Three Bill Williamson Stories, page 1
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Piles of paper cluttered Governor Bill Williamson’s desk. Jefferson wasn’t a very populous state, but it had plenty of legislators and an even greater plenty of lobbyists. One lone governor didn’t stand much of a chance against them all.
Almost at random, he plucked one sheet from the closest stack. It was about a proposed change to the laws about dredging for gold in the state’s rivers. Or he thought so, anyhow; the words blurred on the page. He held it out at arm’s length. He was a Sasquatch; arm’s length went a long way. The typing looked clear enough, but the letters were too small for him to read.
Muttering, he reached into the top center desk drawer and pulled out a pair of glasses. When he put on the spectacles, he could read again … unless he looked down too vertically. Then his glasses slid away from his eyes. If he wasn’t careful, they’d fall off. His nose was low and broad and flat. It didn’t have the kind of bridge most little people’s snoots did. Securing eyeglasses was one more adventure in a world where he fit none too well.
The phone rang. Answering it meant he could decipher the changes to the dredging law later. The handset was made for a much smaller hand, but he could use it even so. “Yes?” he said.
“Sorry to bother you, Governor,” his administrative assistant said, “but Chief Hobbs is here for his ten o’clock appointment.”
“Is he?” Bill said tonelessly. He glanced at the clock one stack of papers almost but not quite hid. As he watched, a digital 9:57 went to 9:58 with a soft thwup. He sighed. Steve Hobbs was right on time. “Okay, Phyllis. Send him in.”
The door to the office opened. The chief of the Karuk tribe walked in. Bill stood up. He wanted to greet Steve Hobbs … and to intimidate him a bit. Hobbs was big for a little man—he stood about six-two, and wasn’t what anyone would call skinny. But the governor overtopped him by three feet, and his hand swallowed the chief’s when they shook.
After the clasp, the Karuk seemed relieved to get his paw back unsquashed. Good, Bill thought. He didn’t care for Indians, and he was sure Hobbs didn’t like Sasquatches, either. Their two kinds had been neighbors and rivals ever since Indians found their way to the New World more than ten thousand years before. Sasquatches had learned a lot from their first encounters with little people. One of the things they’d learned was not to trust their neighbors very far.
Rules these days were different. Neither Sasquatches nor Indians had made many of them. None of the old-time stuff counted any more. None of it was supposed to count, anyhow. The two statements sounded very much alike. What they meant, though …
“Have a seat, Chief,” Bill said. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”
The office—the whole governor’s mansion—was made to Sasquatch scale. Charlie “Bigfoot” Lewis, the governor who’d built it back in the twenties, had been a Sasquatch himself. Bill enjoyed not needing to worry about ducking when he went through doorways or banging his head on a low ceiling.
Little people, though, often felt like third graders in the principal’s office here. To ease that feeling, high chairs let them sit across the desk from Bill at something close to eye level. Or they did most of the time. When he found out Steve Hobbs was coming, Bill had thoughtfully removed the little-people seats that usually sat in the office and swapped in some with shorter legs.
So the Karuks’ chief looked up and up at him when he sat down. Hobbs’ sour smile said he understood why he was getting the kind of welcome he was getting. No doubt he would fix up a memorable reception for Bill if the governor ever visited Happy Camp, the tiny town near the Klamath River where the Karuk tribe had its headquarters.
But Hobbs was in Yreka now. If he pitched a hissy fit, he wouldn’t get whatever he’d come here to ask for. Playing by the rules, he might. Annoying him for the fun of it was one thing, denying him that to which he was legally entitled was something else again.
“You know we take a lot of salmon out of the river when they come upstream to spawn,” he said.
“Oh, sure.” Bill’s big head bobbed up and down. Back in the old days, Sasquatches had come down out of the mountains to scoop salmon from the Klamath, too. The Karuks had shot arrows at them and set traps to keep them away when they did. But those were the old days—gone, if not forgotten.
“We depend on those salmon.” Steve Hobbs ran a hand through his shock of silver hair. He looked more like, say, an Italian than an Indian. He probably had white folks in the woodpile.
Well, Bill thought one of his own great-grandmothers had been a little woman. Jefferson was the kind of place where all sorts of people went into the Mixmaster. Nodding again, Bill picked up the paper he’d been looking at when Hobbs got there. “We’re cutting back on dredging again, to make sure the spawning grounds stay good. The miners don’t like it, but the fish need protecting.”
“Good. You aren’t telling me anything I don’t already know,” Hobbs said. “The fish do need protecting—and not just from the greedy-guts get-rich-quick jerks with the dredges, either.”
“Ah?” Bill Williamson got the feeling the chief of the Karuks was coming to the point.
Sure enough, Hobbs said, “Our catches have been way down the past couple of years. It’s not getting better—it’s getting worse. I can tell you why, too.”
“And you’re going to, aren’t you?”
“Damn right I am.” Hobbs nodded vigorously. “Some of the men from the tribe, they fish on boats out of Requa at the mouth of the Klamath and from Crescent City farther north. From everything they say, the merfolk are stealing salmon right, left, and center. If the fish don’t even make it to the river to spawn, we can’t very well net ’em out, can we?”
“Mm, no.” Bill’s head started to ache. As soon as you mentioned the merfolk, you talked about jurisdictional nightmares—nightmares for everybody but the people of the sea, anyhow. “Are you sure you ought to be bringing this to me?” he asked. “Are you sure it isn’t the coast guard’s baby?” One thing a good many years in politics had taught him was how to pass the buck.
“If you let me down, I’ll go to them next,” Steve Hobbs answered. “But I’d sooner keep it at the state level if I can. You turn the Feds loose on something, Christ only knows where it’s liable to end up. And those coast guard guys, they aren’t from here. To them, I’m just a dumb-ass hick, and a dumb-ass redskin hick at that.”
Jefferson was nothing if not a clannish place. The clans didn’t always get along with one another—Sasquatches and Indians were only the most obvious example of that—but they did mostly pull together when outsiders tried to get them to do anything they didn’t fancy. (Of course, if not for Federal rules and regulations, the Karuks wouldn’t have their riverside reservation and their fishing rights along the Klamath; but that was old, settled law by now, and everybody here had gotten used to it.)
“Well, okay. I hear what you’re talking about,” Bill said.
“Yeah. You would. You may not like me a whole bunch, but you know where I’m coming from,” Hobbs told him. “That’s another reason I came to Yreka. We talk the same lingo.”
That lingo was, of course, English. Both Sasquat and Karuk were nearly extinct, understood by more scholars than folk from the groups who’d once used them. Maybe it was progress. Maybe it was tragedy. Whatever it was, Bill couldn’t do a thing about it. He knew only a handful of Sasquat words himself.
* * *
Not five minutes after Bill got back to the office from lunch, the telephone on his desk rang. When he picked it up, Phyllis said, “Liam McMichaels is on the line, Governor.”
“He is? Why am I not surprised?” Bill said. “Tell him I’m molting, okay?”
“Excuse me?” his administrative assistant said, in lieu of What the hell are you talking about now?
Bill sighed. “Never mind. Put him through.”
Something electronic clicked. A moment later, a hearty voice said, “How are you today, Governor?” Liam McMichaels sounded like what he was: a lobbyist. He buttered people up for a living. He did a damn good job of it, too.
“I’m fine, Liam. How’s yourself? How’s the family?” Bill also knew how to play the game.
“Couldn’t be better,” McMichaels said enthusiastically. After a discreet pause, he went on, “A little bird told me Steve Hobbs visited you this morning.”
“That’s right.” Bill wondered who the lobbyist’s little bird was. If he found out, he coul
“And it’s why I’m calling,” McMichaels said. Among other clients in Yreka, he represented the merfolk. They rarely came out onto dry land themselves. They seldom even followed the salmon upstream into Jefferson’s clear, cold, swift-running rivers. Fresh water left them prone to nasty skin fungi and other parasites. They stayed in the ocean almost all of the time.
When they needed somebody like Liam McMichaels to do something for them in the dry world, they had plenty of clams to keep him happy. Metaphorical clams and, if he happened to want them, literal clams as well. Unless they were happy, dry-land folk might well find trouble on the sea. They were in the insurance business, even if some people called it protection money. They did this and that for and with the U.S. Navy. Across much the bigger part of the Earth’s surface, they were the ones who knew where the bodies were—or, more often, weren’t—buried.
So yes, they had plenty of clams.
“Hobbs, he’s not happy about how many salmon they’re taking,” Bill said. “The Karuks have to eat, you know.”
“So do the merfolk,” McMichaels replied. “Things aren’t so easy for them these days.”
“How do you mean?” Bill asked in surprise. Didn’t Liam McMichaels’ clients live off the fat of the land? Well, of the water? Since the end of the Second World War, they’d used some of their clams to buy spearguns from the little men who stayed dry most of the time. Didn’t those let them plow through schools of mackerel the way Buffalo Bill and his merry men disposed of the bison herds on the Great Plains? (And, not so incidentally, didn’t they turn into the most popular underwater murder weapons? Bill imagined political billboards on the seafloor: SPEARGUNS DON’T KILL MERFOLK! MERFOLK KILL MERFOLK!)
“I’ll tell you how, Governor.” The lobbyist’s voice saved Bill from his own imagination. “The Russians and the Japanese—and now the Koreans, too—have these huge fishing boats. Fishing factories would be a better name for them. They’ve got nets and dredges and longlines and I don’t know what all else. They park just outside the coastal limit—or sometimes just inside, if they think they won’t get caught—and they suck up fish the way your Hoover sucks up dust. When they leave, the merfolk go hungry for miles and miles around.”
“I … see,” Bill said. He wasn’t sure McMichaels was giving him the unvarnished truth. Spreading varnish over places that looked rough without it was part of a lobbyist’s job. But he was sure things were less one-sided than Steve Hobbs had made them out to be. Hobbs had his own axe to grind, of course, and his tribe’s. Bill sighed. One of the things you soon found out when you plunked your backside into this seat was that nothing was ever as simple as it looked. He sighed again. “You can get hold of the folks you represent, right? You don’t have to wait for them to call you?”
“Yes, I can do that.” McMichaels confirmed what Bill had expected.
“Okay. Good, even,” the governor said. “Let’s see … Today’s Wednesday. Tell them I’ll come out in a boat from Requa on Saturday morning. We can talk about it then, if that suits them. If it doesn’t, call me back and let me know. We’ll work out something else.”
“Thank you very much, Governor. You’re a gentleman.”
“Well, I try.” The only definition of a gentleman Bill liked was that he was somebody who kept his weight on his elbows. When you weighed around five hundred pounds, that wasn’t just gentlemanly. It was mandatory. Liam McMichaels would have laughed had he told the raunchy joke, but he didn’t. This latest mess felt anything but funny.
* * *
You couldn’t go straight from Yreka to Requa. Bill drove the Mighty Mo up the I-5 to Grants Pass, down the US 199 to Crescent City on the Pacific, and then south along the coast on the US 101 to get to where he needed to go. He piloted the humongous 1974 Eldorado past any number of genuine political billboards. Some touted Ronald Reagan, others Jimmy Carter. Polls showed the race in Jefferson was close. Nationally, Bill figured the ex-governor of the state next door would trounce the hangdog Georgian with the Chiclet teeth.
Once he got to Requa, he wondered why he’d bothered. Crescent City was a real port. So was Port Orford, farther north. So were Eureka and Arcata, father south. Requa should have been, sitting right where the Klamath River poured into the sea. It should have been, but it wasn’t.
It had a post office and a general store with a screen door so old, the mesh was made from rusting galvanized iron, not aluminum. The airstrip was too short for anything bigger than a Piper Cub. Most of the houses were shacks. The piers … They weren’t built out of Lincoln Logs, the way he’d guessed when he got his first look at them. Lincoln Logs would have been sturdier and more uniform.
Three or four fishing boats were tied up at the pier. They looked as outdated and as badly in need of paint as everything else in Requa. When Bill opened the Mighty Mo’s left rear door and got out (the car had no left front seat, which let someone his size drive it), a little man in jeans, a windbreaker, and a Giants cap waved to him.
“Welcome to Requa, Governor!” he called, ambling down the pier toward the Cadillac.
“Thanks.” With a distinct effort of will, Bill didn’t add I think.
The little man held out his hand. “I’m Dave Super,” he said as Bill shook it. Smiling crookedly, he went on, “Yeah, that’s my real name. Translated from something in Karuk, y’know? Steve called me, said you wanted me to take you out to talk to the merfolk.”
“That’s right.” Bill eyed him. “You don’t seem thrilled about it.”
“Only on account of I’m not,” Super answered. “If I had my druthers, I’d buy a coupla crates o’ dynamite, take the Sweetheart on Parade out over the closest merfolk village, and fix them thieving bastards for good.”
“You wouldn’t get ’em all, and you’d never dare go out on the water again,” Bill said. “And messing with the merfolk is a Federal crime.”
“I know. I don’t like any o’ that worth a damn, but I know,” Dave Super said. “You don’t see me doin’ it, even if I want to. But I hope like hell you can make ’em cut it out. Not everybody here’s got a fuse as long as mine.”
Back in the day, the merfolk had had the edge on the local Indians who went out on the sea to fish. They could sneak up on a canoe unseen underwater. Fishermen seldom lasted long after that. The balance of power had shifted when big sailing ships came into these waters, and when little men had started using rifles and explosives. Some merfolk still resented not being able to call all the shots on the ocean.
When you got down to it, how could you blame them? Bill’s own ancient ancestors must have felt the same way when the newly arrived Indians started aiming arrows at them. They hadn’t known about archery till then; all they’d had were sharp stones and spears. But they’d learned … and the Indians soon discovered they didn’t want to stop an arrow from a bow pulled by a five-hundred-pound Sasquatch.
Learning how to copy firearms and dynamite wasn’t so easy. The Indians and the Sasquatches hadn’t managed that. With the extra handicap of needing to stay in the water, neither had the merfolk.
Like Indians and Sasquatches, they’d stolen or bought what they couldn’t copy. And they’d learned the political game, as had the Indians and Sasquatches. Governor Bill Williamson was living, blathering proof his folk had.
Dave Super pointed down the pier toward his boat. “You ready to take a ride and do some palavering?”
“Sure, if those planks will hold my weight,” Bill said.
“Don’t worry about it,” the Karuk said. “They’re stronger’n they look.”
They couldn’t very well be weaker, Bill thought. The rickety pier creaked and shook when he set foot on it. None of the planks snapped, though. He didn’t go into the Pacific sooner than he’d wanted to. He also made it across the fishing boat’s gangplank.
“Why do you call her the Sweetheart on Parade?” he asked.
Super cocked his head to one side. “You don’t listen to John Stewart, do you?”
“Nope,” Bill admitted. “Rod Stewart, yeah. Al Stewart, yeah. But not John.”
