The Floor of Heaven (28 page)

But then the sky opened up, and Charlie realized he’d larger concerns than taunting Billy. Rain pounded down in thick sheets, and the wind grew fitful. Cascades of water lashed at their faces, a cold, stinging attack. They couldn’t see past the prow of the canoe; the rain was impenetrable. The water poured down so heavily that Charlie thought they might very well drown sitting in their canoe. Billy was attempting to bail out the water splashing into the boat, but Charlie judged it was a futile struggle. A river had settled on the bottom of the canoe and had reached their shins. Their boots sloshed as they moved. At the same time, strong waves continued to bounce the canoe about. When Charlie caught the eye of his “slave,” though, he flashed a confident smile. He was the captain. He’d plod on and pray that they’d be able to ride the storm out.

In the next instant, though, Charlie lost hope. The giant gusts propelling the canoe forward had suddenly pushed it directly into another tide. Caught in this tide-riff, at the mercy of two malicious tides that seemed hell-bent on cruelly tossing the canoe back and forth between them on the choppy sea, Charlie decided that they were doomed. There was nothing he could do but accept his death with valor. Still, it struck him as damn peculiar that after all the nasty scrapes he’d been in out west, after all the gunfights, Charlie Siringo would wind up drowning in a canoe. Who’d have predicted that? His only consolation was that he’d soon be reunited with Mamie.

But they were spared. It was the wind that set them free, another ferocious gust nearly picking their canoe out of the water, liberating it from the tide-riff, and hurling it toward shore. Only now they had to worry about crashing against the rocks. Like knuckles jutting out from clenched fists, rows of craggy, sharp-edged rocks blocked the approach to shore.

“Jump!” Charlie ordered, and on his command the two men hit the water feetfirst. It was one miracle when they both came up for air and another when they discovered that the canoe had not capsized. They swam toward it frantically, and managed to grab its bow. It required all their remaining strength, and a good deal of concentration, to push the boat through the whitecaps and between the rocks, toward shore.

As they got closer, an Indian stepped out of the timber. At first Charlie thought his exhausted mind was playing tricks on him, that the Indian was only an apparition brought on by his fatigue. But when the Indian waded into the water, a grateful Charlie understood that help had come. The Indian was a big man and capable, too. With his assistance, they managed to pull the canoe ashore. By the time the rain had stopped, the Indian had a bark fire going and a bottle of rye had been passed around. Wet and cold, totally spent, the two detectives found the dry side of a large spruce tree and quickly fell into a deep sleep on Admiralty Island.

THE ISLAND was shaped like an egg; at its widest point it was one hundred miles or so from shore to shore, and nearly twice as long. For a week they circled around the island, wriggling up inlets guarded by gloomy granite mountains and exploring wide, smooth bays while eagles soared overhead. They’d hoped to sight the thieves’ schooner, but they had no luck. And the Indians who bought their whiskey could offer no assistance.

So they sailed on into unknown waters. It was a strange, frustrating voyage for Charlie. His usual response to a challenge was to charge toward it. He felt most comfortable when he was taking action, even if it required his standing up to unfavorable odds. That’d always been his way. But day after day, and then week after week, he found that all he could do was paddle on aimlessly, and the passivity of this expedition began to take its toll.

The entire country seemed to goad his uneasy mood further. Sure, there was so much of it, and it was all for the taking. And there was no denying the glory in its terraced valleys, its immense forests, its shimmering glacial peaks. Yet it struck Charlie that this was a wilderness not at all like what he’d encountered when, as a teenager, he’d first ridden up the Chisholm Trail. He couldn’t imagine settlers taking on this frontier. Why bother? he asked himself. It was one thing to stake out a lonely homestead and risk getting scalped in your bed by the Comanche when you could dream that if you stuck it out, in a generation or so your children would be living in a territory bursting with farms, ranches, and towns. But it was another thing completely if there was just no point. Up here, Charlie couldn’t see what was to be gained by a pioneer’s sacrifices. It wasn’t a question of hard work or courage. The irrefutable fact was that you couldn’t defeat nature. Geronimo was as murderous a cuss as any man who’d ever lived, but even he had finally been driven to the reservation. You couldn’t clear these forests or level these mountains. And every year come winter, all a man could do was surrender. Charlie was certain there’d never be farms, or ranches, or cities in Alaska. In the end, the country was too powerful. It’d always best you.

As the weeks stretched into months, even the constant diet of fish grew to be an annoyance. At first, it’d been almost a lark. There seemed to be no end to the fish, crabs, and clams that inhabited the coastal waters. They’d bought two halibut lines, each over one hundred feet long, and it was as if as quick as they’d cast them out, the fish would bite. But soon Charlie was complaining that he smelled of fish. He took to bathing every day, but it brought him no comfort. The rank odor, he was convinced, had seeped into his skin.

The constant sunlight, too, was an irritant. The sun would rise at about nine in the morning and then hang high and bright as a beacon in the sky till about an hour and a half after midnight. It was as if the day wouldn’t end, and that grew to be a genuine annoyance, since one day was disturbingly like the next.

Yet the two detectives never considered giving up. They sailed on. In an Indian village they’d heard that two strange white men in a schooner had headed westward. All they could think to do was point their rainbow canoe in that direction and go with the current.

NO DOUBT it was the monotony that affected Charlie’s judgment, and prompted the display of recklessness that almost got them killed.

It was about eleven at night, but the sun was shining as though it were noon, and the water was like crystal. Their canoe was far from land, and at sea there was a total silence. The stillness made Charlie uncomfortable; at night in the West there’d always be a coyote howling or an owl hooting, and the crickets and insects had their thick buzz of night sounds, too. But this sort of complete noiselessness was new to him, and he found that it fitted around him too tightly. It was unnerving. There was no point complaining, though, so he sat silently with his thoughts in the canoe’s stern, using his paddle to steer while Billy slowly stroked them forward.

As Charlie looked ahead, he saw a dark object about five hundred yards in the distance. Reckoning that it must be an island, he steered toward it. It’d be as good a place as any to put up for the night, he told his partner.

After they’d crossed another hundred yards or so of calm water, Billy began to doubt that they were heading to an island. “That might very well be a sleeping whale,” he warned. “You wake one of them up, they’re apt to turn dangerous. It’ll come straight at us,” he said. There was no anxiety in his voice. He was simply suggesting that prudence required that Charlie change course.

But Charlie was in no mood to be bossed around or, for that matter, to pay much mind to commonsense advice. He snapped back at Billy, “It’s my night to be captain. You’ve got no right to chip in.” Anyway, he was curious.

So Charlie steered closer until there was no doubt. It was a whale. If they kept going on this course, they’d be able to reach out and touch its massive head. Another two canoes lengths or so down the line was its tail.

By now Billy was frantic. He was pulling hard, back-paddling with all his might in an attempt to put some distance between their canoe and this colossal creature. And all the time he was whispering imploringly to Charlie, urging that they had to get away before the whale awoke. If the whale attacked, Billy pleaded with Charlie, it would have them both for dinner.

Charlie was in no mood to exercise caution. After all the flat days, he relished an opportunity to do something out of the ordinary. “Holy smokes, Sayles, here’s the chance of my life to shoot big game!” he exclaimed. Grabbing the Winchester that lay by his side, Charlie lifted it to take aim. Sighting carefully, he took a bead on a broad spot right behind where he imagined the gills might be.

“For God’s sake, don’t do it, Charlie!”

But even as Billy was screaming the words, he heard the crack of the rifle. The bullet struck the whale, and blood spurted out into the water. As the sea turned red, the whale went wild. The massive creature begin turning in circles, faster and faster. It seemed impossible to Charlie that something so large could turn around and around with such speed. The whale circled about in confusion and fury, and the water churned with foam. Large waves shook the canoe mightily.

Suddenly, the whale dived. It went deep, as though intent on hitting the sandy bottom. As its huge tail lifted up toward the sky, it was as if a gigantic hole was created in the water. The canoe was immediately sucked toward this vacuum. The two men desperately attempted to back-paddle, but the pull of this whooshing vortex was too powerful. They could not escape, and Charlie looked down into its inky blackness and imagined he was staring straight into Hades. It was a destination, he realized, that he richly deserved. It had been sheer willfulness that had provoked him to shoot at the whale, and now he’d pay the price for his impertinence.

But no sooner had it opened than the cascades of foam receded, the hole filled, and the water once again lay as flat and calm as a tabletop. The whale had vanished, and they were saved.

As an apology of sorts, Charlie promised Billy that he’d never go after that kind of big game again. But the Englishman was in no mood to listen. He sulked in angry silence for the rest of the night, and for most of the next day, too.

BY THE time three more days had passed and they were far from Admiralty Island, the encounter with “Mr. Whale,” as Charlie referred to the great creature with a newfound deference, had been told and retold many times between them. It’d taken on the proportions of an epic battle. They’d survived, as Charlie was fond of reminding his friend, with a tale they’d be able to share around many a campfire. Looking back at it that way, Billy was of a mind to agree.

They’d been sailing up the coast for days when, on a whim, they decided to follow the course of a long inlet. A swift inland river pulled them along to the banks of an Indian village. This seemed, both detectives agreed, as good a place as any to stop.

As they dragged their canoe ashore, they were met by a stern-looking passel of braves cradling rifles in their arms. But Charlie quickly got out the “firewater” and even went so far as to offer a free taste. That turned people friendly, and the Indians led the two men up toward their settlement.

The detectives decided to linger at the village the next day because an Indian maiden there had caught Billy’s eye. He was off trying to win her over when Charlie, just looking for a way to fill the time, decided to head down to the shore. As he was walking along on the beach, lost in his thoughts, he saw a brave climb out of a birch canoe a few yards in front of him. It took him a moment before he realized that he was staring straight into the face of George Carmack.

TWENTY-TWO

here was no telling who was more surprised. The last person Charlie was expecting to see climbing out of a canoe in the middle of nowhere was the man who’d come to his rescue at the mine. George, meanwhile, would’ve bet anything that he’d never see that durn inquisitive machine oiler again. But it took only another moment before both men’s astonishment turned into suspicion.

Charlie began to wonder if he and his partner had indeed stumbled into Schell and Hubbard’s hideout. Perhaps his initial instinct had been correct: Carmack was somehow involved in the robberies. Accomplice? Mastermind? Maybe it was the squawman who’d alerted the two robbers to a detective’s presence? Perhaps he’d given them the warning that’d made them bolt? Standing still as a pole, rigid with shock as Carmack gazed back at him, Charlie thought that all of those possibilities made sense. And certainly none of them were as far-fetched as going upriver in a rainbow canoe in pursuit of two gold thieves, only to wind up face-to-face on a isolated sandy beach with Carmack. Hoping to resolve things right then, Charlie quickly turned toward the inlet, expecting that he’d see the schooner sailing into view. But when he looked, the water was flat and empty.

The schooner’s absence hit him with the force of a rebuke; and at once his suspicions began to slip. In the next instant Charlie reminded himself that sometimes in life things occur without a connecting rhyme or reason; they just happen.

Howdy, Carmack, he said. And, walking down the long beach toward George, the detective used the time to apply some firm logic to the situation. He remembered that Carmack had quit the mine way before he’d rooted out the crooks’ lair in the woods or had deduced the role the pipeline had played. Carmack had grabbed his final pay and been long gone, while Schell and Hubbard had still been hanging around, lying low, planning to strike again. There couldn’t be a connection. The timing just didn’t add up. Now that Charlie’d thought it through, he started to consider that the joke was on him. Imagine thinking that a thief hoarding a small fortune in gold would be living in the wilderness like some down-at-the-heels Stick Injun. As Charlie stuck out his hand in greeting, he gave himself a stern lecture: Any person who don’t spend his days sitting on the front porch, why, he’s bound to encounter his fair share of coincidences in his travels.

But the man staring back at Charlie wasn’t of a mind to believe in happenstance. George Carmack had something to hide, and as a consequence, a guilty man’s fears rose up in him. At the mine he’d suspected that this Davis fellow had been snaking up to him in the dining hall because he’d recognized an AWOL marine. The sneaky oiler, he thought, had hopes of pocketing himself a nice reward courtesy of the United States government for reporting a deserter. But finding him now up along the Dyea River in Chinook country, far from Juneau or any settlement of white men, for that matter, convinced George that Davis was someone a lot more dangerous: He was a U.S. marshal with a federal warrant. The War Department, George figured, must’ve sent him on a mission to apprehend runaway marines. What other explanation could there be for his suddenly appearing near old Healy’s trading post in Dyea just days after George had returned from his short trip into the Yukon? Davis must’ve been trailing him all along, waiting patiently until he’d left Canada and crossed the border back into American territory so the arrest would be nice and legal. There was no other way to sort it out. People just don’t wander up the Dyea for no reason at all. I should’ve stayed in the Yukon, George complained silently. Though maybe it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference. Way my luck has been running, he nearly moaned, misfortune was bound to strike.