Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel Read online

  Jimmy

  Bluefeather

  A NOVEL

  KIM HEACOX

  Text and cover photo © 2015 by Kim Heacox

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Heacox, Kim.

  Jimmy Bluefeather : a novel / Kim Heacox.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-941821-68-8 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-941821-87-9 (e-book)

  I. Title.

  PS3608.E226J56 2015

  813’.6—dc23

  2015007906

  Edited by Tina Morgan and Kathy Howard

  Design by Vicki Knapton

  Published by Alaska Northwest Books®

  An imprint of

  P.O. Box 56118

  Portland, Oregon 97238-6118

  503-254-5591

  www.graphicartsbooks.com

  The characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For the wild inhabitants of Icy Strait

  Contents

  Part One

  the weight of air

  a face like the surface of water

  a real cliff dweller

  everything closed over him

  the raven, it was nothing

  a soul on fire

  removed and strangely dispassionate

  the death of too many dreams

  first you need to learn the language

  a sharp sea breeze

  cold metal burning

  the rounded shore the same

  a cornbread crime

  every sound drowned

  against the wind

  a time singular and different

  our finest decorations

  you only have to master yourself

  Part Two

  timeless yet out of time

  a kindness never heard

  resentment eating her alive

  jimmy bluefeather

  a place of safekeeping

  a discovery of your deepest knowing

  a shadow in black

  standing in his own surprise

  to save a life is no easy thing

  nobody went home

  the reefs of right and wrong

  Part Three

  áx’ awé koowdzitèe

  eyes she trusted

  to die we must forget, but also be forgotten

  Part Four

  we are each other

  Epilogue

  a choice nobody gets to make

  Tlingit Glossary

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Jimmy Bluefeather Q&A

  “The canoes of these people are made of light wood, called chaha [red cedar], which grows to the southward. A canoe is formed out of a single trunk, and is, in some instances, large enough to carry sixty men. I saw several that were forty-five feet long; but the common ones do not exceed thirty feet. When paddled, they go fast in smooth water. The largest are used for war, or for transporting whole families from place to place. The smallest serve for fishing, or other purposes that require but few hands. They are ingeniously constructed.”

  CAPTAIN UREY LISIANSKI, 1814

  A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1803–06

  [journal entry from Sitka, Alaska, 1805]

  PART ONE

  the weight of air

  USED TO BE it was hard to live and easy to die. Not anymore. Nowadays it was the other way around. Old Keb shook his head as he shuffled down the forest trail, thinking that he thought too much.

  “Oyye . . .” he muttered, his voice a moan from afar.

  He prodded the rain-soaked earth with his alder walking cane. For a moment his own weathered hand caught his attention—the way his bones fitted to the wood, the wilderness between his fingers, the space where Bessie’s hand used to be.

  Wet ferns brushed his pants in a familiar way. He turned his head to get his bearings, as only his one eye worked. The other was about as useful as a marble and not so pretty to look at. It had quit working long ago and sat there hitching a ride in his wrinkled face. The doctors had offered to patch it or plug it or toss it out the last time Old Keb was in Seattle, but he said no. Someday it might start working again and he didn’t want to do all his seeing out of one side of his head. He was a man, for God’s sake, not a halibut.

  A wind corkscrewed through the tall hemlocks. Old Keb stopped to listen but had problems here too. He could stand next to a hot chain saw and think it was an eggbeater. All his ears did now was collect dirt and wax and grow crooked hairs of such girth and length as to make people think they were the only vigorous parts of his anatomy. He always fell asleep with his glasses on, halfway down his nose. He said he could see his dreams better that way, the dreams of bears when he remembered—when his bones remembered—waking up in the winter of his life.

  Nobody knew how old he was. Not even Old Keb. He might have known once but couldn’t remember. Somewhere around ninety-five was his guess, a guess he didn’t share with any of his children, grandchildren, great-grand-children, great-great grandchildren, or the legions of cousins, nephews, nieces, friends, and doctors, who figured he was close to one hundred and were on a holy crusade to keep him alive.

  All his old friends were dead, the ones he’d grown up with and made stories with. He’d outlived them all. He’d outlived himself.

  He was born in a salmon cannery in Dundas Bay to a mother and father who managed to die before Keb had any memories of them. His mom was a beautiful woman (he’d been told), a Tlingit Indian with some Filipino and Portuguese thrown in, who got crushed by a tree that a good-for-nothing logger said would fall the other way. His dad was a Norwegian seine skipper who got drunk and walked off a pier and drowned. His Uncle Austin, his mother’s brother, du káak, a kaa sháade háni clan leader, raised Keb and his brothers and sisters on the other side of Icy Strait from Crystal Bay, the memory place where long ago his people hunted and fished and picked berries and made the stories that held them together. All this before a great glacier got the crazy idea to come down from its mountain and swallow the entire bay like a whale swallows herring. Gone, every living thing buried in ice, the earth pounded silent beneath a cold carved moon. The hungry glacier evicted Old Keb’s Tlingit ancestors and forced them to paddle their canoes south across big water where they built a new village—Jinkaat, Keb’s home.

  It’s written in the rocks, Uncle Austin used to say. Nature doesn’t lie. It might not tell you what you want to hear. It might be a brutal truth. But it is the truth.

  Keb reached the outhouse and fumbled through the door and sat as he always sat, folded into himself. He thought he heard a woolnáx wooshkák, a winter wren, a walnut with wings, and so believing sketched in the missing notes with his imagination. Notes like water over stones. He thumbed through the catalogs and magazines on the bench next to him. Eddie Bauer, whoever he was. Cabela’s. Good fishing stuff in there. L.L. Bean. Why so many catalogs? Why so many magazines? Why so many of so much? He found a big glossy report from the Coca-Cola Company. What the hell? Yes, he remembered now. He’d been to California a few years back to see Ruby’s son, Robert, the sugar water man who worked sixty hours a week for Coca-Cola Company and was hoping to move to the big office in Albuquerque, Albany, Atlanta, Atlantis, something like that, some place far to the east. Robert was married to a white wo
man named Lorraine who had expensive hair, a poodle on Prozac, and a cat named Infinity. Boy could she talk. Talk all day, talk all night. Talk, talk, talk. She had a little phone attached to her ear and even talked in her sleep. The only thing she let interrupt her from talking to one person was the chance to talk to somebody else. She spent all her time at the mall shopping for time-saving devices and lived with Robert in a big house next to a million other big houses all different but all the same. Big houses on big streets with names like Shadowhawk Drive and Peace Pipe Lane. Big houses Keb remembered with sadness and fatigue, how the hot sun burned its way across thirsty country and stirred everybody up. Got them speeding in their shiny cars and eating so much fast food that—what? What happened? Keb didn’t know. So many cars and people, all chasing the sun. A beautiful madness, California. Could they still slow dance after eating all that fast food? Slow dance the way he and Bessie used to?

  “Eyelids,” Lorraine told him. “People can tell you’re getting old when your eyelids sag.” She was scheduled to have hers lifted, along with everything else.

  Robert the Sugar Water Man would spend all day Saturday in his driveway washing and cleaning his Mercedes. That’s how it is in California, he said. Your car is half of your personality. He’d wax the cleaner and clean the wax and buff the wax and clean the buffer until Old Keb got tired just watching him.

  Keb never did own a car. Just trucks. Fords, Dodges, GMs, every one a rolling box of rust that died and was stripped for parts at Mitch’s Greasy Sleeves Garage. Come to think of it, he never did take comfort in a car or a truck like he did in a boat, out on the water, under the pull of the moon and tides. Skiffs, trollers, seiners, gillnetters, even the old gray punt he traveled in with Uncle Austin. All of his best memories were in boats, memories shaped like the boats themselves. Graceful, curving, and languid; exotic and erotic as a woman, the feeling of falling in love and falling beyond that.

  Rowing with your heart.

  And don’t forget canoes. Yakwt lénx’, large canoes. And yakwyádi, small canoes. And yáxwch’i yaakw, canoes with high, carved prows, and seet, a small, nimble canoe with a pointed prow. Canoes with flat bottoms, like ch’iyaash, from the up-north town of Yakutat, good for moving up a shallow river, and xáatl kaltságaa, the toughest canoes of all, with twin prows to push aside solid ice. Keb’s best boats were the ones he learned to carve with Uncle Austin, and later, the ones he carved himself and gave away. The ones he built for friends, long ago.

  Nobody traveled by canoe anymore. They didn’t have the time.

  Lorraine would keep Keb on the sofa talking all afternoon, talking until she gave him a headache. She told him that she wanted a pet bird, a parrot or a cockatoo or some damn thing in a cage. Pity the poor parrot that tried to mimic her. He’d be dead in a day. God loved the birds and invented man. Man loved the birds and invented cages. Best of all was little Christopher, Robert and Lorraine’s delicate son, the boy with Down’s syndrome and a defective heart, the sweetest human being Keb knew, the child whose smile could fill a valley. They would drive down to Malibu for ice cream. Keb tried rum raisin and found too little rum, too much raisin. He tried “death by chocolate” and an hour later was still alive. Next time he’d have a double scoop. Christopher ate “Killer Vaniller” and wore most of it on his chin. Lorraine stuck with “Sensible Strawberry.” They sat on a bench, facing a sidewalk, and beyond that, a fine sand beach and the sea. Kids zipped by on skateboards and rollerblades. Lorraine held little Christopher and sang, “Puff the Magic Dragon.” She said it was peaceful, the sea. “It’s so tranquil and still, it makes you believe that everything will be okay.”

  “I don’t dream here,” Keb told her.

  “What?”

  “Here, in this California leaf-blower place, I don’t dream here.”

  “Oh, Keb, maybe you do and you just don’t remember. You have trouble remembering, remember?”

  Back at her big house, Lorraine gave him the annual Coca-Cola report. On its cover, in large, bold print, large enough that Keb could read it without effort, it said, “A billion years ago intelligent life appeared on earth. A billion minutes ago Christianity emerged. A billion Coca-Colas ago was yesterday morning.”

  “Oyyee . . .”

  Lorraine had insisted that Keb bring it back with him to Alaska; that he show it to Robert’s mom, Ruby, Keb’s older daughter. How proud she’d be.

  Like all great literature, the annual report ended up in the outhouse.

  Keb stood, or attempted to stand. His knees creaked. A sharp pain shot through his whole being. Next thing he knew he was leaning against the outhouse door, heavy on the rough wood, the sound of his own breathing ragged to him, his hips too cold, not right, made of plastic or fiberglass or Kevlar or some damn thing other than old Tlingit Norwegian bones. At least no pain cursed him when he pissed. Not this time. Sometimes things down there felt like they were on fire. Whichever one he was supposed to have two of—kidney or liver—the other one had been cut out and Old Keb couldn’t remember why. Doctors had gotten in there, digging around for a swollen this or a funky that, and decided to take out the kidney because it got in the way or it didn’t look right and that was that.

  It began to rain. Keb stepped outside to inhale the wet earth, the May aromas of skunk cabbage, blueberry, alder, spruce. His nose still worked pretty well. In this regard he considered himself an old bear, a hunter with wild strawberries in his eyes, on good days at least. He had fewer good days all the time. Most days he was a pocket of a man, parceling out his vitamins and pills, staring into his own receding face. Awhile back he had caught himself in a mirror and thought, When did I stop being me?

  A gust of wind caught his white hair and stirred the ferns. Back on the trail, he stopped to taste the cool salt mist blowing in from the sea, the fragrance of rocks. He tightened his arthritic hand around his walking cane and was about to go on when he froze. There at his feet, apparently dead, was Yéil. A raven.

  A shiver ran through him, deep as a shiver can go. His heart jumped in his throat. For a minute he didn’t move; he would say later that he didn’t breathe then either. In all his years in Alaska, Old Keb could count on one hand the number of times he had found a dead raven. No other bird or animal was more storied to him and his Tlingit people.

  He lowered himself to one knee, slowly, mindful in some ancient way of the rain falling harder, the storm filling its lungs. He bent forward to better see the sightless glare of the obsidian eye, the blue iridescence that shone and was gone. Minutes ago it had not been there, this bird that spilled nightfall off its wings, this bird that created the world and stole the sun. Keb looked into the sky and continued to look, unblinking, his face turned to the rain and the great somber trees. The wind stood and listened. Keb gasped. He could see now, see in a way new to him. Every branch and needle and raindrop falling with ten thousand other raindrops had extreme clarity. The sky cleaved open. The earth, wild on its axis, shot through space and pressed upon him the entire weight of its spinning. The stars, cold and conscious on the other side of the world, suspended themselves in the blackness where Raven got its shape and voice. Something had happened. Something bad. A small whining sound grew louder. A presence brushed his face, soft yet strong, the weight of air taking flight. The whining was big and getting bigger—shrill, serrated, sputtering. An engine? Yes, a motorcycle.

  Old Keb didn’t move.

  The motorcycle skidded to a stop. A young man killed the engine and climbed off. He walked toward Old Keb, wearing a baseball cap backward over his long hair. His baggy jeans scuffed the ground. His loose-fitting jersey said, “L.A. Lakers, World Champions.” He had the manner of a jánwu, this kid, a mountain goat grown mostly in the limbs, lanky, quick, unafraid of heights. He had cool, arctic eyes.

  “There’s been an accident,” he said.

  Old Keb nodded, “Yes, I know.”

  a face like the surface of water

  IT WAS JAMES. The accident belonged to James, the cra
ck shot with Old Keb’s Remington 30.06 and a pair of Michael Jordan’s Nike Air Specials; the boy who practiced a thousand days and nights to float over his chosen court with the weighted dreams of every basketball kid in Jinkaat. James, the younger first cousin of Robert, who drank Coca-Cola like water and ate cheeseburgers like seal meat, who smoked cigarettes behind the school gym and played video games with toned muscles tight over his shoulders. James Hunter Wisting, half Arapaho by blood, all Tlingit by heart, made from the rain, Tlaxaneis’ Kingfisher Clan, Héen Wát River Mouth House, the youngest son of Old Keb’s younger daughter, Gracie, who found happiness in all things except marriage, and so raised her children alone and brought them to where they belonged, salmonlike.

  “What happened?” Old Keb asked.

  “Logging on Pepper Mountain,” the kid said. “He’s banged up bad.”

  “Bad? How bad?”

  “Bad, I guess. Charlie Gant says he’s got a smashed leg and a concussion and maybe a punctured lung because he’s breathing funny and he doesn’t look right. They flew him to Juneau.”

  Old Keb reminded himself to breathe.

  The kid said, “His mom thought you should know.”

  Gracie. Old Keb could stand in a mountain gale unbowed, but Gracie, his flower, Ruby’s younger sister, could bend him with a smile. Every man should have a daughter with a face like her mother’s, a history of affection. Teacup eyes. Soft hands like yán, like hemlock, easy to hold. Keb got to his feet and winced with pain.

  “You want a ride?” the kid asked.

  Old Keb climbed on and locked his arms around the kid’s lean frame. The ride was mercifully short. The kid drove like hell. Keb thought: If there’s another accident, we’ll be the first ones there.

  He tapped the kid on the shoulder to stop at the carving shed where Keb lived, on the edge of the clearing under the big spruce. It was a small shed, perfect for an old man who once carved great cedar canoes and now shuffled through shavings on the planked wooden floor while the lanky kid leaned in the doorway, lit a cigarette, and let the blue smoke rise off his fingers. On a stool in the far corner sat Kevin Pallen, a simple boy, sag-shouldered, a mop of hair in his face, a carving tool in one hand, a block of yellow cedar in the other. To know him by his smile was to know the moon by its reflection. But he wasn’t smiling. Kevin looked at Keb with wet eyes, wanting to hear that James was okay and still bound for Duke University and the NBA—something like that, anything like that.