Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel (24 page)

Afternoon softened into evening that first day. Not until dusk did the
Etude
motor into Boussole Bay. Everybody stood on deck while Rene worked the wheel and the sea pushed from behind. The sun fell back a notch. Bold peaks stood against a salmon-colored sky, and beneath them, cradled in high contours, blue-white glaciers gleamed. Keb fidgeted. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. They were on the wrong side of the mountains. They were supposed to be in the canoe, in Crystal Bay. Patience and openheartedness, Father Mikal would say. Never become so old you cannot make new friends, hard as it may be.

Was Little Mac saying the same thing now, the way she held his hand?

Keb remembered when she was born, how she made her father dance and her mother cry. Keb had hoped to be her godfather, but the Chen family chose an uncle in Seattle. Old Keb still looked out for her. The only Asian girl in Jinkaat, she made a fine target for a thousand small discriminations, big ones, too. If his head was working right, Keb could see a light coming on in her these last few days. In James and Kid Hugh, too.

Time on the
Etude
was easier to accept after a hot shower and cheese crepes with blueberry sauce. Add to that Cajun-blackened salmon and fine conversation courtesy of the black chef, his name a mishmash of syllables that Old Keb could never repeat. “Just call me Angola,” the black man said in his deep voice, white teeth flashing, square nails on his long fingers and vein-rippled hands that put out plate after plate of delicacies, a feast for Old Keb, James, Little Mac, and Kid Hugh. Steve did well, too, with a couple rounds of minced beef.

The French geologists had funny names, Shock and Pee Air, as Old Keb heard them. Little Mac spelled them out: “J-a-c-q-u-e-s” and “P-i-e-r-r-e.”

It reminded Keb of when two Japanese photographers arrived in Jinkaat years ago, a husband and wife team who summered at Point Adolphus to take pictures of humpback whales. They got so close to the whales, they said, that they saw them swim right under their kayaks and roll onto their sides for a better view, eyeball to eyeball. All summerlong the Japanese visited town and bowed before everybody they met, and came into Oddmund and Dag’s store every couple
weeks for supplies. They taught Keb how to eat steamed white rice with chopsticks, back when his hands worked better, and Gracie and Galley Sally how to make good sushi. At the end of summer they gave a slide show in the high school gym that was so popular they had to give it twice in one night. Truman told the newspaper they were more popular than basketball, which was heresy, and he got in trouble for it. Their names, as Keb heard them, were Oreo and Cheetah, the cookie and the cat. That’s what he called them. Only after they returned to Tokyo did Oddmund tell Keb their real names: Norio and Chika. Well, what do you expect from a candle-headed old man, his ears filled with hairs and wax?

THE WIND FORGOT to blow. Storms may have descended over the Aleutians or Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, or raked across Arctic Alaska or the Canadian Yukon. They might have hit farther south, the Queen Charlottes, Vancouver Island, or all the way down to Puget Sound. But in Boussole Bay the wind held its breath and that was fine. Keb knew they’d pay later.

He stayed on the yacht to nap while James, Little Mac, and Kid Hugh rowed the inflatable to shore, and Jacques and Pierre ran their skiff all over the place to poke around with rock hammers, maps, magnifying glasses, and big instruments balanced on tripods. The days were so kind, the sun so warm, the light so luminous and rich, the air so still, the mountains so alive, that Old Keb nearly forgot he wanted to die. It’s funny how dying is regarded in bad taste, despite the fact that ten out of ten people do it. After Bessie and his sons died, part of Keb died, too. Happy songs made him sad back then. Sad songs made him happy. All back then, when he lost his way and forgot to carve and watched too much TV and rotted his brain.

“The garbage can in the living room,” Bessie used to call television.

“Don’t go away,” the TV announcer would say. “We’ll be right back.” And back he came every time, the faithful garbage can man, back to tell them all the things they needed to buy. “You deserve it,” he would say. And Keb would sit there with Mitch, Vic, Oddmund, Dag, Daisy, Carmen, and Truman, and think about it.

“It makes a man feel mighty good to deserve something,” Mitch would say.

“Another round of beers,” Vic would say.

“Consumption,” Truman would say, his mouth full of popcorn. “People died of it long ago and still do today, only it’s different.”

Keb had no idea what he was talking about.

Now on the yacht, he kept thinking about his friends, some of them alive, most of them dead, not here, but not absent either. He kept thinking about Uncle
Austin, how he taught him to build a fire in the rain, to sharpen a knife, to regard ten cords of wood as money in the bank, to read the wind and tides with intention, to catch a fish, to build a snare, to live off the land and sea and not just survive, but thrive; to know a thousand things with animal senses—to be smart, strong, sensual, alive, more alive than you’ll ever be indoors. “You can learn to read words on paper,” Uncle Austin would say, “but first learn to read the colors of the wind: k’eeljáa, óoxjaa, sáaná
x
, xóon. Storm wind, strong wind, south wind, north wind. Yánde át, dákde át: onshore wind, offshore wind.” Keb remembered the first fish he ever caught, how Uncle Austin cleaned it and put the fish heart in Keb’s hand, still beating. Some ninety years later he could feel it, the sensation that came over him as a young boy in Crystal Bay. He thought: it’s an ocean of beating hearts, a living sea. Is that when awareness begins? Uncle Austin, Milo Chen, Nathan Red Otter, Father Mikal. Each said it in his way. Bessie, too. The more centered you are, the less you occupy the center. That’s when awareness begins.

One day many years ago Uncle Austin came to take Keb out of school. “You need a written excuse,” the principal said. “Spiritual,” Uncle Austin wrote. “That’s not a valid excuse,” the principal said. “Medicinal,” Uncle Austin wrote. “You’re making this up. Which is it, spiritual or medicinal?”

“Both,” Uncle Austin said. He was taking his nephew out into the woods, to “the temple of tall trees.” “There’s no such place,” the principal said. “Come with us,” Uncle Austin said. The principal did. In his starched white shirt and tie, he left the school and walked into the rain forest with Uncle Austin and young Keb, and stretched out on the moss to watch the tops of the trees swaying in crazy patterns high overhead. “Which way is the wind blowing?” Uncle Austin asked him.

“I can’t tell,” the principal said.

“Stay awhile and watch,” Uncle Austin told him. “You’ll figure it out.”

PALMA BAY WAS another temple, not of tall trees, but of bold geography.

That evening, everybody sat in big soft sofas around a teak table in the
Etude’s
fancy lounge, drinking red wine and Moroccan liquor. Never mind sipping, Jacques and Pierre knocked back wine like water and sailed through three bottles with help from Captain Rene, Angola the chef, and the final member of the crew, a petite, ropy-haired, green-eyed woman from Montreal named Monique, a crossover first mate and chief engineer whose main duty, near as Keb could tell, was keeping Captain Rene’s bed warm. She flirted with Jacques and Pierre, sang with Angola—her voice surprisingly husky, her smile just shy of a
smirk—and fondled Voltaire the arrogant cat. She took a turn on Little Mac’s guitar and handed it back, saying the neck was out of alignment. She and Rene had been to Alaska before, she said. They spent a summer in Sitka working the sport charter fishing fleet. Kid Hugh had worked the same fleet, and turned sour on what he called the “bubba meathead fishing crowd.”

Keb watched Monique regard him from the sharp end of her chin.

Pierre spread a dozen maps across the table, some topographical, one nautical, the rest geological, rich with primary colors showing rock types and faults. Jacques traced his finger along a major fault that ran the full length of the Fairweather Range into Palma Bay at Icy Point. He said two tectonic plates skidded along one another there to create a feature called Earthquake Valley. Yes, Keb knew of a traveler or two who’d gone in there and come out, and others who’d gone in and never come out.

These Frenchmen had a grasp of the past that went back to when Great Raven was an egg. They spoke of millions of years ago when parts of Alaska skidded into other parts and stuck there to make it what it is today. Add to that the cutting and carving by glaciers that a few hundred years ago were much bigger than they were today, the weight of all that ice so great that it depressed the crust of the earth throughout the entire region. Now, with the big glaciers gone, the land was rising, rebounding. That’s what they meant by isostatic rebound. Keb knew of it, but by other names. He knew of piers and canneries built one hundred years ago that now stood rotting and moss-covered back in the forest, fifty feet from the highest high tide. The Dundas Bay cannery where he was born was like this, though he hadn’t been there in a long time. The land had risen tens of feet. As it did, shorelines changed. Islands once near the mainland, separated by shallow water at high tide, were now part of the mainland, as peninsulas. Was the land rising still? Could people rebound, too? Entire ways of life? The only rebound talked about in Jinkaat these days was the basketball rebound, the tangle of elbows and legs beneath the net, and people screaming from the bleachers as if they were in the game too.

Monique went topside and called down, “You might want to come up and see this.” Everybody climbed up and said nothing as Palma Bay filled with weightless, September light. The peaks of the Fairweather Range turned crimson, then pink. Keb found himself gripping the rail, his eyes cast not north-east toward the mountains, but west over the wet curve of ocean where longliners fished for black cod, and skippers played loud rock and roll, and sperm whales cherry-picked the fish off the hooks as the winches hauled them up. That’s how the whales worked. They heard the winches and came to feast
on the cod. East over the Fairweather Range was Crystal Bay, cast in shadow, as Keb imagined, blue light filling deep valleys where wolves put on their winter coats, and bears worked the last salmon streams before denning up. The taste of winter coming. Lean times, rich times, when you paddled behind the mirror and found the identity you would one day like to be, a discovery of your deepest knowing.

SEVENTY NAUTICAL MILES east-southeast of Palma Bay, Anne listened. Not so easy to do. You had to slow down and open up to what early mariners called “the trick of the quiet.” She’d read about it in books. But books only get you so far. After that, you need time.

No hint of dawn. An hour away, maybe two. Not much time to explore the charred ruins of Keb Wisting’s home and carving shed, to learn what she could before the people of his little town were on their feet nursing hot coffee, looking out their windows, and wondering what a fancy-pants federal government boat was doing in their harbor.

Five days since the old man and the canoe had left Jinkaat, and not a word, not a sign. Newspeople encamped in Strawberry Flats asking the same questions all day, every day. Boats from everywhere poking around Icy Strait, as if whoever found Keb Wisting would win a prize. “The old man must be drowned or dead or some damn thing to have disappeared this long,” Ranger Ron said yesterday, as if you could drown but not die.

Anne considered the possibilities. Maybe Old Keb was the raven out the window. Maybe the bear up the bay, the whale deep below, the wren on the woodpile. Maybe the game belongs to Keb Zen Raven and always has. So what the hell? Forget the safety system. Get away. Go alone. Leave Taylor in bed with her delicious boyfriend; run your boat south from Strawberry Flats to Jinkaat in the middle of the night, across Icy Strait before the next big storm. Hit no rocks. Make no waves. Slide in behind the breakwater. Take an empty slip. Walk the hog-backed road up to where they say the old man used to live, where you’ll maybe find clues about who he is or used to be and wants to be again. Not a bad idea if it weren’t so stupid to begin with. A good idea if getting fired was high priority. Anne had no jurisdiction here, tempting the dogs of the night. She wasn’t a
ranger, soldier, sharpshooter, or shape-shifter. She wasn’t Catwoman or James Bond, nothing so cunning or sly. She was a whale biologist who had a federal law enforcement commission in one pocket and a marijuana joint in the other. Maui Wowie. Oh baby. A whale biologist inducted into the SAR. That’s what Ron called it: “SAR, Search and Rescue.” Everything was an acronym these days.

Thirty years old. She still had time to have a family. One child. Just one. She’d need a man for that, right? She’d never done well in the Man Department. Maybe Taylor could give her lessons. Could she make a career in Alaska? Crystal Bay? Working for the US National Marine Reserve Service looked good on paper. But you’ll never get a warm hug from a piece of paper. Many of Anne’s coworkers struggled through a layered bureaucracy made worse by too many meetings and never enough creativity. Like Anne, they’d done what they were supposed to: brushed their teeth, cleaned their rooms, set the table, gone to school, gotten good grades, attended the best universities, and scored prestigious jobs in science and conservation only to be frustrated. Even dispirited. And the alternative? Capitalism and the cult of money? The mythology of happiness through more possessions and endless growth? Not that Anne idealized poverty. She had homeless friends in Honolulu whose plight broke her heart. Only a fool idealizes poverty. But to think we can grow our economy forever, always on the back of nature. Madness.

What to do?

Rob a bank? Storm a palace? Grow a garden? Plant a tree? The irony and mystery of it all, this journey called life, this practice of being human. Is home where we begin or where we end up? Is it where we long to be or where we make use of our best gifts?

Minutes ago, as Anne began walking up the road, she’d seen a bumper sticker on an old rusty truck: “I’d rather be here than have a career.”