Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel (8 page)

Old Keb was on his feet in seconds, shame filling his heart. The boy looked at him with shock; Old Keb took his stare and turned it back on him. “Apologize,” he said.

“What? What’s the big deal?” James blushed.

Keb thought:
Better a red face than a black heart
. “Apologize to your mother.”

“Jesus, Gramps. All I said was that I wanted a couple more waffles. What’s the big deal?”

“Apologize.”

James got to his feet and shoved his way past everybody and hobbled stiff-legged to the door. He turned flint-eyed to face them, tormented by anger and fear and the death of too many dreams.

“Oh, James,” Gracie said, beginning to cry.

He burst outside and slammed the door so hard it snapped a hinge.

A WEEK LATER, Keb found James holed up in Brad Freer’s windowless basement playing shoot-’em-up video games. The boys sat at computer monitors, each with a mouse in one hand and a beer in the other, eating Doritos, eyes rimmed red. Hip-hop pounded out the big speakers. The place reeked of marijuana. Beer cans everywhere. Computers plugged into the wall, and these guys plugged into the computers. Keb tried to focus. Brad looked as though he hadn’t been outside since the Ice Age. An Iraq War veteran, he was the worst commercial fisherman in Jinkaat, the guy who ate tuna from a can while his rust bucket troller,
Call Me Fishmael
, sat in the harbor leaking diesel. Near as Keb could tell, the sky was a dead thing to Brad. His jaw seemed to unhinge when Keb walked in with Little Mac and Kid Hugh. “What are you doing here?” Brad said.

For days nobody had known James’s whereabouts. Gracie worried herself sick. The night before he showed up at Shelikof’s Pizza, where people said he and Tommy Gant got into a shouting match and nearly went at it before Stuart Ewing intervened.

To give James a break and get him out of harm’s way, Robert the Coca-Cola man and his jabbermouth wife, Lorraine, had offered to take him on their cross-country drive to Atlanta. He could sit in the back with the poodle on Prozac and Infinity the cat, and play games with their son, Christopher. They planned to leave next week, and drink Coke all the way. Stay in four-star hotels. Maybe hit a roadside motel and have a big adventure, since Lorraine’s idea of wilderness camping was to go one night without cable TV. Their first stop would be Las Vegas, where they planned to attend the World Pet Expo. Dogs and cats on parade. Very exciting.

Old Keb had another idea. He asked Brad to turn off the music. Brad ignored him, so Kid Hugh unplugged it. Still engrossed in his computer combat, James worked the mouse hard. “I need your help,” Keb said to him.

James ignored him.

Kid Hugh pushed Brad aside and unplugged the computer. Just like that, the make-believe world vanished. Only then did James look up, his face hangdog.

“I need your help,” Keb said again.

James took a long draw of beer. “What kind of help?”

“You need to beat on something.”

“What?”

“You need to beat on something, work with your hands. But first we have some heavy lifting to do. I need you to put that beer away and come help me.”

“Did Mom put you up to this?”

“She told me you apologized to her. That’s good.”

James brought the can to his lips. “No,” Keb said, surprised by his own sudden ferocity. “You can finish that beer, or you can put it down right now and come help us. I won’t ask you again.”

Little Mac said, “James, it’s a canoe. It’s the last canoe.”

He regarded her as if through a thick cloud, where beneath all the bluster and confusion and loss was a quiet plea to be rescued. Keb could see it and figured Little Mac could, too, by the way she took James’s hand and said, “C’mon, we need you.”

THEY DROVE TO the carving shed and walked to the back, following Keb, whose gait was surprisingly nimble. A recent rain had been received by such thirsty ground that little evidence of it remained. Under a carport, Kevin Pallen sat on a massive, twenty-five-foot red cedar log, carving an alder spoon and smoking a cigarette. The log was on the ground, and deeply notched near both ends. Between the two notches, the upper one-third of the log’s midsection had been removed—planked away along the clear grain—while the ends retained their full diameter. Next to the log stood six sturdy sawhorses, each built at one-quarter height and double strength.

“That’s not a canoe,” James said. “That’s a log.”

“Not for long,” Old Keb said. “We need to roll it over and get it on the sawhorses. Loop that line around the end.”

Keb and Kid Hugh had devised a pulley system using a chain-saw winch and a come-along tied off to a big spruce. After several attempts the log didn’t budge. Keb sat down, breathless. Little Mac stirred up some lemonade. Kid Hugh zipped away on his motorcycle and half an hour later rumbled up the hog-backed road driving a front-end loader. He lifted one end of the log, then the other, and soon had it where Keb wanted it, saddled on the sawhorses, bottom-side
up, with the keel line right down the middle. Little Mac served more lemonade, and Keb drank. He hurt everywhere but felt more alive and purposeful than he had in a long time. After a good rest, he picked up his adz and swung it with surprising agility. Thwack! It sunk into the log. Gasping for air, he said, “The adz marks need to be the same size and depth, parallel to each other for the whole length of the canoe. We add the bow piece later, secure it with pegging. Put a hogback in the middle that will level out when we steam it open and increase the beam-width and fit in the crosspieces. Flaring sides, rounded bottom, buoyancy, speed. Vertical cutwater to throw off high waves in a storm wind,
k’eeljáa
.” Keb took another breath, rolling now, coming alive. “Oyyee . . . carve out the interior to where the hull reaches even thickness . . . two fingerwidths on the sides, three on the bottom. Drive in pegs, maybe—guides for even thickness. Nathan Red Otter didn’t need pegs. He gauged perfect thickness by running his hands over the hull. His hands carry knowledge you cannot explain in books. Perfect symmetry, the wood is lighter on the south side of the tree, the ground needs to be dry; it’s important we split it and chisel it out east to west . . . use wedges and hand mauls for that. Use the chips for fire scoring, wet moss to keep the heat not too hot.” Keb lifted the adz for another strike.

“Gramps, what are you doing?” James said, alarmed. “You can’t do that. You’re almost a hundred years old.”

Keb struck the log again with an artful blow. Anybody watching him could see he had once done this with accuracy and grace. He took another swing, his arms like withered twigs on the sturdy handle, hands shaking.

“Gramps, you’re going to kill yourself.”

“If I’m lucky.”

James put a hand on his shoulder. “Take it easy, okay?”

Old Keb sat down and accepted more lemonade as Little Mac stroked the white hair off his forehead. James and Kid Hugh stared, half expecting him to have a heart attack. Kevin sat apart, still carving his alder spoon, a tidy puddle of shavings in his lap, his lower lip trapped between his teeth. For a moment Old Keb envied his dull mind, the gift of quiet that must come with it. Ruby’s Dodge one-ton rumbled up the road just then, not with Gracie driving, but Ruby herself, eaten up with urgency. She had her son Josh with her, and his two daughters with ribbons in their hair. The door opened and the little girls ran to Keb and threw their arms around him. Ruby strode over, long hair on her shoulders, eyebrows black yet the eyes themselves unchanged, marooned on the wrong side of history. How different things would have been had Keb’s kittiwake daughter greeted the rapacious Russians when they arrived in Alaska hungry for sea otter
pelts. She would have seduced them, slit their throats, burned their ships, and freed their Aleut slaves. Even as a little girl she carried the biggest banner, the deepest wounds, as if she alone would right every wrong since Columbus, that arrogant Spaniard who left Europe not knowing where he was going, arrived in America not knowing where he was, and returned home not knowing where he’d been. Alone if necessary, using canny politics and the tinted prism of her pride, Ruby would reclaim the sovereignty of the Tlingit Nation. Never mind that she was only part Tlingit, her mom Bessie having been half Filipino, a real beauty. Keb shook his head. Watching her was like watching his own life reflected and distorted at the same time. Did he love her? Yes. Did he like her? Well, we like someone
because
; we love someone
although
. Keb rose to greet her. She embraced him, then moved to James. “Hello, nephew, how are you?” She made slight acknowledgment of Kid Hugh and Kevin Pallen, while Little Mac she ignored altogether. “Pops,” Ruby said, “we need to talk about the lawsuit against the feds in Crystal Bay. It’s heating up.”

“Oh?”

“I’ll make you dinner tonight, white king salmon. I’d like you to join us, James. You need to be made aware of this issue.”

Need to be made aware? Old Keb’s ears hurt. Why couldn’t Ruby talk like a normal person?

“Can I bring Little Mac?” James asked her.

Ruby ignored the request, and patted the log. “What’s this?”

“It’s a canoe,” James said as he picked up the adz and turned it in his hands. Little Mac moved in and put her arm around his waist.

“Dáa
x
,” Keb said quietly. Nobody heard him.

“A canoe?” Ruby frowned. “Why not a totem pole?” Totem poles were memory columns to the Tlingit people. They were heraldry and social standing, written in wood. “I think it should be a totem pole.”

“A totem pole tells a story,” Keb said, “a canoe makes a story.”

“Yes but—”

“Ruby, this is a canoe.”

THAT NIGHT OLD Keb skipped dinner with Ruby and ate instead with Oddmund and Dag, and with Daisy, who brought her cribbage board. He drank too much red wine and dreamed crazy dreams. A raven spoke to him, a salmon too,
nóosh
, a spawned-out dead drifting sockeye with its hooked jaw, muttering Tlingit and laughing. Milo Chen appeared on a wet cannery floor, gesturing as if to fly, then pounding the boards with his swollen hands. The next thing Old Keb
knew, his bedding was knotted around him and early daylight spilled through his dusty, cobwebbed windows. He heard a loud thwack, the sound of sharp metal striking wood. Another thwack. He sat up and winced as he planted his feet and willed himself to stand. His heart jackhammered. He asked himself who he was. Keb Zen Raven, Nine and a Half Toes of the Berry Patch, son of a Norwegian seine fisherman and a coho woman from Crystal Bay, sign of the north wind. That’s who I am, or used to be. Forgetting his morning pills and dietary supplements, he entered the carport barefoot, wearing only jockey shorts, and found James swinging his adz. Cedar chips flying. “Stop,” he yelled.

James looked up, hair in his eyes. Something about him seemed older and more mature. Keb rolled his tongue to find his voice. “What are you doing?”

“Making a canoe.”

“You want breakfast?”

“Already ate.”

“That the gunwale sweep you’re working on?”

“I guess.”

“You working toward the front or the back?”

“Front, I guess.”

“You better decide. Get it wrong and it’ll go through the water like a salmon in a gillnet. It’ll fight you every stroke.”

James took another swing, another dig.

“That’s good,” Keb said. Truth be told, he feared James. It hurt and was no easy thing to admit that the boy rubbed him wrong. James’s father had been a dog-whipped, smoky-eyed son-of-a-bitch who treated Gracie like a mule until one day she gave him what she got and whacked him back. He whacked her and she buckled to the floor, mouth bleeding, and told him to get the hell out. This time he did. He grabbed the stashed cash, got into the Ford Bronco they had just paid off, drove onto the ferry and left her with the mortgage and credit card debt and four kids. He moved back to Denver and nobody saw him after that. His son wore his shadow, though. In ways more apparent each year—his walk and talk—James echoed the man who beat his mother. For that, Old Keb had a mountain to climb. It’s no easy thing to see a man you despise in your grandson’s face. “You’re beating on something, that’s good,” Keb said to the boy, thinking: better a piece of wood than somebody’s head.

James looked at him with eyes gleaned of expression. “You’re not going to tell me what everybody else tells me?”

“What’s that?”

“That it could be worse? My leg, my career, me, I’m lucky to be alive?”

“No.”

“Good. I hate it when people tell me that.”

“The Haida,
Deikeenaa
, they chose this tree, long ago.” Keb patted the log. “You have to treat it with respect. You have to be quiet, and at peace, and purify yourself.”

James ran his thumb over the cutting edge of the adz.

“You have to get rid of your bitterness, your anger. Throw it away before you work on a canoe. Or else it won’t be right. You have to meditate and give thanks.”

“I thought you—”

“Shhh . . .” Keb said. “We’re meditating now.”

James leaned against the log, put down the adz, and picked at his knee brace. After awhile he said, “Are we done yet?”

“No.”

“When then?”

“Soon.”

“How soon.”

“Later.”

“Later than when?”

“Later than now.”

“How much—”

“Shhh—we’re meditating.”

Keb sat still while James picked at the knee brace.

Remember Gavin Timmerman, the hoity-toity lawyer with the syrupy eyes of a dreamer? He came to Alaska to make something new of himself. A painter, he told Keb that the best art pieces are the ones that continue to have a conversation with you long after you create them. He had a painting in his home that showed a group of people staring at the sea beneath the stars. A caption on the frame said, “The people stared at the sea and the stars, and forgot themselves.” This canoe could be that, an art piece. The sea and the stars, a place to forget some things but to remember other things. How many minutes passed by then? Keb lost track. He took a deep breath and said to James, “You got the right tools?”