Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel Page 3

  THE FLIGHT TO Seattle put Old Keb right to sleep. First class, lots of room, recliner seat. He awoke with a sense of suffocation; had to get his shoes off. No easy task. Socks too. Ruby sat next to him and helped. How good it felt to let his toes breathe. He wiggled them and drank bottled water; she drank two Bloody Marys, then four, six. Little vodka bottles everywhere. She buried herself in her work, fingers pounding her small computer, PacAlaska papers and three-ringed binders spilling out of her seat and into Keb’s. His eyes fluttered open and closed, heavy from the weight of so much change. What would Uncle Austin say? It had been more than forty years since Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act that gave Alaska Natives land and money—nearly a billion dollars—to invest in their future. No reservations. No Trail of Tears. No Wounded Knee but no Custer either. Things would be different in Alaska. The meetings lasted forever. To manage their land with all its oil, minerals, timber, fish, and tourism potential, the Natives created thirteen regional corporations and more than two hundred village corporations, with each Native a shareholder. They hired attorneys to set things up and protect their interests. It was all so daring and new. Keb remembered it clearly, too clearly—all that money, all those lawyers in Fords and Chevys instead of canoes. On the day the act passed and celebrations erupted across the state, Uncle Austin, sick at home with cancer, said, “I hope we did the right thing.” That night he died.

  According to Gracie, corporations around the world had become cultures: General Motors, Toyota, Apple, Nike. But never had indigenous cultures become instant corporations. It was an experiment, like splitting atoms.

  The regional Native corporation in Southeast Alaska was PacAlaska, one of the state’s largest and most profitable. As far as Keb could see, the more it grew the more it wanted to grow.

  “Pops,” Ruby said, “we need to talk.”

  “Oh?” His eyes fluttered.

  “Remember the jurisdiction case I told you about?”

  “The what?”

  “The jurisdiction case in Crystal Bay? The Ninth Circuit Court case coming up this fall, remember?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  Ruby took a deep breath.

  “No,” Keb said. Of course he knew about it. Everybody knew about it and talked, talked, talked about it like Lorraine and her parrots. It went like this: The State of Alaska, backed by PacAlaska, was challenging the federal government for jurisdiction over the waters of Crystal Bay to develop twenty Native inholdings that showed strong mineral and tourism potential. The heart of the matter was that Crystal Bay, ancient homeland of the Jinkaat Tlingits, was now a national marine reserve, and PacAlaska wanted it back. Yes, the glacier had evicted the Tlingits hundreds of years ago, advancing as it did. When it retreated, the feds moved in and claimed the new bay as a great scientific laboratory for the study of plants and animals on land and in the sea. First they made it a national monument, then a national park, then a biosphere reserve, then a world heritage site and finally, just a year ago, a national marine reserve. So many names and titles.

  Ruby was back on her computer, pounding away.

  “Gracie opposes PacAlaska in Crystal Bay,” Keb said.

  “Gracie opposes everything about PacAlaska, but she cashes her dividend checks, doesn’t she?”

  “She needs the money.”

  “She needs the money because she has four children by four husbands, after four divorces, with two girls in rehab, and now a boy with a crushed leg.”

  “She never divorced James’s dad. He’s Apache.”

  “He’s Arapaho.”

  “Oh right. Arapaho.”

  “She’s going to have to live with this, you know, what’s happened to James. He shouldn’t have been logging on Pepper Mountain. I feel sorry for her. I do. But Gracie’s going to have a heavy burden if this costs him his career.”

  His career? “He’s only seventeen.”

  “Exactly.”

  “When I was seventeen I fell and hit my head and broke my collarbone hunting deer with Uncle Austin on Lemesurier Island. He carried me down the mountain and rowed me to Juneau in a punt. Took five days in bad weather. Long time. His fingers almost froze off. It was cold like a knife wound, k’eik’w litaa eeti.”

  Ruby stared at him.

  “It was November. Uncle Austin caught a halibut using—”

  “Pops, this is different. When you have the chance to go to Duke University and get into the NBA and be a millionaire athlete, you don’t go into the woods with a chain saw and heavy machinery.”

  “Charlie Gant’s been a foreman for many years. They say he’s the best.”

  “I know. I also know that loggers have a code of silence, especially when things go wrong. I’ve asked the troopers to investigate. Remember when James tried out for varsity basketball as a freshman and took Tommy Gant’s point guard position when Tommy was a senior? Tommy sat on the bench most of the season that year. Then last summer, Tommy’s girl, Little Mac, hooks up with James. It’s a recipe for bad blood, don’t you think?”

  Keb shrugged. “Don’t argue with Gracie. Not this time. Not in the hospital.”

  “I won’t. But if she starts—”

  Keb raised a hand. “Don’t argue.”

  THEY FOUND GRACIE, Coach Nicks, and the others at a table in the hospital cafeteria, a knot of people sitting solemnly beneath sterile white lights. Old Keb shuffled up behind his youngest girl and touched her. She turned to bury her face in his tattered coat. He held her shaking head with his bent fingers and didn’t tell her it was going to be okay. He just hummed the way he used to when she was impossibly small, hummed until he could feel her mind close around the sad truth of it.

  Without a word, Ruby grabbed a meal tray and got in line for something to eat. Coach Nicks stood and thanked Old Keb for coming. Three basketball boys who had flown down with Ruby, Keb, and Little Mac joined their teammates at the table, grabbed the last of the French fries and wiped greasy fingers on their baggy pants. Built like rails, they had no hips that Keb could see. Shunned by Ruby, Little Mac stood in reserved silence, her dark eyes without reflection. Coach Nicks said the surgery had taken two hours. James was in post-op. The doctors would see him and Gracie in ten minutes or so to “give a prognosis.”

  Prognosis. Old Keb remembered the word. He remembered the hospital too, the shiny floors and bright lights, the clattering of metal gurneys and the strange, sweet smell of antiseptic, the green Jell-O and purple potato salad, the absence of wood smoke and birdsong and children playing and the sky leaping to every horizon. Nurses who woke you up to feed you a sleeping pill.

  Keb had to pee. He had to pee so often he reckoned his bladder was the size of a thimble. Big ears, small bladder, bad teeth. These were his rewards for achieving old age and outliving his wife, his friends, his brothers and sisters, and hardest of all, his three sons. Only Ruby and Gracie were left, tested by God to see beyond their differences.

  Keb followed the others as they made their way up to intensive care, and waited. So much waiting, people holding each other, staring into the distance, turning the pages of glossy magazines but seeing nothing. An hour later Coach Nicks broke the news. None of James’s injuries was life threatening. The MRI—whatever that was—showed no brain damage. The punctured lung would heal. No sign of infection. But the knee was gone. Old Keb watched the color drain from Coach Nicks’s face as he heard Coach say, “James will never play basketball again.”

  One of James’s teammates let out a wail, his voice so hurt-filled that it nearly knocked Old Keb off his feet. Another boy reached for him but Coach Nicks said, “Let him go,” as the grief-stricken boy bolted and ran down the hall. The others stood firm, fighting back tears. Coach Nicks pulled them into a huddle, football style, and said things Keb couldn’t hear.

  Nearby, Gracie and Little Mac held each other and cried.

  The old man shuffled to the window where Ruby stood facing outside, away from him, her elbow on the wall, one h
and running through her long gray-streaked hair, the other gripping one of those little phones. “It’s not good,” he heard her say, probably to Günter, her husband.

  Günter was talking now, the good German engineer who tried to fix everything. Ruby had met him at Princeton, dated him for one month, and married him.

  “You’re not hearing me,” Keb heard Ruby say, as if she were arguing with the window. “Beyond basketball, James’s dreams end, his life will be over now, as far as he sees it. . . . He’s going to be lucky if he ever walks again without a limp or a cane. . . .”

  Keb felt the world spin. He wanted to reach for Ruby and find her through the distance of years, through the thousand things that made them different to the one or two things that still made them the same. He turned and caught Coach Nicks looking at him. “Keb,” he said, “you want to join us?” One step at a time, the old carver approached the huddle. It opened to take him in. The boys kept their heads down and shoulders low. Keb didn’t have to bend down like them. They were at his height now. “Is there anything you’d like to say?” Coach Nicks asked.

  It’s damn hot in here. That’s what first came to Keb’s mind. He wasn’t a sports philosopher like Coach Nicks. He didn’t have a leadership award from the governor. He didn’t study games on TV. He thought March Madness was cabin fever until Truman told him it was a college basketball tournament. During games in the school gym, with the bright lights and everybody shouting and pounding their feet, Keb would get a headache. He attended on Gracie’s insistence, and sat next to Truman, who had a way of making one thing into another: basketball players into mammoth hunters, cheerleaders into princesses, referees into cops, the court into a battlefield.

  “It’s a real cliff dweller,” Keb would say during a tight game.

  “Cliffhanger,” Truman would correct him.

  So what to say now to these broken-hearted young men?

  everything closed over him

  TELL A STORY,” Uncle Austin used to say. “We are a story people.”

  Old Keb said into the huddle, “My sister Dot, she died of cancer in a hospital in Juneau. She was the youngest of us all, and the happiest, and she was the first to die.”

  The boys listened hard. Keb could feel it. They listened hard because the old man’s tongue didn’t work like it used to. Half his teeth were gone. He spoke in a soft and syncopated manner. Hearing him required effort, but he had wisdom, a great heart. The oldest man in Jinkaat, he was a respected Tlaxaneis’ elder, part Norwegian Viking berserker and part Tlingit Raven trickster, as the Raven rattle had the tail of the Kingfisher. Austin Skredsvig, a clan leader, had raised him in the ways of the long ago time. One of Austin’s cousins had been the last shaman in Sitka, a great man who knew the language from a thousand years ago. Most everybody in Jinkaat knew stories of Old Keb and his Uncle Austin walking over mountains. How they traded blankets up north with the Ice People, carved canoes down south with the Haida, and hunted seals in Crystal Bay.

  Gracie and Little Mac joined the circle while Ruby stayed at the window, facing away and talking on her little phone.

  “She had an operation, my sister Dot,” Keb said. “She liked to draw with pencil and paper. She got good at it. So one day in the hospital she made a picture of a black vase, and she put a crack in it. One crack, right down the middle. That was Dot; she did things like that. A woman visiting her dying daughter in the next bed asked Dot why. Dot said it was her scar, the one she got from the operation. You know what that other woman did? She took that drawing in the middle of the night and colored a yellow line over the scar. Just like that. She told Dot it was the light coming in. ‘That’s what cracks do,’ she said. ‘They let in the light.’”

  AFTER THREE DAYS, Old Keb found time alone with his grandson. Visiting hours had ended and Gracie was down the hall, asleep. Robert and Lorraine were back in their hotel room with little Christopher. Many people had come to visit. Near as Old Keb could tell, James saw none of them. Anger and self-pity blinded him. How dark and brooding he looked in the starched white bed, his head bandaged, the TV channel-changer captive in his hand. Little Mac sat nearby with her knees pulled to her chest, reading a book. She wore a black beret and a sad face. Old Keb could see that she too had failed to console James.

  Ruby came in with her little phone, gave it to Old Keb and said, “It’s your friends in Jinkaat. They want to talk with you.” Keb pulled it to his mouth. “Put it by your ear, Pops, like this,” Ruby showed him. “Talk. They’ll hear you.”

  “Hullo.”

  “Hey, Keb, you still alive?” It was Oddmund, or maybe his brother, Dag.

  “I think so.”

  “How’s Seattle?”

  “Busy.”

  “How’s the coffee? Everybody down there drinks coffee.”

  “Good, I guess.”

  “How’s James?”

  “Not so good.”

  “Keb?” It was Helen Pasternak, who, together with Myrtle Applewhite, a chicken wrangler, owned the Rumor Mill Café. “Keb, we’ve got hermit thrushes singing up here.”

  “Oyyee . . .” Keb loved thrushes. He loved Helen Pasternak too, her cooking anyway, and the way she looked in an apron and might look in only an apron. But she was too young for him, in her sixties. He had never had a woman since Bessie. Never would.

  Helen said, “Hang on, Keb. Truman wants to say something.”

  “Hey, Keb, you staying out of trouble down there?”

  “I guess.”

  “I finished another chapter in my war novel.” Truman was always writing a war novel, what he called “a John Steinbeck–Joseph Heller kind of story,” a sequel to Catch-22. Catch-23 maybe, or a prequel, Catch-11, only half as good but still damn good. “You know what I mean?” he would ask.

  Keb had no idea what he meant. But he liked Truman, and listened, and imagined eating the “death by chocolate” ice cream that Helen ordered special from Sitka. It never tasted as good as the stuff he had with little Christopher in California, but he would eat it all the same and thank Helen, and maybe put off dying for a while. Maybe get out of bed each morning to move his bones and live another day. Maybe hear another story down at the Rumor Mill, or Vic’s Barbershop, or Nystad’s Mercantile, or Mitch’s Garage, or Albert Bestow’s Measure Twice Cut Once Fine Carpentry and Cabinetry, another story from another friend that made him laugh and helped the sun rise in his eyes.

  “Hey, Keb,” said Dag (maybe it was Oddmund), “Daisy’s kicking our butts in cribbage. You’d better get back up here and put her in her place.”

  “I’ll do that,” Keb said, suddenly tired.

  Dag told him that Steve the Lizard Dog had eaten one of Truman’s books. Truman wasn’t so mad about it because the dog had literary taste. “Get it? Literary taste, eating a book?” Keb didn’t get it.

  “Give James our best,” Helen said. “And Gracie and Little Mac too.”

  They hung up. Ruby had gone out. Where was Little Mac? Keb tried to turn off the phone. Too many buttons. He put it in his pocket and pulled out the feather. Standing, he felt dizzy; he’d forgotten to eat and drink. He saw James glance his way and turn back to the TV. They were alone now, grandfather and grandson. But the advertising man on TV did all the talking: “You can’t get by without it. The new Resolve, the aftershave you’ve always been waiting for. It’s everything you need.”

  Everything you need? Wasn’t it enough, Keb wondered, to feel the wind in your face, to drink the rain and pet a friendly dog and know the softness of a woman’s thigh? Wasn’t it enough to hear a wolf howl, to build a morning fire in the kitchen cookstove, to taste the first nagoonberry pie of summer, to carve a spoon from alder? Wasn’t it enough to feel the tide run beneath your boat, a boat you built with hand tools and great heart? Keb put the feather on his grandson’s bed, and made for the door. “What’s this?” James asked, his voice flinty.

  “It’s for you, to help you get well. It’s from Raven.”

  “I know it’s from a raven.�
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  “No, not a raven. It’s from Raven, Yéil.”

  James turned back to the TV.

  “What color is it?” Keb asked.

  “It’s black.”

  “Look closer.”

  “It’s black, Gramps. I’m not stupid.”

  “Look closer.”

  “What? What am I supposed to see?”

  “Something to help you get better.”

  “Get better? How am I supposed to get better? My life is ruined. It’s over. I might as well be dead.”

  His words broke bones. Keb’s hand went heavy on his cane. Part of him faltered, another part straightened. A seventeen-year-old boy? His life over? Keb wanted to thump him over the head. No need. Little Mac did it for him. She came into the room and said, “Shut up, James. I’m sick of your bad attitude. We all are.”

  James’s mouth fell open.

  Little Mac began to cry. “We all feel bad for you, we do. But you’ve got to get it together. There are a lot of people way worse off than you.”

  Keb flashed back to the foxholes in Italy where he’d seen a thousand boys dead in the cold morning mud. He’d almost been one himself. He could hear James and Little Mac exchanging sharp words, but didn’t catch them, torn as he was between his devotion and contempt for this fatherless kid. A few years back, when he was new at being a teenager, James seemed to take cold satisfaction in tormenting his mother and saying the old Tlingit ways were corny, that nothing could stop the future or preserve the past. He’d been cruel and unattractive then, a shadow of his father. Later, his hidden goodness required less digging. His basketball game soared. He found his smile, and seemed to take new pride in being Tlingit.