The Woman Who Married a Bear (18 page)

She placed her hands down to her sides. Calvin took a drink of his coffee and cleared his throat. I kept staring down at my old scabs. She looked at me with sympathy and a little disgust.

“I knew you wouldn't believe it. No matter what you tell a white person it all goes to the same place. Get yourself something to eat and go to the dock before noon. And, Calvin, get that deer boned out.”

She turned on the radio and I knew from that my audience was over. She turned and looked at me one last time.

“I will see you in Sitka,” she said.

FIFTEEN

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.

W
ake 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.