The Big Both Ways (27 page)

Annabelle was happy to be up in the tree. She was happy to be on dry land and in the company of someone her own age. She clung to the trunk of the spruce tree and smiled, feeling the permanent heft of its mass.

The sow held the skull with her front paws. She worked the hide with her teeth, and her flame-red tongue scoured the bone. Annabelle sat fascinated as the three boys watched and spoke their own language to each other, sometimes miming that they were bears themselves gnawing on a fine big meal.

Footsteps approached from the cannery side and they all heard the voices of two adults. The boys jumped down from the tree and ran toward the dump. The sow lifted her head and in three long bounds was gone. The boys were scouring through the crates and barrels left in the dump. Annabelle climbed down and ran up to the dump just as the littlest boy
pulled out a glass bottle of Karo syrup. The top of the bottle had broken off and there was a thick plug of mold on top of the amber liquid. The middle boy got a stick and scraped away the mold then dug deep down into the bottle, pulled the stick out, and began licking it as the other two tried to wrestle the bottle away from him.

The big boy found a clean stick and made sure there was not a trace of bark or mud on it. He dipped it into the syrup bottle and he gave the stick to Annabelle. She thanked him and licked the sweet syrup. The boys were clearly proud of themselves.

“Thank you,” Annabelle said to the three of them.

“That’s nothing,” the big boy said. “We do this kind of stuff all the time.”

He grabbed at the syrup bottle again just as they noticed the watchman standing at the end of the dump road with Ellie.

“Hey, you goddamn rodents, get out of the dump. This ain’t your stuff to be scrounging through.” The watchman shouldered his shotgun and fired in the direction of the boys but well over their heads. The boys ran like the sow back into the woods, leaving Annabelle standing with her sugary stick.

Ellie walked toward Annabelle. She wasn’t listening to the watchman rant about the unruly Indian boys or about the three black bear cubs he had shot just a week ago.

Ellie walked slowly, stumbling over the refuse. Annabelle could tell Ellie wasn’t mad. Ellie hardly ever got mad, at her at least.

“It’s getting late. I started to worry,” Ellie said, her voice more tired than angry.

“It’s still light out,” Annabelle said, and she finished the last of the syrup on the stick.

“I know but it’s still late. Funny that way up here. Sun stays up a long time.”

“Lots of things are funny up here,” Annabelle said. She took Ellie’s hand and walked back to the cabin.

Ellie and Slip started in at the machine shop the next day. He had no idea what they would be doing or what they should be doing for no pay.

“I think we should organize first,” Ellie said in a whispery voice, and Slip’s stomach tightened up. Slip’s distress must have shown on his face for Ellie looked him in the eye and stopped walking just short of the machine shop door. “Listen,” she said softly, “I’m sorry about all this,” and she gestured with her hands, taking everything in the world into the scope of her words. “But we’re still above ground, aren’t we?”

Slip looked away from her beautiful battered face. “That’s a plus, I agree,” he said.

“Yes it is,” she continued over his attempt at humor, “and right now we’ve got to work this job. Trust me. I can do this. I can do this better than anything else.” Slip nodded, and Ellie opened the door to the machine shop.

The shop was a dark hole in the back of the cannery building that whirred with rattling lathes and hissing compressors. It was run by a big Swede named Nels and his assistant, Clyde. Nels had been a blacksmith in Saskatchewan, but in his early twenties he killed a man in a bar fight and rode a freight train west to Vancouver. Nels liked working in a small shop. Clyde was dumber than a bag of hammers but at least he didn’t talk much and when he did it was almost always to say something in agreement with Nels. He didn’t ask for a couple of scarecrows to help out in the shop but the super had told him they were coming down. Nels had no idea what they could do.

When Ellie walked into the shop she saw nothing but things to do. There were piles of drill bits on greasy benches, broken sprockets on the floor, calipers and metal rules, punches and hacksaws, cold chisels and deadweight hammers, bent shafts and broken motor mounts scattered on every flat surface and the floor. There were punchboards where the tools had once hung but the brackets were all empty now. There were buckets with solvent, and
some with water for cooling heated parts. There were buckets just for spitting in. There was a calendar with a different inspirational Bible verse for each week of the year hanging on the wall. There were three hanging lights that pulsed with the uneven revving of the camp’s electrical system. There were drifts of sprocket chains snaking between the machines and a broken chain hoist swinging like a gallows from the ceiling.

“What you think you gonna do in my shop?” Nels asked.

The light pulsed on the big man wearing the leather apron. Clyde had his head down and was running a hand file up the notch of a short motor shaft.

“We’re going to do whatever we can to help you out,” Ellie said with a smile sweeter than berry cobbler.

“Just stay out of my way. I didn’t ask for no help.” He turned away and went back to the lathe where he was turning a shaft.

“Let’s get out of here,” Slip said. “They’re never going to let you and me work in here,” and he turned to walk out the door.

Ellie touched his elbow. “Hang on. Let’s watch a bit.”

They sat in the back corner and watched the two men work. Slip had no idea what they were going to do and his eyes wandered all over the clutter. The room was so heaped with tools and broken metal that he could not differentiate the individual tools or what was useful and what was being discarded. It was a junk drawer that had spilled and taken over an entire room of the cannery.

Ellie nudged him on the shoulder and said, “Grab that broom. See there, the greasy one over by the barrel. Go in the back and start sweeping the floor. I’ll find a dustpan and an empty barrel. We’ll start slow.”

Nels scowled at them as they went about sweeping the floor. Occasionally he’d bark out, “Don’t be moving nothing. I got things where I want ’em.”

And Ellie would ask, “So you want these shavings on the floor right where they are?” Nels would turn away and go back
to straightening a shaft or welding a new section of a chipped sprocket.

Soon Ellie and Slip were working together, sweeping and moving around piles of tools and broken metal. They swept around the lathes, then wiped the big machines with clean rags. They threw the rustiest pieces of metal in the barrel. Slip kept his head down and swept because he felt that Nels was going to throw a hammer at him at any moment. But after about twenty minutes of sweeping and scooping metal shavings into the barrel, Slip looked over at Clyde who was staring straight at Ellie. Clyde was standing at a vice holding a ball-peen hammer and looking at Ellie as if she were going to burst into flame.

“Whacha doing this for? He don’t want no woman’s help,” Clyde said softly, and as he spoke he turned away from the blonde.

“I don’t figure it hurts to help you guys get organized,” Ellie said, and she slid the barrel closer to the vice and started sweeping under the workbench. “I won’t say a thing or bother you at your work. I’m just going to make life easier. That’s what I do, boys. I make life easier.” Then she winked.

Slip stopped sweeping. Clyde was turning pale. It seemed to Slip that no one had ever winked at Clyde or spoken to him in a civil tone and the poor man simply didn’t know how to respond.

The little greasy man couldn’t bring himself to look at Ellie again, but he said, “I suppose not.”

Clyde was suspicious of Ellie and Slip for a lot of reasons. One was that a skinny blonde woman had no business in his shop, but she and her beat-up boyfriend could have been stooges. The owners were always hiring private dicks to snoop around the workers to make sure there weren’t any agitators in the bunch. They would be friendly as hell and they’d start asking around about who was having meetings and they’d even start complaining about the food and the bedding to see who piped up. Then in a couple of days, whoever it was who had piped up was
gone on a boat down the coast or sometimes flown out on an airplane to a hospital.

Clyde was watching Ellie. Clyde recognized the way Ellie had said the word “organize” as if it were a ringing bell, and he knew Ellie was up to something. Clyde wouldn’t say anything to Nels. He would just keep his eyes open.

Late that evening Ellie and Slip walked down the boardwalk to the cabin. They had greasy hands and their boots scratched along the slick walkway because of sharp curls of steel stuck into their soles. They found themselves in the parade of tired workers at the end of the day, and Ellie nodded to people she had seen at dinner the night before. If they nodded back she would follow it up with a soft “hello.” Slip tromped back, saying nothing.

As they turned the corner of the main cannery building something caught Ellie’s eye and she ran ahead. Slip kept walking slowly and found Ellie standing at the rail, looking down at the float. She was shading her eyes and gazing at something intently, her hands gripping the top of the rail and her knuckles showed white.

Slip stopped beside her, but she didn’t acknowledge him. He followed her gaze and saw a man and a boy unloading cartons off of a floatplane tied to the float.

“Hey,” Slip said. “We had a good day in the shop. I have to admit you knew what you were doing,” and he patted her on the back. She stared out to the dock without responding to his touch. He ran his hand down to the small of her back where her work coat hung over her dungarees. He stopped his hand when he felt the hardness of the revolver tucked into her belt.

“What the hell you carrying this for?” he whispered into her ear.

She didn’t acknowledge his question. “That’s a Lockheed Vega,” she said. The tone in her voice was softer and more loving than Slip had yet heard. “It’s got a Pratt and Whitney Wasp engine.”

“Really?” Slip said, flummoxed.

“It’s fast,” she said, as if she were describing a mythological animal. “Some of them will cruise at a hundred fifty miles an hour and still carry a big payload. It’s got three gas tanks.”

“No kidding.” Slip had taken out his pocketknife and was cleaning grease from under his fingernails.

“Amelia Earhart flew one,” Ellie said. She pushed back from the rail and began walking away. She bumped into people walking the other way because she couldn’t take her eyes off the plane.

Slip kept scraping his fingernails for a moment, then he shook his head and walked off in the opposite direction.

“I’m going to get cleaned up for supper,” he said, without looking back.

Ellie waved absently in the general direction of the cabin. “Sounds good. I’ll be along.” She walked down the ramp toward the Vega, pushing past the chain of kitchen workers who were carrying cardboard cartons from the dock to the dining room. As she walked toward the pilot she swept off her kerchief, tossing her hair back and running her fingers through it. Slip hated himself for doing it but he watched her from the dock and he recognized a swaying in her walk, a fluid motion from her hips and arms that danced into her stride as she approached the pilot. The pilot came down off the ladder from the passenger door to hop on the float as she came closer. Soon they were engaged in a conversation, the pilot pointing to the wings and then the tail section, Ellie taking in every word. Her hands reached out to touch the skin of the plane even though it was too far away.

When the pilot held Ellie by the waist to help her inside, Slip turned away and walked back to the cabin.

The yellow bird was sitting on the two-by-four rafter when Slip walked in. The bird gave a great shriek and buzzed the top of his head. He flapped and waved the bird off. Annabelle sat up on her bunk reading a book.

“Can’t you get him back in his cage?” he said, too tired to really sound fierce.

“I guess he doesn’t want to get back in his cage.”

“I could get him back in there. Just throw a towel over him, and jam him through the door.” Slip sat on his bunk and started unlacing his boots.

“He’d just find a way to get out.” Annabelle didn’t look up from her book.

“Well if he’s so fired up to be free, why doesn’t he fly away and live in the woods with the rest of the birds?” Slip stripped off one boot and threw it on the floor.

“I dunno. I guess he doesn’t want to. I bet those wild birds scare him.”

“Well if he craps on my stuff one more time I’m going to cook him in a stew.” Slip threw his second boot under the bunk.

Annabelle put her book aside and dug down beside the mattress where she kept a notebook and a pencil. She took the pencil and stood on the bunk, holding out her hand to Buddy. She made kissing sounds and Buddy walked the rafter over to the pencil and hopped onto it. Then the girl lay back down and held the bird up in front of her face. Buddy loved to look at himself in the reflection of Annabelle’s glasses and he stood cooing and chortling a lovely song to himself.

“Where’s Ellie?” the girl asked.

“She’s down looking at an airplane.” Slip clambered up onto the bunk opposite her.

“I went down and looked at it when it came in. It’s a Lockheed Vega. It’s like Amelia Earhart’s plane.”

“I know,” Slip grumbled.

“It’s made of wood.”

“Really?”

“Yep, and when it gets cold in the winter the wood pops and creaks as the plane flies over the mountains. It can go a hundred and fifty miles per hour.”

“I heard.”

“That’s a lot faster than we go in that little boat.”

“No kidding.”

“We’d be where we’re going a heck of a lot faster if we went by plane.”

“That’s true.” Slip was staring up at the unfinished ceiling.

“Slip?” Annabelle asked.

“Yes.”

“I gave you your tin box back, right?”

“Yes, you did. Thank you.”

“There’s a lot of money in there.”