The Big Both Ways (12 page)

She lay listening to the soothing sound of the waves and the wind and she tried to let her mind lift up out of her body. She thought she had cracked one of her ribs, but she knew she had to pull Slip up and get him back to the boat.

Annabelle poked her head out from under her umbrella as the clattering of rocks came closer. She saw Ellie’s legs truding slowly, with the bloody shoes and cuffs of a man dragging behind her.

Annabelle gently uncocked the revolver and set it back into the pocket of Slip’s coat. The yellow bird rattled the bars on his cage. Ellie slung Slip onto the edge of the dory.

“Sweetheart, we’ve got to go. Right now,” she said, and Annabelle didn’t argue. Ellie flopped Slip down in the bottom of the dory like a dead fish. The little girl jumped out onto the shore and helped Ellie push the dory down to the water.

George Hanson sat uncomfortably on a broken chair listening to the tired-looking woman weep loud and hard. A baby slept in the overstuffed chair, a toddler sat as still as a stone next to her mother on the couch, and another baby climbed up her arm.

“I ain’t telling you nothing,” Ida said. She settled the climbing child into her lap. “I got these kids to think of. What’s to say they don’t come back?”

“Who?” George asked, brushing right past her reluctance to talk.

“Floodwater … or the Reds, for that matter. I don’t know. I told him to stay clear of this union business. I told him to stay clear of them Reds.”

“How long has your husband been gone, Mrs. Cobb?” George
asked. He leaned forward gently so as not to lose his balance on the straight-backed chair.

“He left that day the tall man in the car came out here and got the papers. Ray left right after that.”

“Who was the tall man? Had you seen him before?” George had to raise his voice to be heard over the sound of one of the babies crying on the couch.

“Raymond don’t tell me nothing about his goings-on. He don’t tell me nothing.”

“Did he call him by name?”

“Nope. He just called him ‘Boss,’ that’s all I remember.”

“Boss. You sure?”

“Raymond ain’t no Red, officer. I swear to God he ain’t. He just joined the union a couple of months ago.”

George looked down at his notebook. He wrote “Not a Red” in letters big enough for her to see. The baby on her lap stirred for a moment and then closed its eyes.

“Now, what did you say happened to the papers?” George asked.

“The tall man in the nice coat took ’em.”

“Did any money change hands?” George asked.

She did not answer. Her silence told him there had been some money. Maybe not a lot. Certainly not enough. But there had been some money, and George hoped that she had it in a safe place. The Everett cops had asked her the usual questions about the cars and the license plates that had come and gone. They had harassed her for a better description of the tall man and the others in the car, but Mrs. Cobb had given them nothing. George considered taking her through it all again, but instead he thanked her and left. A dirty terrier growled at him as he got back in his car.

Off the beach, the wind remained steady, and the choppy waves came fast in the shallow water, pushing against the stern and slapping up into the boat. Puget Sound was dark, filled only with the
howl of the wind and the crunch of white water breaking on the rocks. The wind would blow the dory past the hobo jungle where the thugs were cleaning up their mess. Men were carrying gas lanterns in their free hands, lowering them to their knees to get a look at the faces of the hoboes laid out on the ground.

Ellie settled in the middle seat and pulled hard on the oars, trying to cut across the waves, but the wind angled them down the beach right in front of the scene.

“Get down,” she hissed. She and the girl scrambled for the bottom of the boat. Ellie peeked over the side of the dory and looked toward shore, hoping they wouldn’t bump up against the rocks breaking white just off the hobo encampment.

The fire had been stoked now by the men with the clubs. Sparks zigzagged into the darkness and a man with a long coat and some papers in his hands brushed a spark away from his face. There were several men down on the ground, but Ellie could see only one person being carried on a stretcher from over by the trees where they had just been.

“Are we all right?” the girl asked in a steady voice.

“We will be. Soon.”

And soon the little dory drifted past the fires and then into the dark mouth of open water. To the west lights twinkled up on the bluffs. Ellie’s arms were cramping and her hands could barely grip the oars, but she gradually pulled the boat away from the beach. The dory moved up and down the swells as if it had found an easy gait. Ellie tried rowing downwind but kept missing the period of the waves and ended up turning the dory broadside letting the waves dump in.

Annabelle had an electric torch that she shined around the dory.

“Better turn that off, honey,” Ellie said softly.

The girl’s leg bumped against the canvas roll and the mast lashed to the narrow outer deck. Ellie reached to untie the line and began tracing the rigging as the dory wallowed in the seas.
Her fingers scrambled over the sail, sorting and tracing the lines tied to the small step mast. Then she stood up and shoved one end of the mast into the hole in the seat just behind Annabelle and Buddy’s perch.

The dory came alive with flapping canvas and thin ropes flailing in front of the boat. Annabelle cowered with the bird in the bow. Ellie tied off reef points in the canvas and then hopped to the bow to reach for the lines that were snapping the surface of the seas ahead of them.

“You know what you’re doing?”

“I’m not sure. This is different from our little boat on the lake,” Ellie said. “But my hands are cramped up and I can’t row this thing fast enough with the wind like this.”

Ellie gathered up the lines and brought them toward the stern. The dory tipped and dodged in the seas, but the weight Slippery Wilson contributed, lying on the bottom, helped its stability. The canvas kept flapping until she stepped over the prone man and wrapped a line around a cleat on the starboard side. Then the commotion stopped. The little sail ballooned downwind and the dory surged ahead. Ellie felt the rush of motion and it made her lightheaded for a moment. She pushed the oars away with her feet and felt the lift of the little boat flying. Then it turned abruptly to port and the whole enterprise seemed to be lurching into the sea.

“Put the oar in the stern!” the girl yelled.

Ellie had released the rope holding the sail and once again the air was alive with the popping of canvas and rattling ropes. She brought both oars in, and then set one in the water at the stern. There was a short piece of tarred twine to hook across the two posts that would keep the oar in place.

“Okay,” she said, trying to sound sure of herself, “let’s try that again.”

She tightened the rope around the cleat again and the sail ballooned out. Ellie dug the oar down into the waves and the little dory surged forward like a plow horse in the morning. But the weight
was wrong and waves lapped up into the bow and Annabelle came scrambling back toward the stern.

Ellie settled her in the stern. Annabelle had tied her blanket around Buddy’s cage so he wouldn’t get soaked. There was scarcely enough room for the three of them in the stern. The little bell in the cage tinkled through the fabric and the bird squawked like a crow. With the weight shifted to the stern, the bow rode out of the water and the dory slipped more easily through the waves. Ellie placed the oar under her right arm and grabbed the end with her right hand. She put her left hand gingerly on the girl’s shoulder and left it there for a moment.

“You think he is going to be okay?” Annabelle asked, furrowing her brow and staring down at Slip in the middle of the dory.

“I don’t know. He got clonked pretty hard. But if it was real bad he’d be dead already.”

“Looks like his head is bleeding,” the girl said, biting her lower lip and moving in closer to Slip to get out of the wind.

“It’s a long way from his heart, honey.”

The girl looked out into the darkness. The sea was humping up and hissing like an animal whose name she didn’t know. She was cold now and frightened. They were both shivering and the girl’s teeth were clacking together. But when she looked at her aunt clutching the makeshift rudder, she wanted to believe that this was just another kind of craziness they had both lived through before. So the girl wrapped herself in a tarp and leaned back into Ellie’s chest for warmth and tried listening to her aunt’s steady heartbeat.

Ellie Hobbes had moved in with her biological father when she was nineteen, and by the time she was twenty Beth had died and Annabelle came to her. Beth had specifically written this provision into her will, sensing perhaps the strength the child would need to be an orphan in this world.

The old man ran the wildest saloon in Aberdeen, Washington,
both before and after Prohibition. The Haywood Saloon was a marvel of curiosities. Early in the century when men around Aberdeen were cutting more timber than almost anywhere else in the world, there was an army of lumberjacks encamped in the area. Hundreds of these men preferred to get their mail, do their banking, and seek advice for most medical conditions inside the walls of the Haywood Saloon. News of the region was reliably reported there: which outfit was paying the best wages, who had been killed in the woods and how. Men would sometimes come in on a Friday and have to be carried out and loaded into the back of a company truck on Sunday morning. The church women of Aberdeen were scandalized that Ellie worked in the saloon, but she didn’t care. No man, no matter how drunk, ever pestered her for sex in her father’s place. They may have been rough, but to Big Joe’s daughter they were courtly drunks who could be counted on for their manners.

Joe was six foot five inches and had been a faller of some renown until he lost his left hand when he caught it between a wire cable and a stump. He compensated with a stationary hook that fascinated children.

The Haywood Saloon had a stuffed alligator across the top of the bar. There was a lumpy stuffed polar bear with dust-scoured glass eyes in the back by the pool table, Indian headdresses hung from the ceiling, and a strange piece of curved ivory, which was said to be a fossilized walrus penis, served as a handle for one of the beer spigots. It was rumored that Big Joe kept the genitals of Wesley Everest, the Wobbly who had been lynched in Centralia, in a jar of alcohol under the bar. Even though Ellie never saw such things, she was not quite ready to disbelieve any stories about the Haywood where, after all, there was a mummified body resting in the basement on a shelf above the hard liquor.

Annabelle slept and fussed in a crib behind the bar while Ellie ran back and forth from the restaurant bringing food for the men who wanted to eat with their beer. She cleaned spittoons and
sometimes acted as a banker by holding on to some of the regulars’ wages so they couldn’t drink them away in the bar.

They lived above the bar in a small apartment that smelled of cedar shavings and cigar smoke. There was never a night that Ellie and Annabelle didn’t fall asleep to the clatter of billiard balls and glasses breaking.

She loved eavesdropping on the men’s gossip and tall stories. They all had dangerous jobs and lived without the benefit of women. They talked so frequently and explicitly about sexual matters that the mystery of human anatomy was lost to her by the time she was twenty.

Men talked about sex. They talked about home. And they liked to complain about the rain and the steepness of the hills. They liked to complain about the dispositions of the camp cooks and the temperature of the coffee. But what working men liked to talk about the most was the stupidity of the educated classes. Thanks to the booze and the consistency of this complaint, the Haywood Saloon became a tight-knit community: it was clear that everyone else, everyone outside those walls, was a stupid bastard.

The men in the front office, and the ones in the boardrooms in Portland and Seattle, may have gone to college, but they didn’t know a goddamn thing worth knowing. Even when the topic shifted, this theme ran through all their stories: the assholes from everywhere else were robbing them blind and slowing down the progress of civilization. There were countless stories of perpetual motion machines that had been stolen from unwitting farmers, of men who wore two-hundred dollar suits and didn’t know how to start their own cars, of engineers who hopelessly screwed up an entire construction job by ignoring the advice of the mechanic on the ground. The people who ran things didn’t know what the hell they were doing. This story was told over and over again in the Haywood Saloon. This was the story that bubbled up between the floorboards of the little apartment where Ellie and the toddler slept. By
the time Ellie was twenty-four she had accepted the story as gospel truth.

When Big Joe died, the bar ended up going to the bank and they shut it down for good. Ellie tried to borrow money to take over the bar, but the bankers locked her out. The night before she and the girl left Aberdeen for good, she let herself in through the windows. She curled Annabelle in her bed and slept on her narrow shelf, back near the icehouse where she used to listen to the men at their card games. It was silent then with nothing but the flutter of the gas lantern. She went to sleep with a head full of anger toward the dumb bastards who had taken her bar away.

Slippery Wilson opened his eyes and could see only Ellie’s profile in the dark. Above her the heavy canvas sail fluttered slightly on its downwind run. There were stars above the dory that appeared to jog back and forth as the little boat lunged through the waves.

“You should have left me there,” Slip said in a cracked voice.

“Jesus, you scared me,” Ellie said, jumping back.

“You should have left me there,” Slip said again.

“I know, I should have.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Not yet anyway,” she said, as she ran her fingers across his head feeling the greasy smear of blood in his hair. “We got to get you patched up.” She pulled on the steering oar to swerve the dory toward a sand spit jutting out into the darkness.