Though Not Dead (56 page)

When he broke free from his stupefaction he slammed out of the wheelhouse and slid down the ladder to the deck. The brailer was just coming out of the hold, the winch on the boom reeling it up to dump the crab into a tote on the dock.

“Attention on deck!” he yelled at the top of his voice. “You, let loose the bow line! You, get on the stern!”

A chorus of voices followed him back to the ladder. “What’s up with the boss?” “What’s going on, Sam?” “Hey, look at the dock!”

He jumped forward and yanked the pucker rope. The crab cascaded back into the hold. “Earthquake, and it’s a bad one! We’re getting away from the dock!” He shoved a deckhand who was staring at the dock, stupefied. “Now, not this time tomorrow! Move your asses before I drop-kick the bunch of you over the side!”

The deck boss materialized next to him. “Sam, I live here. My wife and kids are here. I’ve got to go find them.”

“Go ahead, if you think you can get up that ladder,” Old Sam said.

The deck boss turned in time to see the last bolt pop out of the steel ladder and the ladder drop into the water a hand’s breadth away from the
Freya
’s hull.

Sam slammed into the wheelhouse, slapped the engine into life, and had the bow pulling away from the piling as the bow line slid free. The deckhand on the stern line wasn’t as quick and the rope burned his hands when Sam went all ahead full.

All around them boats, from thirty-foot seiners to hundred-foot crabbers, were pulling away from floats and docks and moorages and steaming north northeast. Sam didn’t breathe again until Woody Island was on their stern. He kept the
Freya
offshore north of Spruce Island for the next twenty-four hours, the whole crew spending their off-watch hours huddled around the big marine radio bolted to the wall at the foot of the chartroom bunk.

There was no telephone service left in Southcentral Alaska. The Anchorage International Airport tower had fallen over. The Million Dollar Bridge fifty miles north of Cordova had collapsed. Twenty miles of the Seward Highway was below water. Later they would hear that nine people had been killed outright during the earthquake, a hundred and six in the tidal wave that struck nine hundred miles of Alaska coastline afterward. To the
Freya
and the other boats who had made it out of the Kodiak harbor, the tidal wave had been a long, hard, rolling swell that rocked their hulls and moved on, but some coastal villages and towns like Seward and Valdez were heavily damaged, and some villages, like Chenega in Prince William Sound and Afognak north of Kodiak had been completely destroyed. In some places the land had sunk five and a half feet, causing high tide floods. In others, the land had risen thirty feet, putting docks forever out of reach of high water.

By Sunday morning the deck boss was beside himself with worry over his family and they were getting close to the point of no return on fuel. The
Freya
headed back to port.

The first indication of what they would see when they got back to town was the house floating out to sea on the ebb tide. Two stories, for the most part intact, the tidal wave had simply lifted it off its foundations and carried it off. It was only the first. Sam, his jaw tight, stayed alert, picking his way through the detritus of totes, lengths of lumber, refrigerators, a red tricycle tangled in a fishing net. It was as if the entire town had been washed away.

Which was pretty much what it looked like when they got up close. The earthquake had reduced the town to a game of pickup sticks, and the tidal wave had washed half of them out to sea. There was no dock left. Sam hailed a drifter he knew to ferry the deck boss to the beach so he could go find his family.

The other three deckhands were from Seldovia, Valdez, and Seattle. The Seattle man opted off in Kodiak, going ashore with the deck boss. Sam got some fuel off a crabber who’d just finished topping off the tank when the quake hit. The
Freya
headed back out to sea, on a course for Seldovia, where he knew there was a fuel dock. Two days later they steamed into the bay. The town looked pretty much intact, except for the small boat harbor, which was being towed back in one float at a time by the fishing fleet. He refueled, emptied his hold of king crab for pennies on the dollar, dumped his Seldovia hand, and headed for Valdez.

The tidal wave had damaged Valdez so badly that three years later it was moved to a new location. He moored the
Freya
to an anchor buoy offshore, and allowed his Valdez deckhand to move his family on board since their house had been first destroyed by the earthquake and then washed away by the tsunami.

And then he headed up the Richardson Highway, hitching a series of rides until he got to Ahtna. The Interior town was shaken but mostly intact. He spent the evening with Jane Silver, who fed him a large meal of moose steaks and mashed potatoes, and at first light next morning he was on the road for Niniltna with a pair of snowshoes he borrowed from the local banker and a pillowcase full of smoke fish and fry bread over his shoulder. It was a slushy trip, but he was made welcome at homesteads along the way. Everyone was anxious for news, and the expression on Joyce’s face when she opened the door of her cabin to see him standing there made it the whole odyssey worthwhile. For the first time since before the war, she was moved to a spontaneous show of affection, throwing her arms around him and holding him close. God, it felt good.

He slept next door in Ekaterina’s spare room and spent the next month chopping wood and hunting for Joy and Ekaterina and Edna and Viola and Balasha, although the few moose he found were thin and stringy. “No matter,” Balasha said. “Anything tender you boil it long enough.” By then all five women had lost their husbands through death, divorce, or abandonment. They worried more about the need to send the children away to school, and the subsequent decline of the village’s population. Every other house was empty and beginning to deteriorate both from the depredations of scavengers and lack of care. He’d never seen the town looking so shabby.

Joyce had gone to the same school in Cordova as Sam had, and she spoke English better than he did, but he noticed that the other women’s speech patterns were overtaking her own. She was misplacing modifiers and displacing clauses, and for the first time he heard someone refer to the women collectively as “the aunties.”

It was also the first time he remembered anyone outside of the Cutthroats calling him Old Sam. Well, what the hell, he sure enough felt old enough that April.

Face it. He’d felt old ever since that night in Anchorage.

“You still have the manuscript?” he said one evening.

“Same place like always,” she said.

Neither of them looked at the wooden armoire lurking in the corner, repository of one of the best-kept secrets in Niniltna.

What the hell, he thought again. What was one more?

He left in May to see to his boat, and got a job ferrying supplies for the U.S. Navy, back on the Aleutian Chain again but this time way the hell and gone to Amchitka, which was damn near all the way to Russia. He was there on October 29, 1965, when they detonated Long Shot, the first of three underground nuclear tests. He sat offshore on the
Freya,
wondering if a giant mushroom-shaped cloud was going to rise up over the island and roll out over the water and kill him dead where he sat. He didn’t much care.

He’d hired his first woman deckhand this trip, a Norwegian Eyak from Cordova with a set net site on Alaganik Bay. Her name was Mary Balashoff. She laughed a lot, and after a while she was laughing in his bed. He told himself he didn’t deserve her, but it didn’t stop him from enjoying her. And slowly, steadily, that night in Anchorage let go of him, so that he didn’t think about it more than once a day, then more than once a week. When a month had passed during which he realized he had not thought of the sight of Emil’s smile, of Erland’s voice yelling, “Dad! Dad!,” he began to feel that life might be worth living after all.

He had found the map in the icon, where Mac had hidden it, probably one step ahead of the Pinkerton agents. Pete Pappardelle had not found it, and either Emil hadn’t found it or, more likely, he had found it and, finding it, had taken a characteristic pleasure in retaining a reminder of the man whose life he had taken without shame or remorse. Old Sam put it back, hid the icon, and got on with it.

Mary was still with him three years later when he loaded most of a drill rig from Nikiski onto the
Freya,
lashing to the deck what he couldn’t take apart and put into the hold. While he didn’t see anyone he knew, he was relieved when they pulled out, even if the
Freya
was riding a little too close to her trim line.

They lucked out with the weather. It was almost flat calm all the way down to Unimak Pass, a thing Sam had never seen before in his life, after which they turned right and went past the Pribilofs and Nunivak and St. Matthew and St. Lawrence and Big and Little Diomede, all the way up through the Bering Strait to the Chukchi Sea and the Arctic Ocean, to land their cargo in Prudhoe Bay, on August 16, just a couple of miles from where the discovery well had been brought in the previous March. Sam was curious in spite of himself, and hitched a ride to the BP Base Camp, which high-sounding name resolved into a bunch of ATCO trailers and a couple of drill rigs, peopled with a bunch of men who hadn’t shaved in a long time. He hadn’t known such flat land existed in Alaska. There was only the barest hint of mountains on the southern horizon. He’d never seen so many birds, either, what seemed like seventeen different species of ducks and all the species of geese there were. He thought of the aunties’ freezers, and his hands itched for a shotgun.

“Good fishing in the rivers, too,” the redheaded radioman said, and offered him a beer and a ringside seat for
Tony’s Nine O’Clock News at Ten,
a radio show comprised of news snippets read off a wire report, what music was available in the form of records played on a turntable with a scratchy needle, and a lot of bad and mostly unrepeatable jokes. It was an impressive example of what people would sit still for when they were that lonely, that bored, and that far from home.

Upon returning home safely, Old Sam took the
Freya
into Seward and put her into dry dock for some much-needed repairs. Mary wanted to go to Anchorage. He most emphatically did not, so she took the train up without him. He spent the interim perched on a stool in the Yukon Bar, drinking beer and thinking.

When Mary returned from Anchorage he said, “I’m going home.”

In the last twenty-five years there wasn’t much of Alaska’s coastline he hadn’t cruised, and he’d put away enough money that he wasn’t nervous about his future even after he paid off the
Freya
’s repairs and maintenance. “Since they outlawed fish traps with the statehood,” he said, “the fish are back in Alaganik Bay, and there’s enough processors in Cordova to keep the price interesting. I’m going to refit the
Freya
for tendering, and spend the summers picking up fish and delivering them to Cordova, and winters in Niniltna.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Actually, I was going to tell you. I got a letter from my dad. He says none of the other kids want the family set net site on Alaganik Bay. I do.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Well, I’d be just offshore.”

“Imagine that. You don’t want to get married or anything, do you?”

“Hell, no,” he said. “You?”

“I’d shoot myself first,” she said, and laughed.

He did love that laugh.

So he’d sat out the pipeline years in what now, after ANCSA and the d2 lands bill, was coming to be called the Park. He bought an old cabin on the Kanuyaq River two houses up from Joyce’s and wired it for electricity so he could read the books he was beginning to collect. Summers he spent on the
Freya,
delivering fish from Alaganik to Cordova for a penny a pound. When he wasn’t hunting or splitting wood or completing honey-do lists for Ekaterina and the aunties, winters he spent exploring the Park that had been created around them, penetrating the fastness of the Quilak Mountains, following the creeks and rivers from their sources to their mouths, tracking the herds of caribou. He regained all the woodcraft he had put on hold when he had left the Park so long ago, and learned more, honing his carpentry and woodworking skills and slowly collecting a set of more and better tools. Long winters were made for that kind of thing.

He went to Canyon Hot Springs, and added the cabin and its outbuildings to Mac’s map. After that, he mostly stayed away, the hope and love of the young man who had built that cabin still too strong, too immediate, for him to tolerate for long.

In the fullness of time Stephan Shugak married Zoya Shashnikof and their daughter Ekaterina Ivana was born. Old Sam took to her right off, and when her parents died so young, he stepped forward to share the privilege with Abel and the vest of the village of teaching her how to hunt and shoot and trap and fish. She was the child he had never had.

There were times he didn’t think he deserved as much satisfaction as he had received in his life, a good boat, a good woman as independent as she was strong, a daughter so worthy of love and pride. There were times when he woke up from a dream of Emil Bannister laying on the floor of his study, his own blood drowning that gloating smile.

At those times he would force himself up out of his bed and down the ladder to brew himself a mug up, facing down his ghosts with a dose of caffeine and a taciturn front, the sweat of fear drying along his spine.

It seemed a small price to pay.

Thirty-four

Bernie’s.

The belly dancers were out and in full regalia, castanets clicking, flirtatious glances beneath spangled veils tucked into knit caps, some of them wearing long underwear under sheer skirts. Pastor Bill’s congregation, which these days just fit at the big round table, held hands and sent up a silent prayer for help in leading the heathens to the path of righteousness. It was the wrong time of year for Big Bumpers, more’s the pity. Kate would have enjoyed watched Bernie force feed them Middle Fingers.