front of us. Sobbing, Mr. Standard leaned forward and grabbed them and held them up to show me.
“That doctor gave me these. That morning he gave me these. Legal papers. He had them right there in his room. They are papers Paul signed absolving the doctor of any problems for his treatment that might result in his own death. These papers are very explicit. Paul wrote that the doctor could administer any medications in dosages that the doctor felt reasonable, even if they resulted in death.”
I cleared my throat. “Mr. Standard, I’m sorry but right now we have to think about you, not Paul or the doctor. I think you are in serious trouble.”
Mr. Standard drew in his breath and wiped away tears with the flat of his hand. “I am in trouble, aren’t I?”
He looked at me beseechingly, then he drew a breath as if he were about to start the story of his life. I interrupted him.
“Listen, Mr. Standard, there’s no time. We’re both in trouble. Please tell me what you remember about the night Dr. Edwards went overboard.”
Standard made a gesture with his hands as if he were erasing a terrible vision in front of him. He shook his head. “I was drinking that night with some of the people from the travel club, friends of Paul’s. They were telling stories and laughing. We were drinking wine. I think some of them had been taking drugs. I don’t know. It was late. I had gone to bed. I remember one of them came in and told me Paul was dead. The doctor had pronounced him dead a couple of hours earlier. I was furious. I told you, Paul was going to see me tomorrow. We were talking through things. We hadn’t done that, you know. We hadn’t talked about his life. The people he loved. We were talking through all that. So I went to Paul’s room. The door was locked. I went to the clinic and no one was there. I finally got a crew person to tell me where the doctor’s cabin was. The doctor was in his cabin. He apologized and he showed me the papers. Then I started shouting. I guess the walls are thin because he told me we had to go somewhere else. So we stepped out on the deck, the crew deck, where they tie the lines and have the hoists and anchor winch.”
Mr. Standard squeezed his eyes shut. He held his hands out in front of him as if he were groping along a hallway in the dark.
“He was sorry, the doctor said. He said he could feel my pain, for Christ’s sakes.” Mr. Standard shook his head bitterly and went on. “But the doctor said there were many considerations, insurance costs, something about the needs of his other patients. He said it was what Paul wanted. He kept talking about the papers Paul had signed and what Paul had wanted and I kept getting more and more angry . . .” Tears were running down Mr. Standard’s unshaven cheeks. “I realize now I was furious because I wanted to talk about my feelings. I knew my son was dying. I knew he was leaving me. I was furious, and that damn doctor kept talking about Paul’s feelings, as if I had never considered my own son’s feelings.” His shoulders moved with his sobs. I waited.
“I was all twisted up in my own feelings. Of course I wanted my son to die with dignity. Of course I wanted him to be free of pain. I just didn’t . . .”
Mr. Standard paused. He gathered himself, then went on. “I shook the doctor by the shoulders. I screamed at him. I remember pushing him against the rail. I did want to kill him, I will admit that. He hit me. He pushed me down. I remember falling and rolling on the deck and I remember standing backup and being alone. He was in the water. I saw him waving his arm up in the air. I remember throwing the life ring over the side. I called out for help.”
“Did help come?” I asked.
“There was someone there immediately. A black crewman. I don’t know his name. He was Caribbean. He sat me down and he went away. Then the ship’s officers came and the alarms sounded. It seemed to take a long time but frankly I don’t remember how long it took.”
“Did anyone else see this happen? See the doctor go over?” I asked him.
Mr. Standard started to speak. Then he snapped his mouth shut. “No.” There was a pause. “No. There was no one else.”
“What are the ship’s officers telling you now?” I asked and gestured around his cabin.
“They say they want to handle it internally. They say they will do everything they can to avoid turning me over to the authorities here in Alaska. I told them I wanted to talk to the police but they said I would be charged with the doctor’s murder. They told me to stay in this cabin. I don’t know. I don’t know.” He buried his head in his hands.
The door to the cabin opened and the same steward who had taken the cart out came back into the room. He bowed slightly at the waist and said to me, “Excuse, sir. But there is someone who wants a word with you.” He gestured to the door behind him. “Forgive me, Mr. Standard,” the steward said and then waited for me to stand and follow him.
Cyril stood in the hall. He had on civilian clothes, a lightweight jacket and new athletic shoes. He was holding his knife in his hand.
“Please, sir. What are we doing now?” He unfolded the knife. “You need to come with me then.” And he turned me around holding my right elbow and putting the blade of the knife just under my ribs.