The Hunger of Crows, page 9
In the mirror, he sees Carla walk in the door, backlit by the moody gray evening light.
After a rare day of brilliant sunshine, the weather turned vicious about an hour ago, the wind clocking around from the west and gusting to gale strength. The forecast was off by twenty knots and ninety degrees. Just another unpredictable-weather day on the coast of Alaska. Now the sun is low in the northwest and blotted out by the storm clouds piling into the bay. Behind Carla, Volker sees two tourists stagger past, pinning their hats to their heads as they lean into the wind.
Carla shuts the door and pauses to fix the blue bandanna she’s wearing around her wind-tossed hair. One of the regulars spots her in the mirror and says, “Uh-oh.”
The others turn on their stools.
Carla comes around the end of the bar. She glances at them. “Hi, boys.”
They nod, sip their beers, look elsewhere. Even Jimmy Thompson knows enough to say nothing.
Carla looks at Volker. “Can we talk?”
“Sure.” Volker points to the kitchen. Carla pushes through the swinging half doors. He follows.
She has a small travel bag over one shoulder. She’s going somewhere. The thought stabs him, but he isn’t going to ask where and have her tell him it’s none of his business. Nor is he going to be the first one to bring up Billy Griest and have that whole subject discussed in front of the guys at the bar. He’s learned a thing or two about fighting with a woman. Start with something she can’t deny. “You moved your stuff out.”
“Yeah, I need some space. You know … for a while.”
Volker feels a thickening sensation in his chest. What the hell? He’s broken up with too many women to even remember. It usually doesn’t feel like this. Maybe it’s because this time he’s not the one who fucked up? That’s a first.
In spite of his intention to avoid the Billy Griest issue, he can’t seem to help himself. “You need space?” he says. “Or a space-man?”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning Billy Griest isn’t exactly the sharpest hook in the tackle box!” That comes out way too loud. He thinks he hears the regulars tittering out front.
Carla sighs and sits back against the kitchen counter, arms crossed. The blue bandanna low on her forehead makes her look like a gypsy or something.
“Look, I’m sorry, George. Really, I am. That’s what I came to say. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry I hurt you. It was a dumb mistake.”
“And now you think you can just waltz back into my life?” The stupidity of that hits him as soon as it’s out of his mouth. It sounds like dialogue from a sitcom. She’s already moved her clothes out of his house. Does she look like she’s trying to “waltz back into his life”?
Carla stands straighter and smiles sadly. She puts one hand on his arm. “Let’s give it a couple days, okay? Take a little break. I’m going to stay in the Kiminskys’ cabin on Loon Island.”
“Tonight?” he asks. “It might get rough out there.”
“We came across after dipnetting and it wasn’t bad. Shire let me run the skiff. We checked the forecast after dinner. Shire said the wind is out of the south, and the mountains are mostly blocking it on the water between here and the island.”
“What time was that?” Volker says. “You know how fast it can change?”
Carla scoffs. “George, it’s late. I’m tired. I just wanted to say how sorry I am.” She turns and walks out of the kitchen with him following again.
The regulars all fidget, refuse to make eye contact. Like he doesn’t know they’ve been listening to every word. Jimmy Thompson hunches over his beer and whistles some familiar tune Volker can’t place.
“One favor?” Carla says. “Can you give me some vodka to take over? Shire says they don’t leave booze in the cabin when they’re not there. Too many break-ins. I forgot to stop at the liquor store.”
“Sure,” he says, not certain why. He’s spent the whole day imagining the guilt he would heap on her the next time he saw her. The vituperation. Now he’s not even sure how they’re leaving things. Is he still the injured party? Of course. But this sure doesn’t feel as satisfying as he thought it was going to.
He pulls a bottle of Stoli out of the cupboard under the bar. Holds it up to her. A peace offering? Why is he making peace? He usually has the upper hand in these things. He fiddles with the band on his ponytail as he watches her stuff the bottle in her bag.
“Thanks, George.” Carla shoulders the bag. She pulls a bag of tortilla chips off the display rack and waves them at him. “This okay?”
Volker nods. He isn’t going to try to put his foot down about a bag of corn chips.
Carla leans in and gives him a peck on the cheek. “Thanks again.”
George realizes he’s fussing with his ponytail again and drops his hand to his side as he watches her heading for the door. The guys at the bar turn that way too. When the door closes behind her, Jimmy Thompson says, “Wow, George, I guess you told her!”
Volker ignores their laughter. The whole thing has left him exhausted.
“Drink up, boys,” he says. “I’m closing early.”
CHAPTER
13
CARLA WALKS OUT of the Orca into the damp night air and circles around to the back of the building on her way to the docks. Contrary to what she just told Volker about the wind not being too bad, it’s blowing straight into her face. But once she’s behind the building, it drops off. It doesn’t feel too strong. She can do this. She doesn’t want to spend another night in the camper in the parking lot. It reminds her too much of the long drive and the many roadside nights on the way to Alaska. Maybe she should’ve just smoothed things over with Volker? Maybe. But she likes the sound of being away on an island.
With her bag over her shoulder, she heads for the ramp to the docks. She gets as far as her truck, parked near the back door of the bar, and stops. The photo is still hidden up in the headliner of the cab.
Shire was right about the fresh air and sunshine. Carla hasn’t thought about the photo all day—not while dipnetting or even during dinner at Shire’s house. Hardly thought about D’Angelo all day either.
She walks over to the truck. Should she leave the picture in it? It’s parked under the huge parking lot lights, looking as old and road beaten as it is, with crow shit splatters on the windshield and rust ulcers on the fenders. There are two security cameras on the eaves of the Orca. Two more on the other corner of the building. Volker seems convinced that there are all kinds of thieves out there dying to rob the few hundred dollars that ever accumulate in the register in this age of credit cards. Nobody is going to risk his security system to steal her eighteen-year-old beater.
Still, on Loon Island she’ll be farther away from the damned photo than she’s been at any time since taking it. As much as it has upended her life—not to mention its continuing potential for getting her killed—there’s something disquieting about being that distant from it. What’s up with that?
She stands at the door of the truck a moment longer, fingering the keys in her pocket.
Fuck it. Maybe she can forget about it for a couple days.
She strides down the big aluminum ramp to the docks.
All she has with her is her travel bag, the bottle of Stoli, and some lime-flavored tortilla chips. She’s left men before with less than that.
* * *
Though it’s almost midnight when she steers the skiff out of the cut from the marina, the bay is lit by the sickly yellow glow from the ever-present solstice sunlight, now seeping under the clouds from behind the snow-topped volcanoes to the northwest. The water is wind-riffled but not too choppy, and Carla feels a surge of confidence about crossing to the island.
There are no other boats in sight. That’s unusual, even for this late hour. People come and go across the bay all day and most of the night, it seems. But not tonight. When she throttles up and powers past the End of the Road Hotel & Resort and rounds the tip of the spit, she finds out why.
The wind has shifted and is coming out of the west, not from the south as forecast. The mountains aren’t blocking it, and the water that was so calm earlier this afternoon is now churning. She throttles up the engine and the skiff lifts up on step, the hull planing across the wave tips without plowing. She can do this. She grips the wheel hard, crouches slightly to absorb the shock of each wave, and jams her knees against the steering console. She’s going to Loon Island.
Halfway there, she hits serious trouble where the water emptying into the Gulf of Alaska collides with incoming wind-driven whitecaps. The skiff plows into a maelstrom that pummels the aluminum hull and nearly knocks her off her feet. She yanks the wheel hard starboard to tack into and through the wind the way Shire has shown her, but she can’t get the skiff back up on step. It’s wallowing and nosing through the waves instead of over them. A wall of frigid, glacier-fed seawater sloshes over the bow, filling the boat to the tops of her sneakers.
She glances back over her shoulder. The lights on the hotel at the end of the spit look just as far behind her now as the island is ahead. Like Shire said, Carla’s surprisingly good with the skiff for a woman who’s spent her whole life in the desert. But the boat is bogging down as the icy water fills it.
Still a mile from Loon Island, a huge wave slams the skiff and jostles it sideways in a trough, and a second, even bigger wave hammers the stern so hard it pops the cowling open on the outboard. When another wave smashes over the transom again, the motor coughs and shudders to a stop. She cranks the starter. Nothing. Powerless now, the skiff begins to founder. All around her, sea-green waves rise and fall like pistons.
The radio crackles with static and unintelligible chatter that sounds like Shire’s voice, then goes dead.
CHAPTER
14
BY THE TIME Volker ejects all the regulars from the bar and closes down the kitchen, it’s almost midnight. He’s pulling the chain link security fence down over the whiskey shelves when his phone rings. “Orca,” he says. “We’re closed. Unless you’re female, young, and lonely.”
“George, wait!” It’s Shire, her voice agitated, none of her usual confidence in it. “Is Carla there?”
“She left a half hour ago. Maybe longer now.”
“Can you catch her? There’s a small-craft warning. The advisory just caught up with the weather. A local squall is coming. It could turn into something bigger. You know how it is.”
Volker feels a sudden weight on him. “Well, shit, Shire. You’re the one who told her it was safe.” He walks through the kitchen to the back door with the phone to his ear. “Hold on a sec. Maybe she didn’t go out. Maybe she’s in her camper for the night again.” Carla’s truck is parked behind the building in one of the employee spots.
Overhead, murderous-looking clouds boil up the bay. Against the storm’s gloom, the mercury lights atop the lamp poles smolder like white coals. The parking lot is devoid of life, the wooden boardwalk fronting the shops and charter offices deserted. On the beach, multicolored tents shimmy insanely with each gust.
Volker walks out into the wind and pounds on Carla’s camper door. Tries the handle. It’s locked. “Nah. She’s gone, Shire.”
Shire groans. “Son of a bitch, I wish she’d get a fucking phone. Check and see if my skiff is in the slip?”
“I’ll call you right back.”
He locks up the bar and hurries against the wind to the wooden sidewalk overlooking the small-boat harbor. From the railing he can see that Shire’s skiff is not in her slip on the long floating dock below. He calls her back and gives her the bad news. “She’s out there. Can you call her on the radio?”
“I just tried. She’s not answering.”
They agree there’s nothing to do until the wind drops off again.
Despite Carla’s assurances, Volker wonders how capable she is with a small boat in big weather. If Shire’s worried, he’s worried.
He walks back to Carla’s truck and hunkers in the lee of her camper. He lights a joint. It’s powerful Matanuska Thunder; the shit will make your eyeballs do the backstroke. He sucks the smoke in deep. Ignoring the wind, he folds his arms across the cab of the truck and rests his chin on his sleeve. Have they broken up? How is it possible that he’s not sure?
A car he recognizes goes by on the spit road and honks. It’s Landry heading home from the restaurant at the End of the Road Hotel & Resort. His window rolls down and he yells, “Trolling for men, Volker? Try the public toilet!” Volker waves absently. Maybe that’s what he should do, go gay. He’s getting too old to be hosing young waitresses, and God knows none of the women in town his age will have him. He really does seem to get along better with men.
He takes another hit and tries once more to figure out where he and Carla stand now. She takes her clothes but says she’ll see him again? And now she’s out there on the near-dark bay in a twenty-foot skiff in a storm like this? Women! Jesus, what a confusing pain in the ass they are.
He realizes he’s biting at a hangnail on one thumb. That pot was supposed to be calming. He throws the exhausted roach on the gravel, steps on it, and pulls another joint out of his pocket. Maybe this one will help.
CHAPTER
15
IT’S NEARING MIDNIGHT, and Scott is now anchored in the lee of Loon Island, which blocks the wind still roaring over the bay. The cove nestled in the concave curve of a tall spruce-topped bluff is calm and quiet, the water showing little sign of the gale except the slow swells curling into the boulders at the foot of the bluff. He can hear but can’t see harbor seals woofing to each other in the shadow of the cliff face. A few yards off the “C” Lady’s stern, a huge male sea otter floats on his back, tearing a crab apart, uninterested in the boat or Scott. Baitfish dimple the surface. He kneels on the forward deck and checks the deadfall on the anchor line. He’s still a little quaky after the ill-conceived and nerve-fraying attempt to round Point Pogibshi just as the storm hit. In the near-dark of the late hour, he can see the tops of the spruce trees, high above, quivering in the still-powerful west wind.
Thankful that he decided to turn back at Point Pogibshi and follow the shoreline eastward to Eldridge Passage and the protection of the islands, he stands and stretches his back. His hands are tight from gripping the wheel. He could use a drink, dinner, and some sleep. Maybe tomorrow the storm will blow through and he can try to head out to the rockfish grounds again. He tests the deadfall on the anchor line with his foot once more, his cautiousness reinforced by the memory of his brush with drowning on the Polar Huntress years ago. Satisfied, he goes into the cabin of the boat and fixes dinner.
He sips a glass of Black Box merlot as he cooks one of the salmon fillets on the galley stove. He has another glass with dinner. He’s drinking more of the cheap box wines these days. He’s drinking more, period. He does the dishes and pans and puts them away. When the cabin is shipshape the way he likes it—a fussy habit that Trina called a “pathology”—he goes to the cupboard over the galley and pulls out the Maker’s Mark.
As late as it is, and as nerve weary as he is, he’s unable to sleep. The insomnia has been getting worse these past few years. He misses the deep slumber he knew on those crabbers and long-liners. He misses the absolute exhaustion from the frenetic madness of the time-limited openers, quotas to fill. Taking his breaks collapsed against a bulkhead in his dripping rubber bibs, instantly unconscious. No trouble sleeping those days. But it’s not just the dreamy oblivion he misses. It’s also the joy of doing something so undeniably, so preposterously risky. Building houses isn’t even close.
If he’s going to be awake, he might as well get something done. Another long-standing habit. He opens one of his tackle boxes and takes out a spool of heavy monofilament line, a pack of stout treble hooks. Using his crimping tool, he spends an hour tying up some yard-long leaders to use for trolling with herring bait; there are some fish you just can’t catch on a fly rod. He tests each leader, clamping the treble hook in his needle-nosed pliers and yanking on the line until the monofilament almost cuts into his hand. Then he carefully coils and sets each one aside on the table.
Still not sleepy, he’s thinking about that long-liner, the Madmen, again. It really got to him this morning. Though maybe not as much as that waitress from the Orca did.
He gets up and puts the coiled trolling leaders into the tackle box, thinking about her now. Why would an exciting, sexy woman like her take up with an ancient, ponytailed dipshit like George Volker?
Add it to the list of things he will never understand about women.
He finishes his bourbon and goes out onto the aft deck to take a depressed leak. The night air off the water is cool. The bay is about forty-five degrees this time of year. He can see yellow daylight gilding the mountaintops to the north. It’s hard to tell whether that’s just remnants of the lingering sunset or the jaundiced start of the coming dawn. The stern has swung toward the cliff face. Without looking at the tide tables, he can tell the water is lying slack and low. He looks at his watch. Twelve thirty AM. Another day. Another tide. Same old Scott.
Carla! Out of the darkness, the name flashes into his brain. Carla.
“Carla,” he says, zipping up, happy to have recovered the lost name. “Carla, Carla, Carla.”
As he turns back toward the cabin, something catches his eye at the periphery of the deck lights’ glow. Something skating into the cove on the breeze. It drifts closer and he grabs the boat net, scoops it up, and swings it under the nearest light. It’s an unopened bag of tortilla chips. The label reads: NEW, HINT OF LIME FLAVOR!
It’s like finding an artifact from another culture. Trina monitored their health and nutritious diet for so long, he can’t remember the last time he’s eaten a corn chip—or any other kind of junk food. Well, brothers and sisters, this man is free now. And what does a single man about town pair with tortilla chips? Bourbon, of course.
