Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel (12 page)

“Great,” Anne said.

Wahanui
strikes again.

OLD KEB FIGURED that if a greedy man could put his money where his mouth is, stuff it all in there, then he couldn’t talk anymore and that would be a good thing.

This particular man was Harald Halmerjan, chairman of the board, looking mighty smart up there in his suit and tie. Important, too. Most people with money are, or imagine themselves to be. There’s nothing more powerful than the imagination, as Truman said. So they make their reputations by the acre, as Harald did now, on stage in the Jinkaat High School gymnasium, at one end of the basketball court, talking about a hundred high-minded things, so many things and so high-minded that Old Keb heard his voice as a sticky, wet, bubblegum hum. Harald had a lot to say and was saying it to a packed audience. He gripped the podium with his big ham hands. Never mind that he used other people’s time. Seated next to him and waiting her turn was Ruby.

Keb felt his heart break.

He set his mind on pies. Strawberry, nagoonberry, or rhubarb pie, any pie. Cherry pie from Juneau Safeway. Apple pie from Fred Meyer. Cow pie from Trinidad Salazar’s lupine field and horseshoe pitch with his inflatable puffin. Shoe-fly-pie from Peter Becker’s Boot Shop. Any pie to erase Harald Halmerjan, the Great H. H., often wrong but never in doubt. Gracie once said that H. H. treated Big Oil like a good neighbor, or an ATM, whatever that meant.

H. H. blathered on.

Keb sat in the back row in a small metal chair that cut off blood to everywhere. His toes were numb. His ass felt like lead. His back ached. He had to pee. He was hot. His heart raced. He had no pills. He had to get outside and breathe the earth, if it was still there. The gym smelled like paint thinner or a lacquer of some kind. He wondered: Why do we sit in here to decide how to do things
out there
?

His leg twitched. He moaned.

“Okay, Pops, get up,” Gracie said, sitting next to him. She helped him. As bad as he felt, she looked worse. It wasn’t just her size anymore. Gracie had always been big. Other people ate and she gained weight. It wasn’t her fretting over James either, or her diabetes. Something else was going on. Gracie wasn’t well.

Now Ruby was speaking, saying all the same things H. H. had said. Keb heard a lawyer cut her off from across the stage, a big guy who quoted a Frenchman named Alex Cokeville. That’s how Keb heard it,
Cokeville
, a sugar water man with a lot to say about how runaway enterprise and industry built America but also threatened to destroy it. Apparently this Cokeville knew more about America than Americans knew about America, which didn’t sound very American. It sounded French.

Gracie said the tall man next to the lawyer was Crystal Bay Superintendent Paul Beals, a nice guy by most accounts. Keb had met him once. The woman next to Paul was the famous astronaut who’d walked in space. That’s what they called it, walking in space. Keb wasn’t fooled. All they did was float along, tied to the mothership like a baby on an umbilical cord. He’d watched movies with Mitch, Vic, Oddmund, and Dag. Anybody could do it, Mitch said.

It was Oddmund’s turn to testify. He approached the microphone, hunched forward like a human question mark, rolling up on his toes with each step.

Keb had to pee. He shuffled off toward the men’s room at the back of the gym, a long and perilous journey on a waxed basketball court. He made it and did what he had to do. More peril. He washed his hands, gently soaping his new calluses from the adzes, wedges, and mauls that shaped the canoe. When he reentered the gym he was surprised to see Charlie Gant and a couple sidekicks standing nearby in a defiant knot. Charlie waved, and Keb waved back. That’s what you do in a small town, you wave. Charlie walked Keb’s way, open-faced, wearing an easy smile. As he did, Stuart Ewing called from nearby, “Hey, Charlie, got a minute?”

The smile fell off Charlie’s face.

“Where you been?” Stuart asked.

“Around,” Charlie said.

“You seen Tommy?”

“No.” Charlie wore a dungeon face, a chin full of stubble under bloodshot eyes. His long hair was matted and unclean and sprinkled with spruce needles. Keb wondered if he’d been out sleeping under a tree.

“You know he’s in trouble for cutting up Taff’s desk,” Stuart said. “The sooner he turns himself in, the better.”

Charlie shrugged.

“People are wondering, who were the choker-setters that day, up on Pepper Mountain, and why you had the crew skidding the logs.”

“Bugger off, Stuart. I made my statement to Taff.”

“Where was Pete?”

“Pete?”

“Yes, Pete.”

“He was cutting, I think. Felling trees further to the west, down the line.”

Keb walked into the discussion. More of a shuffle than a walk.

“Hey, Keb,” Charlie said, his face brightening. “How ya doing?”

“Fine.”

Keb noticed that Stuart had the good sense to step aside. Charlie reached out and shook Keb’s hand gently, allowing for the old man’s bent, arthritic fingers. Coach Nicks walked up with Mitch and Vic and several boys from the high school basketball team.

Important things were being said back on stage. Oddmund had finished and Superintendent Beals was wrapping up. “You good people always make us feel welcome here in Jinkaat, by golly. Thank you for your attention, and your thoughtful questions.”

Charlie said something that Old Keb missed.

“What?” Keb said.

“The canoe,” Charlie said. “My buddies and me, we were wondering if we could take a couple swings at the canoe, when you work on it next. We heard it’s kind of a community thing.”

“Any time,” Keb said.

“James won’t mind?”

“No. He won’t mind.”

The shadow of a wolf crossed Charlie’s face. “Look Keb, I have no argument with you or James. But you should know that what he did was wrong, telling Taff what he did about Pepper Mountain. It cost me my job.”

“What is it you’re saying, exactly?” Vic asked Charlie.

“I’m saying James is looking for somebody to blame and there isn’t anybody to blame.”

Coach Nicks stepped forward to project his full coachness.

Keb fidgeted. There was too much going on . . . too many people.

Charlie snapped his head back and forth as a crowd gathered. Keb tried to spread his arms, to give Charlie room; Charlie appeared to do the same for Keb. The crowd thickened and pressed in, moving toward the gym doors. Somebody stepped on Keb’s foot as he felt himself jostled to and fro. Is this what Coach Nicks meant about a full-court press? Then, as quickly as it began, it ended. Keb could breathe again; the bulk of the crowd had passed by and was out the doors.

Keb looked over in time to see Stuart reach for Charlie and Charlie flick his arm away with terrible speed. Stuart’s face turned the color of paper ashes in a cold stove. Charlie burst through the doors. Keb watched him, hoping he’d turn back for a final friendly gesture of some kind, but he did not.

BY NOW, TWO dozen people milled about the waxed gym floor like pebbles that wash up and down a beach, rubbing each other. No sooner had Charlie left than a new rubbing began, this one between Ruby and Gracie. By the time Keb got his foot to stop throbbing and his head tuned in, they were well into it. “So what then?” Ruby said, “you think we should live on government handouts? Live on welfare, buy cigarettes and booze with food stamps?”

“No,” Gracie replied.

“What then? Move to a reservation? Build a casino?”

“No.”

“What then? What’s your solution?”

“I don’t have a simple solution, okay? Nobody does. Not even you.”

Ruby was going to win this argument like she won everything else. Keb knew what she was thinking: Wake up, Gracie. You’re still standing in the middle of the meadow with your hands over your eyes. You’re fooling nobody but yourself. It’s the modern world.

But Ruby said none of this, bless her heart.

Gracie looked at him with a face full of apology.

At times Keb felt he could better govern a kingdom than a family. “Our children will be beautiful,” Bessie had told Keb sixty years ago when they were expecting their first, Ruby. Yes, they were beautiful, and pigheaded and poor. The bills never stopped coming. Neither did the kids. Money was always tight. Work was toil, one odd job after another. What Keb loved most was his carving. It never earned him a cent, but it made him happy. So much risk and imagination, it set him free. That’s it, isn’t it? We are most free when we are most at risk. He gave it all away, the dozens of cedar masks and ornate paddles, the spoons, crests, and canoes. His family had a few happy years until the first son drowned, and Bessie died, and his two other boys had affairs with Jack Daniels. That left
Ruby and Gracie divided in a new kind of poverty. “We are each other,” Keb would tell them. “Like it or not, we are each other.”

He heard a commotion and turned to see the famous woman astronaut working her way through the crowd, the biggest celebrity to hit Jinkaat since TV star Walker Texas Ranger bought licorice in Nystad’s Mercantile and did some Kung Fu fighting with the local kids out in the street. Next to her was the big lawyer, bantering with Truman about Cokeville the French philosopher and other important things. Tall Paul Beals was in the mix too. Tall as a tree and taller still, the closer he got. Reaching down to shake the old man’s hand, he said, “Keb, it’s good to see you again. I’ve heard about your canoe and would love to see it.”

Keb had no time to respond.

Harald Halmerjan swept into the crowd and got busy telling Paul how Crystal Bay National Marine Reserve, with help from PacAlaska, could better serve all Alaskans. Others piped in. Did one of the voices belong to the famous woman astronaut? Did she know Kung Fu like Walker Texas Ranger? Keb turned his mind to his canoe. Was the float line still straight and true? The next thing he knew, Paul was introducing him to the woman astronaut who walked in space and maybe did Kung Fu, and Harald was blathering on to anybody who would listen or not, raising his voice louder and louder until the famous astronaut winced and walked away, taking Paul with her. Where was Gracie? And Little Mac? And James? Keb needed fresh air. He needed Little Mac’s fingers light on his forehead, brushing away his hair, playing sad songs on her guitar. Happy songs. Sappy songs. A glass of lemonade. The smell of cedar. The cut of the adz. Salty dreams, that’s what he needed. The sounds of the sea. But all Keb heard was Harald Halmerjan, the great H. H., talk, talk, talking.

THE LAST TIME Harald came calling was on a cold, rainy October night a couple years back. Keb was pulling hot cornbread from the oven. While some people make their cornbread round, Keb made his square, and took no small satisfaction when it came out piping hot, lightly browned, ready for butter.

Of course he offered some to Harald.

Picture a man not fat but not thin, built-to-last, barrel-chested, balding. What little hair he had he combed over the crown of his condo-sized head in poor compensation for the cards Mother Nature dealt him. So much room up there, you could rent it. That was Harald, the former mayor of Jinkaat, a fine tenor with money in his pocket and gold in his teeth. Truman said he slept every night with a lawyer under his pillow. So what did Harald do that rainy October night? He grabbed a plate—no crime so far—and took a corner piece of Keb’s cornbread.

Everybody liked the corners.

As Keb saw it, a perfect geometry defines square cornbread, cut four-by-four into sixteen pieces, equal in size but not texture. The best pieces are the corners. Harald took one. Could you blame him? But he didn’t stop there. He went on to take three more, all corners, lathered in butter and stuffed down with hot venison stew and a bottle of cold Alaskan Amber, all while Keb watched in stunned silence.

“That’s fine cornbread,” Harald clucked.

Keb nodded.

To make matters worse, Ruby sat there and said nothing. She had arrived with Harald, dripping wet from the rain. “You know, Keb,” Harald said (Keb remembered every word, his mind sharp in the presence of a cornbread crime), “you’re the oldest man in Jinkaat. You’re a knowledge-keeper.”

“A what?”

“A knowledge-keeper, Pops.” Ruby explained that a knowledge-keeper was an elder with great wisdom who never drew attention to himself, who kept his own wise counsel, avoided politics, had little interest in money, never stopped learning or teaching, knew a great deal about the land and sea, and had the respect of many people, young and old. He hardly ever spoke in public, but when he did (only for the most important causes) his words were unassailable. “It’s a conundrum, you see. By staying out of the spotlight—out of the fray, you might say—a knowledge-keeper maintains his purity of heart and mind and soul. By entering the spotlight he enriches others with his wisdom, but he also taints himself with their attention and admiration.”

Conundrum? Keb was thinking, what’s a conundrum?

“We want you to know that we appreciate you,” Harald said.

“Me? Why?”

“For everything you stand for, all the ways you enrich our lives.”

“What do you want from me?”

Ruby touched his hand. “We don’t want anything from you, Pops. We just want to thank you for all the support you give us.”

“Support?”

“Yes, you know, in all the ways we want to make life better for the Tlingits of Jinkaat and Icy Strait and Crystal Bay.”

“Nobody lives in Crystal Bay.”

“Not anymore, but they used to,” Harald said.

“Long ago,” Keb said, “when people traveled by canoe and had summer fish camps and knew all the right places to get food. Oyyee . . . good times but hard times too.”

“Not that long ago,” Ruby added.

It was then that Keb remembered looking down at his hands, the fingers bent, the nails warped and split, the skin deep brown, almost black around the knuckles. Uncle Austin’s hands had looked the same when he was old. The October rain came down hard that night, but not a single drop got through the roof of the carving shed, Keb’s home. The floor was bone dry. It’s funny how we build things small, then big, then bigger. Everything was bigger these days, except open space. Uncle Austin used to say that the Tlingit never did build anything you’d find in the history books. Don’t look for a Machu Picchu or Great Pyramid in Alaska. The greatest gift we can leave this world is the forest and the sea the way we found it, separate and the same, the oldest home of all, older and more beautiful than all the things industrious people pride themselves in building.