Authors: Anne Argula
“There’s Molsons in the fridge and cotton sheets on the bed and the Bee Gees on the hi-fi, just so you don’t have to go into a strange and quiet place.”
“Great. Listen, Frank, I’m curious. What kind of work were you in before you started running the cottages?”
“Why, do I seem out of my element as an innkeeper?”
“A little, I guess. I just had the feeling you once did something…outdoorsy.”
“As outdoorsy as you can get, little lady. I fished crab for years in the Bering Sea, and lived to tell about it.”
“He was a wild one, he was,” said Angie.
My spine struck high C. Down the front ran the sweatworks again.
“I laid away a nice nest egg, sold the boat, bought the cottages. Now you have the complete story of my life.”
“Oh, you held back a few things,” said a devilish Angie.
“You hush now.”
“You had a boat?”
“Oh, you can’t crab without a boat. Your arms get tired.”
He and the missus cracked up. I could see the secret to their marriage.
“Did your boat have a funny name?”
“Only yachts have funny names. Fishin’ is deadly serious, and the boats are christened accordingly.”
I was glad to learn that.
Then he went on: “‘Northern Comfort’ could be ironic, I guess, but it wasn’t meant to be.”
Woi Yesus. I’d already heard enough to know my life would never again be quite the same, the way it has to change once you’ve seen a ghost or a flying saucer or some other thing you know cannot exist. You wind up spending the rest of your life retelling the story, hoping someone will believe you, which is kind of what I’m doing right now, this keyboard on my lap, the snow falling outside my window.
I went the extra fathom with Frank.
“Did that boy, James Coyote, ever crew for you?”
“Isn’t that something?” trilled Angie. She looked at the old skiper and clapped her hands once. “After you left, we started talking about that old murder…that awful tragedy.”
“Yeah, and I remembered,” said Frank, “how James crewed for me one summer. He made big money for those days and bought himself a used Ford four-by, still in high school. He told me he wouldn’t be going out with me the next season. All he wanted to do was ride his four-by and chase after white girls.”
“Oh, he didn’t say that either,” said Angie.
“No, he said he couldn’t go out again ‘cause he was flat out scared to. There’s no shame in that. Every man who goes crabbing up there is scared but they weigh the risk against the reward and they go out anyway. I really expected James would too, but by the time the season rolled around again, somebody had blown off his head.”
Woi Yesus again. I was an abbreviated boo away from flinging off my clothes and running naked through the rain.
I collected Odd at the end of the counter and told him we had to get outside or else I was going to disappear in a flash of flame. On the sidewalk I saw that he had the old Indian man in tow, his hand under his arm, half guiding, half supporting.
“He says he knows me…from before.”
Woi Yesus a third time.
“Where are we taking him?”
“He’s taking us.”
The old man had to sit in the back, in the cage, but it seemed to make no great difference to him. He was secure in his cosmic innocence. To worry about him talking off your ear had to be another of Frank’s lame jokes, because he didn’t say anything, except to direct us, finally to one more dirt road that dipped into a wetlands, though the whole island seemed wetlands to me. When we got to where we were going, the drizzle stopped and the sun broke through. I put on my shades.
A large black mongrel with wet matted hair barked menacingly at our arrival, out of a sense of duty, apparently, because he seemed happy to see us once we alit from the car, his tail wagging, his head down for a pat. A cat on the porch licked her paw. A rooster and his harem of hens scratched about within leaping distance of the cat but were unafraid.
Old man Drinkwater asked us to wait while he went inside.
It was a poor house, one tiny room added to another over the years, one shed of plywood and sheet metal constructed after another, as the need arose and the materials afforded. I had been measuring my breath ever since getting out of the car. Now standing there, looking at the house, waiting for its occupants, I was pretty much holding it in. In spite of the face I’d been putting on, I had all but bought into Odd’s experience. Maybe later I would be able to sort out some other explanation, but for the moment I was swept up into it and it was hard not to believe that Odd had led another life, and it had been on this ground.
Earlier I warned him that he could have been the number one suspect. It never occurred to me, until that moment, at the Coyote house, that he might have been the victim. I watched him for any signs of recognition. I didn’t see any. The dog had certainly taken to him, rubbing up against his leg as Odd roughed up his ear, and he was an old dog, but he was not
that
old.
“Odd? What are we supposed to say to these people?”
“I was hoping you’d know. You’re senior.”
Before I could smack him upside the head, Drinkwater came out with a couple almost as old as he. They were rail thin, the woman from wear, the man from disease. A hose connected his nostrils to a tank of oxygen he moved with a hand truck. This was an island of infirms, I thought. They looked at us from the porch and we looked at them from the yard until our host waved us feebly to join them on the porch, where there was enough seating to accommodate a small pow-wow: a rusty metal glider, several plastic molded chairs, chaise lounges made from rubber tubing, a few overturned milk crates, and a bench seat from an old pickup, the terrycloth seat covers still on it. This was the most comfortable spot and was offered to Odd and me. You had to lower yourself to one knee to get on it, then stretch your legs out in front.
I don’t know what old Drinkwater had told them, I don’t know what he knew or what went on between him and Odd while I was hosing myself down in the ladies’ room. We sat on the porch and said nothing for some moments, watching the vapor rise from the back of the black dog as the newly emerged sun hit it.
The old dog broke the ice by bringing a soggy tennis ball and dropping it at Odd’s feet. He threw it over the porch railing and the dog leaped after it.
“Now you’re in for it,” said Mr. Coyote.
“They’re from Spokane,” said our guide.
“We used to go there, to dance,” said Mr. Coyote.
I had decided, for once, I was going to keep my mouth shut.
“We’re policemen there,” said Odd, then corrected himself, “…police persons.” I wanted to smack him again. “We got here last night, on police business. and it looks like we’ll be going back tomorrow.” All three of the Indians nodded their heads solemnly. Odd threw the ball again for the dog. “Last night, at the tribal police headquarters, I got interested in your case, James’ case…his murder.” They nodded again, in the same way, as though both comments drafted the same water. “Do you mind talking about it?”
James’ parents took a moment and without looking at each other said, “No,” simultaneously, and our old guide said something in their own language, which in the world is probably spoken by about a hundred and twenty-two people. Whatever he said, it made a hell of an impression on them. I couldn’t take it. I had to ask.
“I told them this young man used to live here,” said Drinkwater, “before he was the person he is now. I knew him back then.”
“Why didn’t you say it in English?” My stomach was hurting, like maybe I’d had a bad clam, even though I’d had nothing to eat since frybread, if you don’t count those two nervous bites of pie a la mode.
“It makes more sense in Shalish,” he said.
I got it. I knew a little Polish, not enough to explain this, but I knew it would make even less sense in Polish. My mother’s people kept their eyes on the potato, their brogues on the ground. It was the Irish half of me playing havoc with my grasp on reality.
Odd asked the old couple to tell us about their son, dead these more than thirty years now. The father, whose name was David, said his son’s name was James Coyote. He died when he was seventeen, a senior in the local high school. He was the second oldest of four brothers. Two of his brothers are still on the island, but Warren, the youngest, went to Las Vegas and became a dealer of blackjack. Having said all that, he stopped talking. Either that was all he had to say or all he could say, until refueled with more oxygen.
“Did he have any enemies?” asked Odd. I don’t know what book he was playing from, but it seemed like a reasonable question.
The parents looked to our guide, as though he may be better able to field that question. “We are all family here,” he volunteered. “We have our disagreements, but we eat the same food, sleep under the same sky. To kill my son would be to kill your own, to kill yourself. James was killed by a white man.”
Why was I part of this? I felt embarrassed and ashamed to watch this frail old couple put through this. They had lost a son. I still had a son.
“Then, did he have any enemies among the whites?” asked Odd.
“Yes,” said his father, “One.”
We looked at him dumbly, but it had no effect on him. “And who would that be?” I asked, finally.
“Someone who did not want him with that girl.”
If they seemed to know little about their deceased son, they knew nothing at all about his girlfriend, Jeannie Olson. It was a new romance, his first serious girlfriend, revealed to them by one of the brothers, who teased James about it, because she was white and an inch taller than he. They had misgivings about it, not that such a thing had never happened before, to other young people, and even some people not so young, but when it had it created awkward self-consciousness for the couple and contempt from the community and usually ended in shame and regret.
Our old guide said, “To quote Woody Allen, ‘The heart goes where it wants to go.’”
I burst out laughing, I couldn’t help it. The old guy smiled. Score one.
Odd fell into a lazy pattern of throwing the ball for the dog, a question here, a question there. I eased back into the cast off seat of the totalled pickup, relieved that he had not yet opened his arms and cried, “Mom! Dad!” The old guide who claimed to have known him back then had not yet put his finger on who he had been. It was like trying to remember a name that escapes you.
“What about that old hermit,” Odd asked.
“Wayne Coffey?”
“Was that his name?”
“Wayne was not a hermit,” said Mr. Coyote. “He was in my father’s house, and my father was in his. It was only later when he was old and tired of all the noise, that people started to talk about him. Wayne had no hatred in his heart for anyone.”
“Could be whoever did it is dead,” I said.
The three Indians looked at me as though sorry for my stupidity.
“No,” said Odd, with authority, “he is not dead.”
Now, they looked at him, but in a different way, like he was the smart one.
“
He?
” said I. “How do you know it’s a he?”
“Could a woman shotgun two innocent people?”
“Catch me on a bad day.”
“It was a man,” said Odd. Then, “I wish I could see that pick-up they were in that night.”
“It’s out in the shed,” the father said.
“You still have it?” asked Odd. I couldn’t believe it myself.
“You can’t sell a vehicle somebody’s died in, unless you sell it to a white man, and I couldn’t do that.”
We stepped through the mud to one of the several sheds, this one big enough to hold a car. The dog had given up on the game, but followed Odd’s heels as if trying to impress a new master. It was slow going because James’ father had to wheel his oxygen tank through the mud, but once outside the shed it was all gravel. I stomped the mud off my Rockports. The woman swung open the two wooden doors to the shed.
“It’s under that,” said David,
that
being a dusty blue tarp. Odd took one corner, I took the other, and we pulled the tarp away, laying it out on the gravel. The truck was white, scarred and dinged, with a canopy over the bed, and spread on the bed was a mover’s blanket. There was little room left in the shed for anything else, though spare parts hung from nails in the walls.