Joko (31 page)

When he finished, he looked Jack full in the face to make sure he had his attention and asked if he understood. The sasquatch nodded.

“Remember,” Johnny added. “Sit very still.”

Jack nodded again.

“Don’t worry,” said Johnny, examining the slice on Swan’s index finger. “It looks worse than it is. Razor cuts heal fast.”

Swan tore a strip of tablecloth and wrapped it around his finger. He put the straight razor down and began removing his shirt. “I’d better wash the blood out of this before it sets in.”

Jack sat motionless in the chair, clutching a hand towel.

He wiped the suds from his chest and stood up. He starting moving toward the door, but Johnny took his arm. “Let me look at you.”

Swan and Johnny scrutinized Swan’s work, while Jack stood motionless, looking at them doubtfully.

“I think we should put some clothes on him,” said Swan.

“To complete the picture.”

Johnny went over to a box full of clothes they had sorted to be used as Jack’s wardrobe. He produced the pants and shirt that Jack had worn previously and tossed them to the sasquatch. “Put them on, Jack.”

After a few failed tries Jack got the clothes on in good order.

“Those pants might keep slipping down,” said Swan, still tending to his slashed finger. “Let him use my suspenders.”

After a few minutes of tugging, Jack’s outfit was complete.

“You look great, Jack old chap!” exclaimed Swan.

“Yes, indeed,” echoed Johnny.

Swan thought about his Indians’ unexpected visit. “I wonder,” he mused. “If the Makahs came back and saw Jack, would they take him for human?”

Johnny sized up Jack once more. “He don’t look like a monkey, that’s for sure.”

Shaved, cleaned, and dressed, the sasquatch stood before Johnny and Swan. Swan had indeed worked magic.

Close inspection revealed a slightly pointed head, but Swan had managed to cut the hair so his head looked more round.

Loose fitting clothing helped mask a short neck and his slight bowleggedness.

“Well,” said Johnny after a minute’s thought, “If I hadn’t seen it happen I wouldn’t have believed it. You really did change Jocko into Jack.”

“And he’s done magnificently,” said Swan, happily.

“You’re right, John. We did it, all of us, together. But Jack deserves the credit. He’s proven himself extraordinary in many ways. He came to me as a beast, but now I know he is a someone.” Swan patted Jack’s shoulder gently. “Now, my good friend, we can set about rejoining society. It’s time to plan our next step, yes?”

Johnny sighed. “Whatever gets us back to Yale, Mr Swan.

I’m worried about Aunt Gert.”

“You can allay her worry the day we return to Port

Townsend,” answered Swan. “Getting you home will take a bit more doing.”

“I haven’t figured how to do it,” said Johnny. “Walking to Yale could take months.”

“You can’t do that, John,” said Swan.

Johnny frowned. “Well, we really don’t have a choice, do we?”

“You have to go south maybe a hundred miles before you’d be off this peninsula. You have rivers and streams to cross. And that’s
before
you get onto the mainland, John.

From there, well, north to whatever. What will you do? Go east to the Cascade Mountains and poke along over ravines, waterfalls and wilderness, ’til you get to Yale?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I guess so. Aren’t there roads?”

Swan looked at him for a long serious moment. “That’s no answer.”

“It’s all I got,” said Johnny, shrugging his shoulders.

Swan didn’t say anything more. He just grumbled and went over to the rain barrel where his bloodied shirt sat soaking in a pan. He lifted a wet sleeve and peered at the bloodstain that still discolored it.

“Dammit,” cursed Swan. “That was my favorite shirt.”

Jack had been silent, listening to the two humans’ discussion.

He didn’t understand all of it but enough came through, mostly from watching Johnny’s face, that he had a notion of what Swan was concerned about. Once again the two humans were arguing his fate.

He was, after all, standing in the middle of the room like the decorated tree. Would he get thrown out too? Was he going to be abandoned by the only family he had?

“John-ny and Jack go,” he said.

Johnny and Swan had forgotten there was a third person listening. They reacted to Jack’s words in unison. “What, Jocko … Jack?” they both said.

Jack said no more. The sadness in the sasquatch’s eyes was palpable now that he had a civilized look. It struck Johnny deeply that they had been ignoring Jack in their talks, when Jack’s future was the entire point of the discussion.

“Poor Jocko …” said Johnny.

“That’s JACK,” corrected Swan.

“All this change is confusing me, Mister Swan. How do you think Jack feels about it?”

Swan wrung out his shirt and hung it on a peg protruding from the cabin wall. He held out the fabric to see the stain.

“Well, I guess no harm was done,” he said quietly. “I’ve lots of stained shirts.”

Johnny smiled. Swan had a way of brushing adversity and hostility away with ease.

Swan left the shirt hanging; he walked over to Jack and spoke to him directly. “Jack, you are very much a part of this discussion.” Swan paused to let Jack answer.

Jack said nothing, so Swan continued. “If you’d care to comment, we’d both love to hear it.” Swan paused, waiting for a response from the sasquatch, but when none was offered he continued. His eyes moved back to Johnny. “I think you should come with me to Port Townsend.” He fished in his pocket for his pipe and tobacco. “I am known there and can vouch for you both. We can concoct a story of some kind.

Something like; “Jack here, is from the far away land of …

Sumatra”. I like the sound of it, don’t you?”

Johnny’s face brightened. “Right. Jack, we don’t know his
real
name, well, he stowed away for three … no,
four
months

… aboard the …”

“… the Farragut bound from Tahiti,” offered Swan as he lit his pipe.

Jocko still stood where Swan had cut his hair. He looked at the many small clumps of himself lying on the floor and wondered why it hadn’t hurt when it was cut. He wanted to ask Swan but had no idea how to, so he listened intently and watched the smoke from Swan’s pipe curl in the air.

“That’s a good story,” said Johnny. “I mean, what’s the chances of running into a person from Sumatra in

Washington Territory?”

“In Port Townsend? Actually? Pretty good.” Swan stroked his beard. “It’s certainly full of Orientals. You’ll see that for yourself.”

Swan noticed the sasquatch watching the smoke from his Meerschaum. “What do you think, Jack? Are you ready for Port Townsend?”

“Go … Por … Town-sen,” said Jack.

“Right, Jack,” said Swan, taking the unexpected remark in stride. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do. Because, among other things, it’s the fastest way to get you both to Yale.” He walked over to the window and peered out at the distant white-capped mountains. “It will take a bit of doing, mind you. You will have to stay a while in Port Townsend, and you and Jack will have to keep practicing his skills.”

Swan closed the window when a gust of wind blew sparks from his pipe into the room. “He’s working hard, I’d say. He’s doing very well. But you and I both know that two months of training isn’t enough.”

Johnny sighed and looked at the floor.

“Oh, John, it won’t take long. Before you know it, you’ll both be riding first class on a steamer to Vancouver and, from there, a train to Yale. And, assuming no pressing business holds me in Port Townsend, I’d be happy to accompany you.”

“You would?” said Johnny, looking hopefully at Swan.

“One way or another, I’ll see you get back to Yale.”

Swan’s confident attitude helped calm most of Johnny’s fears. By the next morning they had a plan and a purpose.

They were finally packing to leave.

As they readied their packs, Swan reminded them that Port Townsend was forty miles away; over rough land to the northeast. Without mules, everything would have to be carried on their backs. No simple task, since they had a box full of Swan’s notes to carry, along with provisions for three weeks of hard travel. Swan solved that problem by distributing the books evenly in each of three packs. Because of Jack’s obvious strength, Swan thought it was reasonable to give the largest pack to him.

“What did you plan to do without Jack and me?” asked Johnny as they sorted through the notebooks and reference journals. “How were you planning to return to Port

Townsend?”

“With the trapper’s mules, and a few Indians, when he returned in April.” Swan glanced at Jack, who had dressed himself in a fur hat, coat, pants, shirt and boots. He looked at himself in the mirror and seemed amused at the sight. Swan watched the sasquatch shuffle uneasily in his boots and considered their good fortune that he’d brought an extra pair, and that they could be adjusted to fit Jack’s oddly shaped feet.

“We should have mules,” protested Johnny, looking unhappily at the packs.

“But why?” asked Swan. “We have you and Jack!” He laughed and bent over to pick up his pack, and though he tried to hide it, a groan escaped his lips as he lifted it up.

“Well,” he said, teetering under the weight, “strapped on properly they shouldn’t give us much trouble.”

Johnny cursed as he picked up his own pack, then threw it to the ground. “I better get Jack set up before puttin’ on this damned thing. I’ll kill myself or throw out my back, wrestlin’ with his ’n mine at the same time!”

Swan scowled. “John, you sound like an old crone!”

The cabin was finally sealed and they were on the trail. Swan had compromised and left some of his fatter reference books and a small collection of his lesser notes in a box in the corner of the cabin, and he admitted that he had perhaps failed to plan his trip
from
the cabin as well as he had planned the trip
to
the cabin, but he threw that off as a sad vestige of his former drunken self.

Jack had cleared his sasquatch nest from the cabin while Swan nailed the window blinds shut “to keep out the varmints.”

It was almost April, and the trapper had not arrived as Swan had expected. He had told Johnny he hoped Jack’s meeting the man might afford an excellent test of Jack’s transformation. “I was hoping the trapper could sniff around Jack, but I suspect that the trapping was difficult and he may have gone straight back to port to collect his money. No matter. We’ll meet plenty of good folks along the way, I suspect.”

Johnny’s thoughts had followed a similar vein. He yearned for, yet feared the road ahead. Swan had assured him they’d meet the locals, the Indian homesteaders they would run into along the way.

A mile down the trail near the banks of an unnamed stream they came upon the remnants of the Indians’ camp.

Swan gave it a cursory inspection and felt the ground where the campfire had been. “Hmm. It looks as though my friends stayed a while. This campfire’s seen some use, but the ground is cold. They left some time ago.” His eyes searched the ground. “They had two mules.” Swan pointed upstream.

“They didn’t go back to Townsend. They went north for deer.”

Swan pointed in the opposite direction. “We’ll follow the stream south ’til we get to a village. If the rains hold off we can make good time. It’ll take a day or two to reach there, following the riverbed. But if the water gets high, we’ll have to go inland and it will take longer.” Swan looked at Johnny’s leg. “But you know that, yes?”

Unlike many of the riverbeds in the area, the one they were following cut a narrow stony swath through the dense forest.

Swan said that the area usually provided ‘no such respite for the traveler’. Here, placid streams quickly became chasms and white water gorges were common, but this riverbed provided broad shores of flat glacial rock for long stretches.

As they walked Swan talked principally to Jack. He wanted Jack to be primed with lots of human conversation by the time they encountered other humans. Johnny wondered if it would do any good. Only time would tell if Jack would ever be human, but, watching him hop from rock to rock, pacing Swan as the man lectured, Johnny had to admit that they had done a good job with the transformation. If they ever got back to Yale, Gert would be amazed to see the new Jocko.

For Jack’s part, his only problem seemed to be with the boots. They nearly crippled him at first because they cramped his toes, but he quickly managed to adjust them. If they hurt his feet, there was no evidence of it that Johnny could detect.

While the two humans worked their way around the boulders and fallen timber, Jack seemed to move effortlessly, regardless of the terrain. His only problem was that the straps of his pack kept slipping off his rounded shoulders, but Swan solved that in good order by using a rawhide boot lace to tie the straps together at the back. When he made the adjustment Jack thanked him with a toothy smile and then bounded off happily. After that, despite the weight of his packs, Jack maintained a steady lead and had to stop frequently to let the humans catch up. Swan said he acted like a hound.

After a few hours of steady progress, Swan had to rest.

Exhausted, red-faced, and dripping with sweat, he threw down his pack contemptuously and stood for a moment searching the shadows for Jack. Then he then heaved a great sigh and sat down on a boulder.

“Let the sasquatch push on alone,” he growled. “Damned if an old codger like me can keep apace with the likes of him.”

Swan leaned back against a log and looked up. Jack was standing on a large log behind him, staring down at him in apparent amusement. Swan jumped when he first saw him, then he shook his head. “Oh, give it a rest, sasquatch.”

Johnny suggested they make camp, but Swan would have none of it. “We’ll get nowhere if we stop every few hours,” he protested. “Besides, it’s still early. Just let me sit for a few minutes.” He looked doubtfully at Johnny’s leg. “I suggest you give your leg a rest as well. We’ve still got a ways to go before s undown.”

“Are you in a hurry for some reason?” argued Johnny.