The Big Both Ways (33 page)

Walter Tillman offered to fly George anywhere he wanted and George knew that would be the responsible thing to do. But he thanked Walter Tillman and sent him on his way. George said that he would do his best looking for the dory there in Craig. He would ask around, he said, and would be in contact with Walter as soon as he made landfall in Juneau.

Young Walter Tillman looked at George and said, “You won’t get much out of these folks here, sir. They’re a hard bunch.”
George smiled at the young man and thought that surely his experience would count for something.

But in the next few days George discovered that the young man was right. He walked the docks and drank coffee and tried to talk with the fishermen and beach loggers, but all he got was a series of courteous dismissals. When he asked about the small dory and the girl with the yellow bird, the conversations went dead.

The Indian people he spoke with gave him nothing at all, denying any understanding of his questions but giving him the impression of full cooperation. The white people simply turned him off. After the first of such interactions George began to see something familiar about these folks tucked back along the wild coast. There was something of the Big Finn in all of them: the wariness of authority and a stiff-necked defensiveness around anyone who dressed in expensive clothes and asked questions without a long and proper introduction.

Then George remembered the history his father had taught him. After the Centralia debacle back in 1919, the state of Washington had started enforcing the Sedition Laws. Anyone could go to jail for ten years for just having once been a member of the IWW. Anyone found with a Red card or a pennant with the words
ONE BIG UNION
emblazoned across the fabric could be arrested. The Big Finn kept no radical materials either on his person or in his home. He stayed in Washington and kept the fire alive. But many of the most public of the radicals began to scatter. There was more than one island off the wild north coast that held old seditionists. They fished and strung radio antennas above their cabins to pull in the scores of the distant ball games, and they kept to themselves. The islands around Craig had a fairly high density of hermits and folks with new names and histories, and their neighbors knew to give them both their privacy and their loyalty.

During George’s days in Craig, the weather was fair with only a few showers blowing through. He stayed on the ship, where he ate meals of fresh fish and crab that the galley prepared to keep
everyone’s spirits high. George even rented a small skiff and a fishing pole to spend days out on the water, telling himself he was looking for the dory with the little girl and the yellow bird. But in fact he was not looking for anything that reminded him of Seattle and the corpses there.

William Pierce and McCauley Conner had indeed been drinking downstairs in Yvette’s sporting house, while Ray Cobb was eating at a soda fountain down the creek. They had gotten a ride on a fish-packing boat that left Craig the same afternoon the
Admiral Rodman
had arrived.

The three men were an ill-suited bunch, dirty and mismatched. Pierce had a certain stiff-spined dignity. He was tall and he stood up straight and always appeared to be scouting the space around him. Conner was a rheumy-eyed dreamer who always had at least half his attention turned inward. He stood with a slouch as if he were looking for something to lean up against. Cobb was a short cairn of hard-packed flesh and muscle. Wherever he stopped he seemed to be affixed to that one spot until some stimulus, food usually, would tip his bulk forward and he would shamble back into motion.

David Kept had been a good friend to the members of his local. He had gotten them more money and had kept them focused on attainable goals that seemed to grow closer with each month. Kept had stood on the bull rails and made the members only promises that they all could keep, and they had believed him because their lives continued to improve under his leadership. There were better money and predictable hours, fairness in the hiring hall, and no special treatment for “friends of friends” from the outside. David Kept ran a good shop and he was well liked by a group of working men who had no other friends like him.

So when his body was found in the trunk of the Lincoln, the membership commissioned its own investigation. The national office wanted to work through the police, but the boys on the
docks were in a hurry. Besides, no one trusted the police. Even if David Kept had made inroads with the local cops, the boys boosting the bales and slings had no more use for the cops than they did for a dose of the clap. They would handle it themselves without the police and without the Floodwater boys who oiled through every public meeting and informal gathering. Even though David Kept had no wife or children, he had family … and they would take care of his interests now.

So as Ellie had been flying over the mountains in the Vega and Slip had been packing his and Annabelle’s belongings for their dory ride north, William Pierce and McCauley Conner were lying naked on either side of a sleeping whore named Beatrice. Ray Cobb was down the street drinking one glass of soda water after another and belching so loudly that some of the patrons were moved to complain.

“Christ, I miss my home,” Conner said, his skinny hairless shin draped over the sleeping woman’s backside.

“Listen to you. You got a bed and money in your pocket. Hell, there’re men all over the world who would envy us.”

“I still wish I was someplace else. Doing something else.” And he rolled over onto his side, away from the girl, who stirred slightly and murmured something from her dreams.

“This is different from the usual. I grant you that. But it’s got to be done. You said so yourself when it first came up.” Bill Pierce was stroking Beatrice’s neck, hoping she’d stay asleep. Even though the men had bathed the night before, the sheets were still sooty with coal dust and smelled of fish oil. Bill wiped his nose. “You said so yourself,” he repeated.

Out the open window they heard an airplane passing overhead.

“I know what I said, but goddamn, Bill.”

“We’re just going to take her and the kid back south.” Pierce spoke softly, rubbing the white skin of the woman’s thigh.

“Why’d we have to bring Cobb, anyway?” Conner asked. “I thought he was going to die down there in the bottom of the ship.”

“Cobb insisted he come along. He says he’s got more reason to stick up for Dave than anybody.”

“I don’t like him,” Conner said, and the girl began to stir. “He’s got too big an appetite or something. I don’t know.” Conner brushed dark hair away from the girl’s face.

Pierce sat up on the edge of the bed. “We’ll keep an eye on him. We’ll get this done and be home.”

“No killing. You sure of that?” Conner put his hand against the girl’s cheek.

“Not if it can be avoided.” Pierce pulled up his pants.

“God, I miss my home,” Conner said. Then he kissed the girl and she opened her eyes and smiled.

Ellie stayed feverish for several days. She drank water and nibbled on stale bread that John brought to her from the restaurant down the street. On the third day he brought a proper dinner—rice, fish, and onions—and it was hot and had a fine hint of salt and ginger.

The whorehouse was quieter than Ellie had expected. There were footsteps padding down the hall, creaking floors, and the continued opening and closing of doors. If she listened she could hear the creaking of the box springs and the murmur of women’s voices uttering encouragements. Outside, the noisy creek became silent twice a day as the tide came up high enough to fill the narrow rock basin with seawater. She started using the tides as a clock to keep track of the day. On the fourth day she used a radio telephone downtown to call the flight service in Campbell River, trying to get news from the cannery, but all she could find out was that Slip and the girl were no longer there. The phone line hissed and popped, and when the flight service secretary slammed down the receiver, the silence on the line scared her.

Yvette changed Ellie’s bandages once a day, and each time she gave the invalid one more day before she would have to
start turning tricks. Ellie shook her head and said she wouldn’t, and Yvette would threaten to throw her out and Ellie dared her to. Yvette would storm out of the room leaving an angry wake of silence. Then Ellie would walk down the backstairs to help John and the crippled Chinese girl with the laundry.

On some afternoons while she waited for sheets to dry, she read magazines on the porch. Sometimes Doc Williams would come to check on her and they might drink a glass of red wine and visit about the news of the day. Williams liked to converse, which was fortunate because he was good at it. He favored art and politics. He liked Roosevelt and the New Deal. Ellie avoided politics but was happy to listen to him talk about French painting and German composers. Sometimes during their conversations she dozed off with her head propped against the porch railing, dreaming of music she had never heard.

Some men came into the whorehouse early in the day. They usually walked quickly and ducked into doorways hoping no one would notice them. Late at night men would sometimes come in groups, arm in arm and singing. Judging by what she could hear through the thin walls, the quiet men during the middle of the day were more voluble in the rooms with the girls. They would sometimes call out names or begin to plead and order specific attentions. Once she heard a man, visiting at what must have been his lunch hour, recite the Lord’s Prayer as he made the bed frame rattle against the wall.

The louder party boys were generally quieter once they came upstairs. Many of them, she suspected, were essentially scared of women and hence the need for the big show out on the sidewalks. But occasionally these party boys became violent, and John would bound up the stairs and, with a thudding of their bare heels on the uneven floor, the big black man hauled them outside as if they were sacks of coal. Doc Williams would come then and soothe the girls with paregoric, or morphine if the injuries were serious enough. Most often he calmed them by simply sitting at their
bedsides, listening to them talk about their fears and about their plans for their future.

“There’ll be far too many millinery shops in the world if all of these girls were to achieve their dreams,” he told Ellie.

Mindful of her need to repay Yvette, Ellie found ways to be useful. She carried coal for John or she helped the girls with the laundry. When they were blue she would sit and play cards with them or simply listen to their rambling stories. They were decent girls, mostly immigrants from Europe, sturdy girls who seemed to bruise easily but didn’t enjoy complaining. Their given names were often long and difficult to pronounce so they adopted American names with their customers. They were Betty or Sally and sometimes Claudine upstairs, but playing cards back in the kitchen or running their clothes through the ringer washer, they would call each other the pet names of their youth. They smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and drank whiskey from their own clean glasses and talked of the lives they had left behind in Budapest, Prague, or Dublin—the dirty stone streets and the roofs that leaked. All the while the rain pattered down on the shake roofs of Ketchikan and the lonely men queued up under the clogged, overflowing gutters until Yvette let them in.

It was there that Ellie brought up the idea of forming a trade union. “It would be the most powerful union on earth,” she said. “Imagine a strike. My God, what a beautiful idea. Jesus, girls, imagine it.”

“The wives would be the first to beg us to come back,” a sad-eyed girl spoke up.

“Explain to me why you need Yvette,” Ellie asked the girl named Petroska.

“Shut up, Ellie. You’ll get us bounced out of here,” another whore called out from the porch, where she was helping Alice wring out her second load of sheets for the day.

“I’m just asking. I like Yvette as much as any man.”

“Any man?” Petroska asked with a smile.

“Perhaps not any man. But I like her, and I can understand
why you like her too. But she gets paid for being generous to you. When you are generous to her, it comes out of your pocket, and when she is generous to you it
also
comes out of your pocket. That’s all I’m saying.”

“You’ll get these girls in trouble,” John said, smiling. He was turning the crank on the old wringer and feeding a wet sheet through.

“These girls are already in trouble. That’s all I’m saying.” Ellie made an emphatic gesture with her left hand and it bumped the edge of the table. Wincing in pain, she pulled her arm back and cradled it against her chest. “Damn!” Her eyes were clamped shut and tears squirted out the corners.

“Poor baby.” Petroska patted her cheek with a pale hand. “Poor Ellie. There will be no revolution in America,” she said, as if she were comforting a baby.

“Why’s that?” Ellie shot back, still cradling her throbbing hand.

“Because Americans are children. They could not endure a revolution. Trust me, Ellie, this I know for sure. Americans are babies, big and fat and happy. There is no revolution for such people.”

“You haven’t seen much of the Depression over here.”

“Pagh! This is nothing. This is as bad as it’s been and it’s still wonderful. No, sweetheart. No revolution. You should try selling something else.”

“What, silk stockings and tractor parts?” Ellie did not like being condescended to by a whore. A whore who was being exploited whether she knew it or not.

“I like silk socks. Very good,” the Russian girl said.

“All right, you two, enough. Help me with these sheets,” John called out. He had a basket of laundry and was backing up against the door to hang it out to dry along the side porch of the building that had a wide eave and got springtime sun. Most of the laundry for the house was picked up by a Finn to be done
over at the steam laundry in town, but Yvette charged the girls for that service so many of them paid John a lower rate to save a few dollars. Ellie pushed against the back door with her back and stepped out onto the porch. John set the wet laundry down and walked back inside.