The Big Both Ways (42 page)

“What about Ellie?” Annabelle asked. The sweet taste of chocolate was still in her mouth. She pushed her glasses up her nose. “What about Ellie? Shouldn’t we go get her?”

Slip looked at her. Her pants were ripped and the tail of her shirt hung halfway out her pants. Her braids were loose and fraying. She seemed smaller than she actually was.

“Yes,” Slip said, knowing that if he disappeared from Juneau now he would be convicted for the murder of Ben Avery. “We better find Ellie.” And he started back toward town with the girl.

That evening Slip went back to the dory and got his bindle and a suitcase of clothes for the girl. He had no idea how long they would be in Juneau. A light rain fell on him as he walked back to the boardinghouse. Rain ran down the windows as he got Annabelle settled on the folding cot in the room. The girl didn’t want to read the Oz book Slip had found in the house for her. She didn’t want to play with any of the kids who were swinging from a rope swing behind
the house. She lay on the cot with her glasses on and her eyes open as if she were afraid to go to sleep.

Slip took a shower down the hall. He put on a different wrinkled shirt and combed his hair. When he came back, the girl was asleep. He reached down and took off her glasses.

Slip was bone tired. He tried to think of a way he could leave this town and his troubles behind him. He didn’t want to go to jail. All he wanted was to wake up in his own bed on a cool morning of a warm day. But that wasn’t going to happen. He sat down on the edge of his bed and watched the girl sleep until the sky flared silver and settled into its long summer twilight.

Downstairs George Hanson withstood the silence of the young police officer from Ketchikan. The landlady had poured them each a glass of iced tea and had excused herself to go back to her room to read. All that passed between the two men was the clicking of ice.

Finally George said, “After we finish this, one of us should take a chair and sit out by the back door. You can see the window to his room from there. One of us can stay here at the front.”

Walter nodded his head as if he understood. The young policeman reached into the bag at his feet and lifted out a revolver in a burnished leather holster.

“Brought you a weapon. My captain told me you would need one,” the young man said.

George took the weapon and pulled the gun from its case. “Thank you,” he said, “though I doubt it will be of much use. Once the shooting starts, I don’t think a pistol will do much good.”

Walter Tillman leaned closer to the older officer. “Why is Ellie Hobbes going to lead the scabs up the hill to the mine?”

“She’s got no choice. The strike’s at a deadlock. People are losing money. Management can’t just force them to cross the line at gunpoint. They need it to seem like it’s the workers’ idea.”

“There will be hell to pay.”

“That’s true, but management won’t be paying. Violence gives them an excuse to break up the strike.”

“What about Ellie Hobbes?” Walter rattled the ice in his glass.

“They’re throwing Ellie out with the trash. Besides a battle right now works to everybody’s advantage, even the strikers. Some of them are starting to have second thoughts. Head cracking will radicalize a few of them.”

“Why don’t we take Wilson and Hobbes into custody right now, tonight?”

George Hanson stretched and settled into his chair. He sighted down the barrel of the pistol. “I don’t have enough to hold either of them, even if we could get someone here to authorize an arrest. We need one of the two to come running into our arms.”

“One of them is going to be killed,” the young man said, staring at the floor.

“I think it’s probably worse than that,” George said as he spun the cylinder of the gun. “If we don’t do things just right tomorrow, lots of us may be killed.”

TWENTY-ONE
 

The two policemen traded shifts during the night so that by the time Slip and the girl clambered out the bedroom window, Walter Tillman was sleeping lightly on a straight-back chair just off the porch. He woke up when Slip threw a bundle of clothes down into the bushes below his window.

It was early morning and the sunlight had a syrupy warmth to it as Slip and the girl wound their way through lanes, empty lots, and interconnecting trails. Twice Annabelle fell behind and he turned to take her hand, and twice he saw the policeman duck out of sight.

All through town men were waking up and leaving their houses early. The city attorney, who was also the lawyer for the mine, had drafted a police protection act. People could not gather in groups larger than five without being subject to arrest. That morning men tapped on windows and whispered to their friends. Miners were spreading the word about the scabs marching on the mine. Businessmen were reporting to the Arctic Brotherhood Hall to work as deputies. Kids climbed trees to get a good view of the street. Police were unlocking the trunks where they kept the tear gas, and firemen checked the hydrants for water pressure and made sure their hoses were ready.

Slip and the girl passed two men in an alley smoking cigarettes and speaking intently to each other. The men caught sight of them and ducked into a doorway. Through another open window Annabelle heard a man arguing with his wife. The sound of breaking crockery rained down on their shoulders as they walked past.

Slip took Annabelle to the dory. He pulled back the tarp and moist air billowed out of the hull. He made a nest in the bow and tucked the girl down where she could pull the canvas over her head if she needed to hide.

“I’m going to go uptown,” Slip said. “I’ll try and find Ellie.”

“I want to come,” Annabelle said with ambivalence.

“You wait here. No matter what. You say it back to me now.”

“I’ll just stay here,” the girl said and she sat still in the boat.

Slip looked down at her and she seemed so still that the world could have stopped moving. The clouds could have been hung from hooks and turned to ice. He reached down and touched her cheek. “That’s fine. You stay here,” he said. He stuck the handle of the axe down his pants leg so the axe head hooked into his belt. He walked a little stiff-legged but that was okay, because he didn’t feel like sprinting anyway.

Men were beginning to gather in front of the New Miners Association Hall. Everyone wore their hats. Some even had ties on under their work coats. They were going for jobs but few expected to dig rock that afternoon. Floodwater operatives in their long wool coats and newly deputized store owners walked the perimeter of the block, waving anybody through who said they wanted to go to work. They checked their names against lists of the striking miners. They had no need to enforce the police protection act here. This gathering was sanctioned, and the deputies were walking the sidewalks like barkers trying to get more workers to join the crusade.

“You going to let them radical bastards tell you to go hungry?” one called out to a skinny old man with tobacco stains
down the front of his shirt. The old man shifted from foot to foot and mumbled some excuses for why he needed to leave. But dozens of men pushed past the men with the lists and once inside the block the deputies would not let them leave. There were a few men who looked like they were ready for work, but there were far more who weren’t. They had on slick-soled shoes and hunting jackets.

“I’m just here to take a look. I’ve got to run back to the house in a second,” one man in a grey fedora said.

Over by the hall someone was passing a flask, and someone brayed to his friends, “What right they got to say that I can’t work?” Some men nodded and some walked away. Up a side street they heard a slurry of swearing and baton blows thudding down on someone’s ribs. Three more men drifted away. Two more men showed up.

Ellie Hobbes sat in the front window of the miners association office. The doctor had changed her dressings and given her some sulfa tablets. Ellie had on a new skirt and a clean white blouse. She had dark rings under her eyes and when she smiled her mouth couldn’t quite stretch over her teeth. Even in the fresh clothes she had the sad countenance of a beaten mule.

A kid ran out from the back room and brought her a glass of brandy. Ellie gave him a nickel tip and watched him jam it into his pants pocket with a grin. As the kid started back Ellie called him over and gave him another dime.

“Thanks, lady!” the kid said. He flipped the dime end over end and caught it as if he were James Cagney or a big city swell.

“That’s okay,” Ellie said. “You got a hole to hide in back there?”

“Are you crazy?” The kid stood flat-footed with his face screwed up.

“I used to work in a bar when I was a kid, and I always had a hiding place for when fights broke out. I had a little spot
beside the cooler where nobody could get to me. You got a place like that?”

“I can handle myself,” the kid said, and he put the dime in his pocket and swaggered off.

Ellie watched him go and she felt sick to her stomach. The doctor had said she should be in the hospital, but there wasn’t much need for that now. She looked out the window at all the working men milling around. The atmosphere was charged and tentative at the same time.

“They should have some music or something, maybe a vaudeville comic, something to keep their minds off of what is going to happen next,” Ellie said aloud, though no one was listening.

Tom Delaney walked from the back room and stood over her. “We’re losing them,” he said.

“Yes, you are,” Ellie said, taking a drink and watching the nervous men looking for a way out.

“We need these spineless sons of bitches to go over to the hiring hall.”

“They just don’t look too anxious to take a beating,” Ellie said without looking at the shamus.

“What the hell’s the matter with them? If enough of them go there, no one would have to take a beating.”

Ellie smiled broadly and set the empty glass down on the table. “Why don’t you go out and tell them that?”

“Why would the strikers put up a fight? They know they’ll get stomped.”

Ellie laughed. “They are thinking the exact same thing about you,” and she waved her hands at the scene on the street. “They think you’re bringing the revolution to them.”

Outside two more men joined the group passing the flask. A man in work clothes glanced at his watch and looked nervously at the deputies. Delaney tugged on Ellie’s shoulder.

“Well, nothing’s going to happen if somebody doesn’t build a fire underneath these boys.”

“We’ve got a deal?” Ellie said again without looking up.

“We’ll talk about that later.”

“What if I don’t go out there?”

“You feeling suicidal, Ellie?”

“Not particularly.”

“Then it looks like we have a deal.”

Walter had lost Slip in the crowd that was flowing through the streets toward the New Miners Association Hall. Deputies pushed away gawkers with their batons and waved through any scabs who said they wanted to go to work. Walter pushed against the crowd and held his badge in front of him but the crowd was too tight. Slip had somehow hit a clearing in the crowd that closed in behind him.

Slip kept walking toward the front of the New Miners Association Hall. Someone had turned over a crate on top of a couple of pallets and deputies were clearing a space for a speaker. Slip kept one hand on the axe head and leaned into whatever body was blocking his way.

“Christ, buddy, ease up, will you?” someone yelled, but Slip pushed toward the front of the crowd, the blade of the axe hard against his hip. He thought about being arrested, about tight handcuffs and the long months of waiting until someone led him up the thirteen steps where a long-faced executioner stood ready. He thought of Ellie and whether she had made a deal with the cops. There was some logic in killing her, once all hell broke loose, just as it surely would. Nobody would stop him. Then he thought of that first moment he saw her beside the Skagit River and he thought of all the wild country he had seen since then. Like it or not, he was living in that wild country now.

No one introduced her. Ellie got up on the overturned crates, looked out into the crowd, and waited for them to settle. There were men and a few boys. Some were waiting for her to speak. Some nervously looked at their watches. Some looked up the hill where
the silent mine sat like a monument. One by one their attention turned to Ellie, maybe out of curiosity, maybe just because there was nowhere else to look.

“Brothers,” she said loudly, but no one looked up. “I been asked to talk to you today because I’ve been here before.”

“You ain’t
my
brother!” someone called from the crowd.

“That’s true,” she said smiling, her bruised face apologetic. “You don’t know me. But I’ve been here.” She cleared her throat and held up her bandaged hand where fresh blood was already weeping through. “I used to have a good hand but a machine took off most of it,” she yelled. The man who had been catcalling stepped back and pulled his hat down on his head.

Ellie scanned the faces. “A plain, stupid machine. Just a machine in a cannery, like a million others up and down this coast. It was my own fault and I’ll live with it. I might even get me a job posing for exit signs.” Ellie held up the deformed profile of her hand with the index finger pointing up the hill. A few men chuckled.