Ghost Sea: A Novel (Dugger/Nello Series) (3 page)

I
t was a cold, dank, foghorn-riddled morning, with just a patch of water visible around the ketch. I was alone on board, tied to a tilting wharf at the bottom of an alley in that helter-skelter, gap-toothed boomtown of slapped-together sawmills, canneries, and shipyards, just gouged out of the wilderness but already falling down. The fog was as wet as rain; it streamed down the masts, dripped out of the rigging, puddled in the furled sails. The tide was out and great clumps of mussels crackled on the pilings.

There I was, shackled by debt—I felt richer when I was penniless salvaging logs—waiting for the fog to lift so I could run up coast to Squamish with some medical goods; it wasn’t life or death but I was anxious to go because the ten-dollar fee would pay off a bit of debt. Just a few more dozen trips like this and about the same for Meschie’s gold mine way up coast, and if in all that time—a year, maybe two—I managed not to run aground and rip the bottom out of her, saved every penny, barely ate or drank, my debts would be paid off, and then—freedom. I’d sail out of this dungeon-of-a-climate and not stop until the Marquesas or Cook Islands—fool’s dreams never die—where the water is so clear you can watch your anchor touch bottom, and the air is warm and the sky blue enough to hurt your eyes, and you can get lost in some archipelago for the rest of your life. Dreams. When debts are paid—all kinds. No use leaving a port for good until they’re paid, because you’ll just carry them around inside you all your life.

Damned fog. Like a prison.

But mostly I was anxious to get away from her. There was nothing worse than being so near her and not seeing her, not having her look at me with those daring, frightened eyes. I stared into the fog and thought I saw the outlines of their yacht.

I leaned on the wheel, and stared at my empty hands. Bloody fog; closes you in and turns you on yourself. “Self-cannibalization,” Nello, my half-Kwakiutl first mate, called it, “except you can’t see the bites.” But you sure as hell could feel them. I paced the deck some more. A patch of light brightened the fog and for a minute I was certain it was her, the sail of her small dinghy coming toward me, but then the light faded and the fog closed.

Cautious footsteps sounded in the distance. Then stopped. A rope strained as the wharf shifted on the tide. Then a voice called out and drifted, “
Terrence Jordan
. Ahoy.”

“Over here!” I yelled as cheerfully as I could—it might be a client. An older man with a bowler hat and careful mustache popped out of the mist. He held a cane in one hand and a damp business card in the other and looked at me through his misted glasses.

“Captain Dugger?” he asked politely.

“Yes,” I said.

“Hopkins,” he said, and looked quickly over the ketch, clutching one of the cards I had old Mr. Chow, who ran the Chinese paper, print for me:
Captain S. V. Dugger. The ketch
Terrence Jordan.
Denman Street Docks. Coastal transport. Anything. Anywhere.
I know that last bit was pretty short on class, but when you owe as much as I did…. I went and stuck those cards in chandlers, hotel lobbies, beer parlors, social clubs, the seaman’s home on Pender, the steamship terminal on Main, the railway station, boardinghouses, whorehouses, and even the Salvation Army. You never know.

I invited Hopkins to join me below for a cup of tea—I don’t offer rum early, in case they think me a drunk and take their business elsewhere—but he stood and eyed the ketch knowingly: her hull, her sheer, the masts, even tried to see under the water, checking, I guess, for growth.

“Newly copper-sheeted,” I said. “Fastest on the coast.”

At that he seemed to ease and I slipped back the companionway hatch and we went below. The embers still glowed in the galley stove, so I heaved in some scraps of wood while Hopkins looked around the cabin.

“Wonderful,” he kept saying. “A wonderful little ship. Remarkably Oriental, all this joinery.” I let his comment go; it was a long story. He opened his coat, sat himself down on the starboard settee, and made himself at home, running his hand over a varnished sea rail. “Captain Dugger,” he said, “we would like to engage you and your ketch for a period of time.” And just as I felt the South Sea’s breezes blowing on my face, he pulled out a business card, and I read in disbelief,
L. W. Hopkins, Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Retired
. I stared dumbstruck. The law and I never mixed; not that I felt myself beyond the law, but rather that the law seemed always beyond me. Suddenly the South Sea’s breezes seemed farther than ever.

“I don’t have room for horses.”

Hopkins didn’t laugh. When he saw I wasn’t going to say any more, he said almost bashfully, “Captain Dugger, your name was something different off San Francisco that foggy afternoon.”

I had a good mind to bolt then and there, but my legs wouldn’t move. I froze half risen, with my back arched like a cat. Thank God the kettle rocked. “The tea.” I struggled to the stove. It took all my wits to figure out what to pour into what. Took my time. “A bit of rum?” I offered, while pouring a long slug into mine. Through the portlight I saw the fog close in as if it meant to stay there for the rest of my life.

We sat quietly sipping tea-laced rum, the fog sending tendrils down the hatchway. For the first time I looked closely at Hopkins; his eyes were furtive—he was the type that knows a lot more than he lets on. He ran his eyes over the cabin, making polite remarks—how much he liked the doors, the bookcase, the inlaid table—and all the while, on every pass, his eyes lingered for a second on the rough-carved cedar mask hanging on the bulkhead.

“Fascinating piece,” he said, nodding at the mask.

“Kwakiutl,” I offered.

“Do you mind?” And he got up for a closer look.

It was plain, simply carved, the white paint thin and splotchy from age, the features smooth, the brow high, the nose thin and upturned, cut short—a skull. The square white teeth were bared, gritted tight. There were no lips. Scruffy tufts of horsehair were stitched above the brow. The eyelids drooped half closed, one eye stared out in horror, the other bled a long, crimson tear.

“A skull rattle,” I said. “Keeps you safe from cannibals.”

Hopkins smiled. “Could come in handy in this town.”

There was a thud against the hull. It was her, I knew the sound of her dinghy bumping.

“I better check,” I said, and ran up. The fog was empty. A piece of driftwood rolled on the tide and banged the hull. I took a deep breath and went below.

Hopkins was still looking at the mask. “Brilliant, don’t you think?” he said in honest appreciation.

“Except it doesn’t work,” I said. And when he looked at me quizzically I added, “Not when you most need it.”

He looked away; he knew when it was best to let things go.

“From up the coast?” he queried.

“Way up,” I said. “A couple hundred miles.”

“You hear a lot of stories about up there: Desolation, wild islands, wild people. Unimaginable rites.”

“Stories,” I said.

“You know the place?”

“Not well.”

“But your first mate, Mr. Nello, was born there.”

There wasn’t much old Hopkins didn’t know. I pulled in my limbs as if not to give anything more away.

“End of the earth,” he went on. “Barely charted. Rocks and reefs, towering mountains with inlets like corkscrews, hundreds of miles of wild emptiness.”

“And fog,” I said. “Even more than here.”

“Kwakiutl,” he sighed.

The rum didn’t do its work; in fact, I was getting jittery. But not Hopkins. He sat calmly and stared at me. He asked for a bit more rum, took a gulp, leaned forward, and said in a quiet, confiding tone, “Captain Dugger, you know what a potlatch is.”

“Only so-so,” I said.

“All summer long the Indians fish: salmon from the sea and streams, herring from the shallows. In the tidal flats they pick oysters, clams, sea urchins, mussels. They dry or smoke everything to preserve it for winter; even dry seaweed, berries, mint, everything in the summer, everything before the rains.
Bakoos
time, they call it. Then winter comes, and the rains come, and they pull back into the villages into their great cedar houses and it begins—Tsetseka, it means Magician. It all starts innocently enough, days of feasting, some mourning songs for those who died since spring, singing, joking, all very nice, very noble. But then day-by-day things turn ugly. They say that spirits come out of the sea, the woods, wild spirits; ‘Dog-Eaters.’ And worse.”

His voice dropped. “There are rituals. Frenzied women are stuffed in cedar boxes and thrown on a bonfire. Alive. Others are hung from ropes by their skin. Everyone watches. Young men are dragged off into the woods for weeks and are left there alone; they come back wild animals—they attack their own people and…. They’re called Hamatsa. Cannibals. We’ve tried to put an end to all this.” I poured him some more rum.

“How long would it take to get up there?” he asked.

“With good winds, timing the currents in the passes, and not pushing your luck, maybe ten days.”

“And back?”

“Depends.”

“On the winds?”

“On whether they eat you or not.”

Hopkins straightened up, annoyed. “This isn’t easy for anybody, you know,” he blurted. “I have great respect for these people, their traditions, their knowledge of their world. They’re generous, caring, they look after the sick, the old, each other, even strangers. They’re a noble people. But these potlatches, this savagery has to end.”

He took a deep breath, calmed, and began again.

“There was a law passed against these rituals over forty years ago. But to enforce it out there, my God! It’s the end of the earth! So they went on. Until last winter. An informant warned us in advance of the place, the time. A boat took in the Indian agent and police, ran aground twice, but went on and arrested the worst of them. Poor buggers. The fog thinned for an hour at midday so the boat got in…. Poor sods.”

“I read about it,” I said. “You took everything they owned.”

“Just the things used in the potlatch,” Hopkins objected. “Things used for the horrors; just the masks, things like that.”

“Just the masks? They have no written language. Those masks are their history: deeds to property, records of marriages, stories of their creation, even their names. Christ! First you take their lands, now this. What the hell did you leave them?”

Hopkins wasn’t prepared for that. He stared at me almost meanly but went on. “The Indian agent took the masks; that was within the law. Then he sold them to a private collector;
that
was not.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

“The potlatchers were tried and sent to jail,” Hopkins went on with a forced calm. “Thirty-two of them. Last week they feigned a riot and in the commotion two of them vanished.”

“Maybe they got eaten.”

“Captain Dugger!” he snapped. “They escaped, then killed a man! Left his head in a bowl.”

I don’t remember what it was I had tried drunkenly to say, but whatever it was, it made Hopkins’s fist hit the table so hard the mugs jumped, and he roared,
“Dammit, Dugger! I can ship you back to Frisco and have you hanged!”

M
Y NERVES HAD
had it; my ears were ringing and I made out only phrases drifting in the cabin. “An important artifacts collector…family of insurers…broke into his yacht…took back masks…killed a crew….” Hopkins talked on but it was all choked by the fog until a cold draft of it shot down the hatchway and my head cleared and his voice came back. “They stole a canoe and headed up coast. We’d like you to find them.”

I must have looked pretty strange, because he asked, “Did you hear me?”

“Can’t you go find them yourselves?”

“
Our
hands are tied, Dugger. They took a hostage. The collector’s wife. He made us promise not to jeopardize her life.” Then he leaned close to me and said slowly, with as much accusation as I ever care to hear, “Katherine Hay; I believe you know her.”

I think my breathing stopped. It must have, because I passed out. When I looked up, Hopkins was gone; only his card and a stuffed envelope rested on the table. I thought I heard his footsteps die off in the fog. I had a slug of rum. A long one. It did the job. I lay down on the berth, and in the codling warmth drifted off into painkilling sleep. And dreamt of Katherine Hay.