Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel (3 page)

Keb nodded his appreciation as his one good eye continued to survey the room. Seated against the far wall were half a dozen Greentop boys, loggers tipped back in their chairs and eating pizza from Shelikof’s, the local takeout. Idaho rednecks, hard-bitten timber men with wood chips on their pants and frowns on their faces, cigarettes in their fingers. Oil-stained gloves tucked under their belts. Silver metal hats upside down on the floor, spinning when they kicked them with their steel-toed boots. Old Keb shuffled over.

Charlie Gant got to his feet and wiped pizza sauce off his lips with an oily sleeve. A disk of pepperoni fell on the floor. Steve the Lizard Dog snarfed it up. Charlie offered a hand. “Hey, Keb, we’re all really sorry. Damn, I mean—it just happened and like, I don’t know. . . .”

Sitting next to his older brother, his face opaque, Tommy Gant had his eyes on Mackenzie Chen.

The crowd moved in behind Old Keb. He could feel their weight, their hunger for an explanation. Truman handed Keb a cup of coffee.

Keb asked, “What happened, Charlie?”

“It just happened, it was an accident.”

Keb studied him hard.

Charlie said, “James was a choker-setter and . . . I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I can’t say.” Tommy and Pete and the others nodded, thumbs hooked in their suspenders. Yep, can’t say.

AIRSICKNESS NEVER BOTHERED Old Keb until he started flying in these little planes that shouldered their way into dour clouds. Rain pelted the windows. Keb closed his eyes over the clear-cuts of Chichagof Island and Port Thomas, mountains and valleys stripped of their trees. Streams brown with sediment. A ravaged land. The timber industry had never bothered him until it all went wrong. Until chain saws brought out the worst in boys and corporations the worst in men and his own people lost their way.

The affable pilot pushed his headset mouthpiece away and said over his shoulder, “Hang on, Keb. I’ll make this ride as smooth as possible. There’s a headset in the seat pocket in front of you if you want to use it. I got Buddy Tabor on channel one and Emmylou Harris on channel two.”

Keb didn’t move. Opposite him was a woman in a NMRS uniform, and behind him were two other uniformed federal officers who worked for the National Marine Reserve Service, a new federal agency that Truman had said was established to protect America’s threatened oceans, though exactly how the oceans were threatened Keb didn’t know. He wasn’t sure he
wanted
to know. Everything was threatened these days.

“I’m sorry about your grandson,” the pilot added.

A nod from Keb. He was going to barf any minute unless this buckaroo got his plane to calm down.

When the pilot did find smoother air, Keb leaned forward and asked him, “Do I know you?”

“Terry . . . Terry McNamee.” Big smile. Crooked teeth. “I contract out to the National Marine Reserve Service. My mom works at PacAlaska with your daughter, Ruby Bauer. She’s your daughter, right?”

Keb nodded. No matter how much she irritated him, she would always be his daughter. Chichagof Island receded off their tail.

“It’s been a bad spring,” Terry said, as Keb studied whitecaps below on Chatham Strait. “Crappy weather. And now this, you know . . . the accident. . . .”

Old Keb nodded again.

“Remember that basketball game last year against Unalakleet, when he scored thirty points and had two defenders on him all night? Damn . . . I sure hope he’s okay.”

Old Keb shrunk into his big coat. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and found, to his surprise, a feather. He pulled it out, stared at it. Raven black. How did it get there? Holding it by the shaft, he twisted it slowly between his thumb and forefinger. Had he put it there? The hand that held it felt more agile. The feather flashed with rare light, not black but blue, a stormy sky over indigo water. Keb trembled and dropped the feather. For an instant he was a boy again with Uncle Austin in Crystal Bay, ninety years ago, watching golden leaves fall off tall cottonwood trees, spiraling down, laughing as they tried to catch them.

“We’re over Admiralty Island,” Terry said to him. “How are you doing?”

“Fine,” Keb lied.

Admiralty Island, what kind of name was that? A square-rigged British name. Keb’s people called the island
Kootsnahoo
, Fortress of the Bears. A little to the north, off the plane’s left wing, was Point Retreat, so named by Lieutenant Joseph Whidbey of His Majesty’s Ship
Discovery
, when a warrior band of Auke Tlingit pursued Whidbey and his sallow-faced sailors, those scurvy-wracked, black-gummed, homesick men who rowed facing backward while the Tlingit paddled facing forward. According to Uncle Austin, who knew everything, Whidbey served under the bloated Captain George Vancouver, a man without imagination. “Captain Van,” his men called him, but never to his face. Now the chase off Point Retreat, the Tlingit warriors stabbing the sea with each stroke, each man fixed with a
niyaháat
and a
shak’áts’
, a breastplate and a double-ended dagger. The cedar canoe running true. The
x’i
g
aa
k
áa
in his
shadaa
, a wooden helmet, fiercely beckoning his men forward. Not far ahead, Whidbey’s men rowed for their lives, muskets ready. A rising wind filled their sails and gave them a close escape. Five years later the Russians arrived with Aleut slaves and powerful cannon and a lust for furs. The Tlingit fought bravely, where Sitka stands today, and lost. Evicted from their home, they lived apart from the Russians. Then came the missionaries and whalers. In time, the shamans died, and so did the Tlingit language—almost—and the world was never the same. “You see, little man,” Uncle Austin would say to young Keb, “when you’re rich, it can all be taken away.”

The plane buffeted. The NMRS woman seated next to Keb handed him his raven feather. Blue uniform. Shipwrecked eyes. A face like
héen
x
uka hin
x
uka
—the surface of water. “Do you remember me?” she asked.

Just then Terry butted in, “Whoa, Keb, sorry about the turbulence. We’ll have you there in a minute. Remember that game against Skagway, the state championship? James was in rare form that night, I’ll tell you. . . .”

RUBY WAS AT the airport. “Hi, Pops,” she said as she looped her arm through Old Keb’s. “Thanks for coming.”

How was it she managed to be taller than him? Everybody was taller than him these days. At the rate he was shrinking, they could bury him in a shoebox. It was one thing to be a
shaan
, an old person, but another to be a
shannák’w
, a little old person.

Gray-streaked hair framed Ruby’s brown face, her eyebrows tipped in black. A kittiwake among gulls, she was a cliff-nester, a risk-taker, a big shot Princeton graduate and university professor and president of the PacAlaska Heritage Foundation.

Keb watched her ignore Little Mac.

He sucked in air. The airport was too crowded, too hot; the lights too bright. Where was the blue uniform woman with the shipwrecked eyes? Did he remember her? Why should he remember her? He heard voices, the cut of sharp words and questions. He fumbled with his buttons, trying to remove his heavy coat. He could hear Ruby above the others, speaking . . . to him? No . . . about him. About James, too. Then he understood . . . the heat and light were television cameras. Oyyee . . . He raised his hand to shield his face.

A man yelled from the back, “Ruby, Ruby! Allen Jenkins here with the
Juneau Empire
. Do you know the exact nature of James’s injury? Have you heard anything from Duke or the NBA?”

Old Keb staggered and nearly fell and somebody caught him. “I got you, Gramps.” It was Josh, Ruby’s eldest. Faithful Josh holding him and walking him away, and Little Mac helping, walking him to a row of seats and sitting him down and treating him like a breakable thing, a piece of pottery. Dear God. How many times since Bessie’s death had he sat alone with the silence, with only the sound of time? How many times had he thought about dying without dying himself?

“I’m hot,” Keb told Josh.

“I’ll bet you are.”

“When do we go to the hospital?”

Josh didn’t answer. Ruby appeared, kneeling, her thin, bony hand strangely talonlike on Old Keb’s arm. “When do we go to the hospital?” he asked again.

“They sent him down to Seattle, Pops. It’s a head injury. He needed to go right away. There’s another flight in a couple hours. I’ve booked you on it with a first-class upgrade. Robert and Lorraine are coming up from L.A. You want something to eat?”

“What?”

“Food, Pops. You hungry?”

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

“All right, all right, let me finish this interview, okay?”

“Don’t talk to those people.”

“I’ll handle it, Pops.”

The minute Ruby left, Josh and Little Mac got the old man to his feet and walked him to the restroom. Shuffling along, Keb looked down to see two angels beside him, two little girls with open faces, smiling their missing-tooth smiles, red ribbons in their hair, lips moving, making birdlike voices. Josh’s kids? Yes . . . but their names? What were their names? Would they grow up to resent each another, like Ruby and Gracie?

A sadness came over him. He was tired. Tired of himself and everyone else. Tired of forgetting. Tired of eating pills. Tired of being tired. He wanted to lie down and never get up; fall over dead—dead before he hit the floor—as the doctors said would happen when the aneurysm burst near his heart. It could happen any day, they said. Keb’s family had listened with long faces as the doctors explained that the aneurysm was inoperable. That was five years ago and here he was, still on his feet, dying by degrees. And the strokes? At last count he’d had twenty or more, the doctors said. Little pieces of scar tissue dotted his brain where memories used to be. He didn’t know the names of his great granddaughters, but his mind like a fist held on to the names that brightened his own childhood, the ones he learned when traveling with Uncle Austin on the water—the name of the hunter who could outsmart a seal, the name of the island with big wild strawberries, the name of the woman who could clean a salmon with her one hand (a wolf took the other one, she said), the name of the inlet where mountain goats came down to shore to eat algae, the cove that offered protection from a north wind, the sandy shore where a family of river otters played. These he remembered, but so much he did not.

Standing at the urinal with his forearm against the wall, his head against his arm, he peed an old man’s dribble. Damn, he had known discomfort before, but nothing like this. His cousin Johnny once used a pistol to shoot a halibut in a skiff and put the bullet through Keb’s foot instead. That didn’t feel so good. Falling off a cliff on Jonas Island and shish kebabbing himself on a spruce branch ranked up there too. A chain saw ripped into his thigh once. He did his best to forget that. There was the time he went berry picking in Dundas Bay and fell asleep barefoot in the sunshine and awoke to find a bear licking the berry juice off his toes. He yelled and the startled bear took a bite and ran off, leaving Keb with five toes on one foot and four and a half on the other. And of course, the war, the shrapnel in his hip, the artillery thunder, he and the others pinned down by machine guns, the gut-shot men moaning through the night, crying for their mothers. That was pain too, a scar. Why did he live when so many others did not? He never talked about it, or tried to make others understand. He wasn’t sure he understood himself.

He grabbed a paper towel and dabbed the sweat off his brow and thought about all the old farts in the rest home who sit around killing time until time kills them. Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. What to do? Keb straightened up and sealed his mind. He’d go south to the city by the sea, the city named for the great chief who said all men were children of the Earth, the city of coffee and computers. He’d visit his grandson and tell him Raven doesn’t care about fame or fortune. Raven doesn’t care about diplomas or degrees. Raven looks for scars, the signs of suffering that give a man his depth. Add this wound to the others no strangers see. Add it and move on because it’s the only thing to do. There are two tragedies in life: Not getting what you want, and getting it. That’s what he would tell his gifted, tormented grandson. After that, Old Keb Wisting would return to Alaska and walk into the woods and lie down and die.

THE FLIGHT TO Seattle put Old Keb right to sleep. First class, lots of room, recliner seat. He awoke with a sense of suffocation; had to get his shoes off. No easy task. Socks too. Ruby sat next to him and helped. How good it felt to let his toes breathe. He wiggled them and drank bottled water; she drank two Bloody Marys, then four, six. Little vodka bottles everywhere. She buried herself in her work, fingers pounding her small computer, PacAlaska papers and three-ringed binders spilling out of her seat and into Keb’s. His eyes fluttered open and closed, heavy from the weight of so much change. What would Uncle Austin say? It had been more than forty years since Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims
Settlement Act that gave Alaska Natives land and money—nearly a billion dollars—to invest in their future. No reservations. No Trail of Tears. No Wounded Knee but no Custer either. Things would be different in Alaska. The meetings lasted forever. To manage their land with all its oil, minerals, timber, fish, and tourism potential, the Natives created thirteen regional corporations and more than two hundred village corporations, with each Native a shareholder. They hired attorneys to set things up and protect their interests. It was all so daring and new. Keb remembered it clearly, too clearly—all that money, all those lawyers in Fords and Chevys instead of canoes. On the day the act passed and celebrations erupted across the state, Uncle Austin, sick at home with cancer, said, “I hope we did the right thing.” That night he died.

According to Gracie, corporations around the world had become cultures: General Motors, Toyota, Apple, Nike. But never had indigenous cultures become instant corporations. It was an experiment, like splitting atoms.