The Bully of Order (7 page)

The doctor puffed away and met Bellhouse's eyes through the smoke, had a flash of memory of being caught in a stall behind a mean mule when he was a boy, remembered thinking: If I don't move, I won't be kicked. But he was kicked anyway, broke ribs. Just stood there and waited for it.

“They'd never allow me to flub a charter, Doc. No way. How many ships come up this coast? Don't you think they'd shut me down if I was fraudulent, as you say, or somehow misrepresenting my union brothers to the south? If I were anything save impeccable I'd wager they'd steam north and throw me off the fucking pier.”

“I don't want any more bloodshed. Hear me? I don't care who ends up on top.”

Bellhouse winked. “The one doing the fucking is usually on top.”

The doctor forced a smile and leaned forward, filled his coat pocket with cigars, leaving the box empty.

Bellhouse stabbed the knife into his desktop. “If we're critiquing each other's professions. If that's what we're doing. I don't want to have to get up in the night three times over to piss, but you haven't been able to help me with that, have you?”

“Maybe you should've seen Ellstrom.”

“Fuck Ellstrom.”

“I did what I could, Hank. You showed up two days after the fact. I think you should be grateful to Chacartegui for sticking you with a clean blade, might've saved your life.”

“Promises were made, you understand. Oaths were uttered.” He held up his hands; the knife stayed in the table, barely moving. “I'll never sleep through the night.”

“Dying will solve it.”

“Yours or mine?”

“Don't threaten me.”

“You'll know when you're threatened.” Bellhouse slapped the knife free and went back to sharpening. “It's never a change of subject with you. Never a ‘Did you hear what happened with the Russian dancer and that Tlingit fella they call Jameson?'”

“Fine, why don't you tell me?”

“The way I hear it, they had to tie him down to free the slipper from where she'd crammed it up his asshole.”

“News of the Harbor.”

“It is fucking news. More than your tin-pail stump speeches.”

“Jameson isn't Tlingit. He's Quinault.”

“I fucking care.” His eyes brightened, knife raised. Haslett didn't want him to stand up; he might need to leave if he stood. “It must take a big heart to pump blood to all that fat.”

“It's the same as yours, Hank, about the size of a fist and going all the time.”

“I'd like to train mine to turn off while I'm sleeping so it'll last longer.”

“If you trained it to listen, you'd never sleep again.”

“You are a fucking slint, aren't you?”

“I am something.” He sucked his cigar till it wore a ripe orange ember. “Did you hear about the corpses found bobbing in the slough last Tuesday?”

“Dead men?” Bellhouse faked a bout of shivering.

“They were yours. I put them on the slab, and I know it was you.”

“No, you don't.”

“I'd tell you you can't murder your way into power, but I'd be lying.”

“Yes, you would.”

“Beware of the starving masses.”

“I am the starving masses, Sawbones, fucking mutt-hungry.”

“Sure you are, except it's not food you're after.”

“Wisdom might be your salvation.”

“For all of us, as it should be.” The doctor dropped the cigar on the floor and ground it out with his heel. “Send someone over to my place if you see Ellstrom, would you? His wife and child are camped out there for now.”

“She's a pretty lady, that one. Haven't I heard Tartan talk about her sometimes? Will that be available? Will the shelves be stocked with the wives of doctors?”

Dr. Haslett couldn't stop the smile that crept onto his face.

“And you're watching over them? Huzza huzza. Lions and lambs.”

“Hardly.”

“Sly old devil, all wrapped in lard.”

“Says Lucifer. Thanks for the cigars.”

Back in the rain, the doctor's feet were squishing around in his boots. The light was failing behind the clouds.

He stopped and had another shot with Persimon before he went home.

“My feet itch, Doc. Where'd you put em, so I can go and give em a scratch?”

“Worms ate them by now, Persimon. Sorry.”

Persimon, as if he'd spilled a drink in his lap, leaned back and studied the stumps of his legs. “Sometimes I feel like I could get up and walk.”

“We all do.” And with that the doctor got up and left. He'd had enough, enough watery liquor and dogged bar top. Enough of the hard harbor. He wanted his comfortable home and to see the woman waiting for him there.

As he walked in the rain, his thoughts returned to Hank Bellhouse. Society wasn't uplifted by men like him, but eventually he'd bury his chisels and pry and move the population along just the same. A slow grind. With killers comes progress, and with progress come new, more insidious killers to replace the rougher and more real ones that preceded them. This wasn't the doctor's first boomtown. The real trouble would set up camp on Bellhouse's grave, but here he was a sailing man who didn't even care that the steamers were coming up behind him. To have blind guts like that must be lovely. To know your throat's slit and keep smiling.

D
r. Haslett helped me
organize the sale of Jacob's equipment. It was crated and shipped to Seattle, all of it. In order to keep the bank away I held nothing as precious and got rid of everything I could.

I found work in the bakery and it kept us fed, but the hours were difficult. There was no sympathy for me because of what Jacob had done, how he had lied. Women treated me as if I'd stolen their husbands, and most men just laughed in my face. I wasn't anything to them. I had to lock Duncan in the apartment when I went to work because no one would watch him for me.

Eventually Mr. Hayes sent boys over to post notice on the apartment door. I was so angry, with my last dollars I hired men from the livery to freight our few belongings to Matius's claim. I'd tried to sell it before but had no legal right to do so. Moving there, it was the end, where I never wanted to be.

Nearly two hours by wagon, an hour if we took the ferry, and another to walk the mud road from the Wynooche dock to the house. The direction was east, northeast. I found a map with the deed in Jacob's desk. We took the ferry. It was a new ship operated by a husband and wife from Minnesota. We were alone on deck. The freighters had taken the road.

I'd heard people complain about the noise of steam engines, but I've always found them calming. As we chugged upriver on the shoulder of the tide, we passed by the sloughs of various legend; corpse farms, keepers of lost children, sad and desultory mires. At one point I thought I could see the shadow of the arch of a bridge through the trees. No sign of the freighters. They were well ahead. All this circumnavigation, as if anything would ever be easy or nearby. I was told ours was the second to the last stop on the ferry route. The dock was new and well tended, just on the lee side of the unsure mouth of the Wynooche. When we gained the road, the workmen bid us good day and I asked if any freighters had passed and they said yes and pointed at the wagon ruts.

The walk was pleasant and we saw deer through the trees, so I ducked down and held on to Duncan and we watched them until they wandered off. They never saw us, or if they did, they didn't care. In time we came to a road that branched, but the freighter's tracks continued. I led Duncan down the lane. There was a homestead there, but it had been abandoned. The door was nailed shut and the windows boarded over. Some of the chimney stones had fallen and sat jumbled in the tall grass. There was a grave in the trees, with a wooden marker that was soaked through and mossy. Back on the road we could hear men logging in the distance, the thud and ring of an ax, the breaking timbers. Duncan hadn't said a word since we got off the ferry. I touched his cheek and kissed his head and he smiled at me.

“We're kings,” he said.

“How do you mean?”

“Who else is here?”

“Nobody, but it doesn't make us kings.”

“What would?”

“There are no kings here, and there never will be.”

“What about a queen?”

“A queen and a prince maybe, but no kings. The kings are all gone.”

“Will you read to me when we get there?”

“Yes. After we eat. Are you hungry?”

“Yes.”

We followed the wagon tracks of the freighters through a gap in the trees into a meadow, and there it was. Relief is what I felt, and I said my thanks that it was a new place and apparently well built. Long live the queen. There were seven windows (shuttered) and two doors (bolted from the outside), single story, shake roof and shingle siding. If Jacob had built it, I would have been overjoyed. But he did, didn't he. It was ours. I must never forget that. No one had taken any time with anything but the house and the barn and the privy, and outside of the hand pump in the yard the land was still as raw as the day it was born. No garden, no fence, no clothesline.

The freighters carried our things inside while we sat on the porch. I thought we might be able to sell some of the timber.

“Nobody else lives here?” Duncan said.

“We live here.”

“But nobody else. It's lonely.”

“Not if we're here.” He was right, though. Looking out at the swampy bottomland and the dark forest—it was lonely. If there was ever a place that could make you feel exiled, this was it. We needed to leave this coast, but I didn't know how. Standing at the front door, I thought I could just hear the river whispering through the trees.

Duncan got an ear infection from running around in the wet and mud. When I took him to see Dr. Haslett, the doctor took pity on us and offered me a job, and I accepted. I was to buy his groceries and cook his dinners three nights a week, but the other woman, Miss Falvey, would still do the cleaning and keep the house. I also agreed to help him in his work if needed. Jacob had taught me some things regarding nursing.

Dr. Haslett was nearly the same age as my father. The idea of this sometimes lodged in my mind and put an awful chill on me. We were both adults with children, and we should've, a long time ago, resolved ourselves to our roles. It would be a huge mistake, wouldn't it? But Jacob was gone, possibly dead, most likely dead. Dr. Haslett's wife had left him too. She didn't even want money, is what he'd said about her. A judgment on all women. I didn't immediately understand the loathing in his voice, that it'd be better if she did want something from him. To have no use for him at all was the strongest insult she could muster.

Most mornings I felt alone and completely forsaken. The fallen women crowding the balconies of the Line couldn't feel as wretched as I did. At times I felt so small that I would look at Duncan and want to ask him what path I should take. Your father left us, and we don't have any recourse. The strange thing was that the longer he was away, the more I believed that I might not have ever loved him. What was he doing, and where? I began to see what a withering kind of life Jacob and I had shared, small and without purpose. Then I started to dislike him, not for abandoning me but for being who he was—a weak and transitory man who had been spoiled as a child—and my dislike grew into disgust and eventually into hatred. I thought it would all be much easier if he were dead, and more than once I wished he were.

Duncan was old enough to know that Dr. Haslett and I were acting strange, but not nearly old enough to assign guilt. On the nights I cooked dinner, we stayed over. It was too far to walk alone in the dark. Duncan and I shared a room off the kitchen. The room was small and cramped, with a partition and a Dutch stove. Duncan never stirred when I'd get up during the night, and when I returned his breathing was always there for me, steady and deep and in him as if the sound of the ocean could be in him.

Mornings, I woke him in the dark and we began our walk home before the sun came up. Miss Falvey would've started rumors. The ferry didn't run until it was light, so we usually walked. Passing through the empty streets of town, we measured our steps between the gaslights and counted the boards by threes, three-six-nine-twelve, and Duncan would hold out three fingers and bless them like a priest. Sometimes the mills were between shifts when we passed by; the lights were on, but the engines and the blades were quiet. Through the sawdust and steam-glazed windows I could make out the shadows of the workmen inside and hear the saw sharpeners filing away and mechanics tinkering like an orchestra tuning up. And on the days when the rain had yet to start we would take a moment to watch the ships in the harbor, where they rested perfectly at equilibrium, acting by weight alone with no motion. A deep calm filled me when I watched the ships.

At home, the cold bones of the house were hardly welcoming, and sometimes it took all day for it to feel like someplace you'd like to be. After we finished the chores I often read to Duncan, whatever he liked. He had several favorites. The rain beat down on the roof, and we were dry and safe. More than anything I wanted him to grow up and be a man of his own, a better man. I wanted it soon, even though I knew that it wasn't fair. He was only a boy, a child.

I
caught a steamship out
of Westport, and when I arrived fresh and for everyone the New Face, I told all that would listen that I'd been crimped, drugged and dragged; shanghaied, comrade. Friendski. Remember me? Rampage of a story. With my cash out, new pals, like hens to scratch, assembled. I relayed how a man named Gibbons got me drunk in Montesano and I woke up passing the mouth of the Columbia. Which was true. Gibbons was no friend. I'd been around but not far—Oregon, California, a month at Cooney's penitentiary not three miles from my front door—but I told them tall tales of how I'd been to Australia and seen brush fires burning from a hundred miles offshore. I had to tell them something, so I told them what I'd heard other people say. Heard about Australia in a redwood camp on the Smith River. Japanese whaling ships I'd heard about in Portland at a mudflat bonfire. Cliffs of Dover in a San Francisco whorehouse. Pygmy cannibals, same whorehouse, different room. Foolishness to think that after years away a person can return to an establishment that he was lastly thrown forcibly out of and be treated with any degree of kindness. Worse for me, though, was that they didn't even remember me or care that I'd returned.