Ghost Sea: A Novel (Dugger/Nello Series) (16 page)

At sunset, the wind eased some and the water around us became calmer. Nello wanted to take Charlie for a row, show her the island and the tidal pools, but I guessed it was mostly to get her away from us. We launched the skiff and it danced at the end of the painter. Shreds of red clouds swept at speed overhead; the foam in the strait and the chop around the ketch turned red, and over the spit and the tip of the island a pink spray flew like horizontal rain. The black fins glided back and forth along the shore.

“Could that be a burial island?” Olson asked as Nello lowered the oars into the skiff.

“Could be,” Nello said. “There was a summer village in the bay before the plague.”

Olson hesitated then got up the courage. “Would you mind very much dropping me off there to have a look? It would be a great favor.”

Nello must have felt sorry for him, because he said, “Sure,” and while he helped Charlie down, Olson went and rummaged in his cabin. When he came up he was loaded like a pack mule. “Cameras, notebooks,” he said sheepishly. They went.

With the three of them plus the gear, the skiff rode low—Olson in the stern with his gear in his lap, Nello at the oars, and Charlie huddling low in the bow. When a swell swung in from the strait and raised and rocked them, Nello yelled, “Duck down. Duck down!” and Charlie looked around, confused, having no idea what the hell “Duck down” could be.

They landed in the crook formed by the island and the spit, Charlie jumping out first to lighten the bow and pulling the skiff closer in. Nello held the skiff while Olson clambered out, leaving much of his stuff behind. Then they pulled the skiff up on the sand. The tide was rising; the spit shortening. Nello and Charlie clambered among the rocks at the end of the spit. Olson had vanished; must have gone up island. I pulled out the binoculars and looked out into the strait where the foam blew, looked up and down both shores for the canoe, looked slowly, rock by rock, tree by tree, and only when I heard the shouts did I spin around.

The two figures on the spit had separated, the small one standing still, the other running hard toward the island. I raised the binoculars—could hardly see in the dusk—but I saw Olson in the skiff, rowing with all his might, away from the spit, straight toward the bay. Nello leapt in the water and thrashed after him but Olson did well with long, hard pulls—he was already more than a hundred feet from shore. I cursed and yelled. Sayami awoke with a start. Nello was swimming hard after the skiff but with each pull of the oars the distance between them widened. He stopped. Treaded water. The fins of the killer whales arced in the fading light. He turned and looked at Charlie alone on the shrinking spit—then began to swim back. Swam. Stopped. He waved toward the ketch. It was a while before the wind brought his broken shout. He swam, then stopped again and waved. The shout—it could have been anything—but sounded like, “Kill him!” My first thought was, How? I could try raising the anchor and hoisting the sail, but alone? Olson would have by then skimmed over the bar, out of our reach, in the shoal bay. The tide rushed in. The spit vanished. Charlie stood in the sea.

I ran below. Olson had cleaned out his cabin, left only his rifle. I stuffed the Winchester full, running back up, then cut Sayami’s hands loose and shoved it at him. “He’s clearing out. Shoot him,” I said. “But don’t kill him. If you kill him we might lose the skiff. Shoot him and maybe he’ll come back.”

Sayami struggled in pain, sat back against the deckhouse, and, with his elbows on his knees, steadied the barrel on the lifelines. He aimed and waited for a lull in the motion of the ketch. “I can barely see,” he mumbled, with the butt against his cheek.
Kill him,
said the buffeting wind. Sayami didn’t blink; didn’t breathe. Nor did I. Then a deafening thunder trembled the twilight. Olson clutched his arm. Sayami sat still. Olson struggled up.

“Don’t fall in, you bastard,” Sayami muttered. Olson had lost an oar, struggled to his feet, pulled out the other oar, turned toward the bow, and, with his feet astride, tried pathetically to paddle.

“What now?” Sayami said.

Kill him!
the wind said.

“Kill him,” I snapped. “He’s almost in the bay.”

“I’ll stop him.”

“Kill him!”

Thunder. Olson’s left knee buckled and he fell onto the gunwale.

“I hit him low,” Sayami said. “If I had hit him high, he’d have fallen in.”

Nello had reached Charlie and was dragging her through chest-deep water toward the shore. The black fins shot toward them.

Thunder. Olson hung over the side but he still held the oar and pulled with his dying might when, with a corkscrew motion, he propelled himself sideways and plunged into the sea.

“You bastard,” Sayami said.

The sky had grown so red it reflected on the glistening fins. They had turned and headed toward the skiff. Then they formed a circle with their heads close together, and tossed up an odd shape that flailed dark and frantic against the red glow on the sea.

T
HE GALE BLEW
for two more days and nights, strumming the rigging, rattling blocks and hatch boards, and hurling endless chop against the hull that in the night sounded like slaps against your head.

The first morning we flooded the skiff until it was down to the gunwales and let the choppy water rinse away Olson’s blood. Then we bailed it and rinsed it and wiped it dry. Below, we cleared away every trace of Olson, as if that would somehow help us forget we’d killed him. I went through his big bag: some clothes, a few books, but the money was gone. I suggested that Sayami take Olson’s things to at least get something for his trouble, but he said he didn’t like him, as if you had to like who you killed before you kept his things. I took the bag and rowed to the island. Nello said to burn it all so he could use it on the other side, but I couldn’t be bothered. I shimmied up a low spruce and wedged the bag into a fork—as a memorial.

I was already back down when I thought about the journal. I started a fire and burnt it, page by page. The last entry was just after Devil’s Hole.
Can’t see a thing. This is a land of illusions.

I threw it in the flames; for sure he’d want that with him.

W
E HAULED FRESH
water from the creek in the bay and washed the salt from everything on board. We sloshed out the lockers that had been filled with sea, rinsed all our tinned food and wiped it dry, scrubbed the decks, washed the salt off the varnish, laid the sails out on the deck and rinsed the salt out of them—must have made twenty trips with buckets. Sayami rested, Nello and Charlie worked together and talked endlessly to each other. I worked alone and talked softly—to Kate.

There wasn’t much to say, but still I couldn’t stop. I went over things we said, laughed at some, regretted others, tried to attribute deep meaning to her simplest words, and invented things she
should
have said to me. I went over what I’d say when I found her; rehearsed everything, then changed it a dozen times. Finally I decided it all sounded stupid and it would be best not to say a word. Stand there; let her speak first.

The wind eased after midnight—the howling stopped. There was only the odd gust in the trees, and the lulling stroke of wavelets washing against the hull. I lay in my bunk and closed my eyes. “Stay close,” I whispered. “It’s cold against the wood.”

I
WENT ON
deck, well rested, before dawn. The moon had set and the sky swarmed with stars. The lantern glowed faintly in the aft cabin. We could have hauled anchor and hoisted sail right then but I didn’t have the heart to interrupt them.

KATE

The Illness

I’m without strength of any kind. I stop paddling at midnight. I’m so cold. He carries me into the woods and makes a bed of branches, bundles me in a blanket and lays me on it. I sleep but dream violently. When I wake up he’s leaning over me. When the sun is high he unbundles me, lifts me up and takes me to a place between two rocks where the small stones of the beach are warm from the sun. He lays me down. They feel so warm. His big hands are very gentle as he takes off my pajamas, and I don’t resist. He unties a coil of kelp that has been in the canoe, pours fish oil from it, and rubs it over me. He leaves me there in the sun and fills his shirt with the pebbles warmed by the sun, and piles the hot pebbles against my sides, against my arms and legs, between my legs. He returns with more until I am covered in warm stones. I can’t move. I drift off in the heat.

The wind blows hard that night, and for the first time he builds a fire. He puts in stones to heat them, then he makes a bed of hot stones, covered with kelp leaves and tips of cedar. He lays me on it, then covers me with more hot stones. He comes back throughout the night to replace the stones, keeping me warm, and giving me water to drink. In the morning when he uncovers me, he laughs at my pale body in the sun. He rubs the oil from my skin with soft bark from a cedar, and covers me with a new coat of oil. He keeps his hands between my legs a moment, seems in thought, watches me, then he covers me in warm stones. I sleep all day. At night he moves us, but again the wind blows hard, and the waves are high, and we return to our hidden beach. He makes the hot stone bed with the kelp again. I fall into a deep, deep sleep. I awake pouring sweat in the morning. He rubs me dry and helps me dress. I am finally strong enough to walk.

W
e left early and caught the best of the tide, which didn’t turn and harden against us until midmorning. Then we hugged the eastern shore, where islands and points of land slowed the current’s flow. The wind was cool but the sun warmed us, and Nello and Charlie sitting together on the foredeck, leaning against the house in the clear brilliance of the day, gave a peaceful honeymoon aspect to the voyage. Except for Sayami, bandaged and full of holes. In the mountains to the west, the lengthening plumes of fog poured thicker down the clefts, spilling ever farther over the cold sea. The wind brought tufts of haze and laid them gently over us like children lay angel hair on Christmas trees. Color drained from the world. Near me on the aft deck Sayami made a scuffling sound.

“What is it?” I said with little interest. “Fever?”

“Hell, no.”

“Infection?”

“You kidding? He poured half the sea in them.” He shifted around trying to get comfortable, then settled back and looked west over the mountains where the fog blew from. “I was going to go home after this,” he said. “Get a small
ryokan
in the mountains where I’m from. You should see the colors this time of year. When a quick snow comes, the reds and yellows burn through the whiteness. Most people like to get married when the cherry blossoms bloom. Me, I’ll take the snow. If she waited.”

He swept water off the caprails.

“And now?”

“Ha! Now. I was going to get five hundred for him. That’s gone. Five hundred for the masks. That’s in doubt. A thousand for you. Hell.”

“You could live on that?”

His face changed, became more businesslike. He looked at my face, my chest, as if he were trying to find a good place for a bullet.

“No,” he said flatly. “Not on that.”

“What, then?”

“Her.”

I must have looked horrible, because he quickly looked away.

“What about her?” I said.

He looked away at the mountains again as if they were about to tell him something. “He promised me ten for her.”

I didn’t say a word. Just tried to gauge how much strength was left in him, how much greed, what kind of hardness.

“Alive,” he said, almost reprimanding me. “Alive.”

“You could kill me after I find her,” I said. “Then you could get it all.”

He laughed a sad, embarrassed laugh. “I’m not good at my job,” he said. “Wolves, bears, cougars, sure. In the war, sure. They had me snipe. Good eyes, calm hands. From far away, but close up? I have trouble killing flies.”

“Especially those in love.”

He laughed.

“You can wait till I walk away,” I said. “Then shoot me from a distance.”

“Too late,” he snapped. “I’ve already seen your eyes.”

“You’d seen Olson’s.”

“But I didn’t like them. I owed him a couple of bullets anyway.”

Off the starboard bow rocky shreds of islands broke out of the mist, with wind-tormented trees jutting at the broken angles the gales had left them, only their evenly shorn tops rising toward the east. I glared into the rifts among the rocks, for any movement, for the dark line. “There’s a good chance she’ll go back with you,” I said. “Just shake my hand and go.”

He looked past me into the distance to the west.

“Last night,” he said. “The stars. Everything so perfect. A thing like that can’t happen.”

From behind the last island discernible in the mist, where I couldn’t be sure if it was a rock or a shadow or my imagination, came a long, flat shape; like a canoe. It stopped, then drifted silkily ahead.

“Nello,” I called softly. I looked through the binoculars. We were heading away from the islands, amassing more and more mist between us, and what had been to my naked eye a shadow of a line became, through binoculars, a diffused stain. Nello came aft, looked through the binoculars, then handed them back to me.

“It’s them. Right?” I said.

“Jesus, Cappy. I don’t know. Could be them. Could be anything. Could be nothing.”

“But you said they’d turn here.”

“Cappy….”

“Why would they stay out in the open? Way out of their way?”

“I told you: he was raised to deceive. Whatever you think he’ll do, he’ll do the opposite. Wherever you think he’ll go, he’ll go the other way. And when you think you figured him out, when you expect him to do the opposite, he’ll do the opposite of that.”

“But he let us see him. Was that on purpose, do you think? Is he trying to draw us in there among the rocks?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your gut feeling?”

“My gut’s in knots.”

The rocks of the islands blurred; only the dark spruce trunks twisted, crippled in the fog.

“And if I follow him in there?”

“There is a short sound with a channel at its end, but I don’t know it well. We’d have to hit it at high, high tide. At dusk. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe we’d get through. But if we run aground, we’ll be there till April.”

“That’s what he wants, isn’t it?”

“You think so?”

“Sure.”

“Then probably not.”

T
HE LAST TWISTED
spruce trunk paled, then vanished. We sailed placidly through the fog; the western shore we saw just before tacking; the slopes of eastern forest, warmed all day by the sun, emerged as we neared in layers of rounded hills.

By dusk the air had cooled, but the wind remained. The eastern shores suddenly steepened, darkened, then split and, with two small islands marking an entrance, opened into a narrow sound. It reached fogless but dismal, twisting at the feet of rocky bluffs, as uninviting as a grave. We turned. The wind rose and pushed us in. The bank of fog towered behind us pressing us into the gloom.

The closeness of the place was suffocating. Out in the strait, in the fog, I could at least imagine open water around us, but here—trapped by the bluffs and brooding cedars and black water still as glass—I had the sensation of falling down a well in a dream.

“F
IVE MILES TO
the village,” I heard Nello say, and all the time I kept falling.

Slivers of islands—reduced to forms of least resistance by the relentless back-and-forth scouring of the tides—shot by us. Twilight fell. The wall of fog closed in from behind, then, just as it buried the stern, it burst, shooting plumes among the trees and over islands. We glided in silence. The fog filled every indentation, every hollow. There was something unspeakably foreign about the place; the strange bittersweet smell of the evergreens, the riddled fog, the uncertain light that now grew dim, now brightened, as if even the sun wasn’t sure whether to stay or go. The silent current carried us with an eerie lack of movement of the ketch. The sails stayed full yet the wind seemed to come from nowhere. According to the compass, we were heading south, which made no sense—not much did except for the smell of fried meat from the galley.

Sayami was behind me on the aft deck, oiling, cleaning, adjusting the Winchester for the hundredth time in two days, wrapping it in a grease-soaked rag to keep the fog off it, coddling it with the tenderness of a lover. Nello sat in the bow, his legs crossed, leaning slightly forward, motionless, like a watchful Buddha. Patches of fog drifted over him, buried him, then flew off, and he and the bowsprit stood out starkly against the black water.

I heard Kate whisper,
Then what?
And I could see her walk away.

Nello tensed. He was staring to port, off the bow, into the shadow of the hollow bluff. I looked until my eyes burnt but saw nothing. I heard Sayami breathing behind me, then a soft sound, the cloth sliding from the rifle onto the deck, and the sound of the rifle being pumped, slowly and as silently as possible.

We all saw it at once. The killer whale’s back was as black as the sea, but sliced the water into a sinuous wake with its tall fin. He dove with a violent splash of his tail that shattered the stillness until the last echo was swallowed by the gloom.

The pass narrowed; there was less light. To be safe, I edged the ketch into the center. Sayami stirred. He had risen to one knee and, with an elbow on a stanchion, held the Winchester.

Charlie popped out the hatch. “Cappy,” she said with her warmest smile. “Eat now?”

“Shhh,” Sayami whispered. “Shhh.”

He raised the rifle and aimed. Nello spun around and looked at me, hand questioning. I thought they had both lost their minds; nothing moved anywhere. Only the dusk thickened. A breath of wind swirled the mist. I heard Sayami stop breathing. Ahead, the mist solidified, and there, where Sayami was aiming, was the dark canoe. They were maybe ten boat-lengths ahead, close to shore, moving in the slower part of the current, and I could make out the Kwakiutl’s broad shoulders, slowly leaning, pulling, leaning, pulling. He was on one knee in the stern, paddling on his right side, full strokes but jagged, as if his strength had ebbed. She was slumped in the bow. We closed in. Sayami, aiming, whispered, “Do I shoot him?”

I couldn’t answer. Suddenly all I wanted was to turn the ketch and go home.

“If he turns around it’ll be too late,” Sayami pleaded.

“You might shoot her,” I snapped.

“How bad a shot you think I am?”

He was right. The canoe was off our bow quarter, with a goodly space between the Kwakiutl and Kate.

“Would you shoot if you were me?” I whispered.

“I don’t know,” he said.

We couldn’t have been more than a hundred feet away.

“Last chance,” Sayami whispered. We were so close we could see the Kwakuitl’s muscles bulge as he pulled the paddle trough. “Damn you!” Sayami hissed, as the Kwakiutl turned. He must have sensed us, for we made no sound, and he turned and looked at us, unsure but unafraid. Then he pulled ferociously. And pulled. They were getting away. Kate raised her head, as if awaking from a dream. Her face was drawn, barely hanging on to life.

“Kill him,” I whispered.

“Damn you!” Sayami hissed.

“Kill him!”

“You kill him,” and he thrust the rifle at me.

All in one mindless motion I spun, raised the rifle, barely aimed, and fired. The bluffs thundered back the sound.

The Kwakiutl lurched forward with his head thrown back, his back arched, but still he plunged the paddle in and tried to pull; but then, as if possessed, he rose, twisted, teetered, stumbled. “Jeezus,” Sayami whispered—as the Kwakiutl plunged his paddle again and again, madly paddling air. Finally something inside him must have broken, because he stopped, then slowly, like a falling tree, tumbled over the side. With his foot caught under the thwart, he flipped the canoe on its side. The canoe filled and the current sucked it under.

The water was empty.

“Nello!” I yelled.

But Nello was flinging the skiff into the sea. Then he was in it and rowing like a madman. I spun the wheel. The ketch turned, the sails slatted. We headed after him—toward the empty water.

Nello was halfway there when the water near him burst, and out popped the oily bottom of the overturned canoe. Nello lifted its side to look below; then lowered it. And kept rowing.

I felt Sayami gently take the rifle from my hand. Charlie buried her face in her hands. “Poor Cappy,” she sobbed. “Poor Cappy.”

KATE

The Burial Cave

I’m sure I’m dying. Everything seems so very far away: the canoe, my hands, the broken shells next to my face as I lie on the beach. Even the tiny, transparent fish that skitter across the water and up onto the rocks. I paddle only once, then stop, not because I’m tired, but because it seems silly to try when the sea is so unreachable. I felt better for a while after the hot stones, but through the cold fog, hour by hour, I feel myself slip away. We are in a long, dark passage when I hear a noise, I turn, and there float tall sails against the hills, like great white wings of the Angel of Death. There’s a terrifying boom, and then I’m under the black water. So silent. He pulls me out into a dark and sloping tomb, with just a cloud of light in the water at my feet. So cold. He lifts me on top of him and wraps his arms around me to keep me warm. Slowly, the water recedes, until on its surface shines a brilliant moon. Its light dances on the ceiling of our big, big tomb. He picks me up and sits me against the wall. On either side of me sit a row of dead. Some just bones, others shrunken flesh. So quiet. All in a row. On the far wall are piles of boxes and baskets and some canoes. He pushes a canoe over the sloping stones into the water, shattering the moonlight. The tomb goes dark. With all of us dead.