Arrow's Flight

Joel Scott

Description

Crime and adventure on the high seas Jared Kane is a West Coast commercial fisherman whose life has been plagued by bad luck and blackout drinking. When he inherits Arrow, an old 46-foot wooden sailboat, he sees a chance for redemption. With his friend from prison, Danny MacLean, Jared plans an offshore voyage, sailing from Vancouver down the Pacific Coast to California and out into the South Pacific.  But that bad luck rears its ugly head: Danny is attacked and left for dead, and when the unknown assailants attempt to finish the job, Jared is forced to flee aboard Arrow with Danny lying helpless in his berth, under the erratic care of his grandfather, a Haida elder who won’t speak English. On the search for safe haven with the would-be killers hot on their tail, Jared finds himself with no good choices but to run south — ill-prepared, poorly provisioned, and crewed by a silent old man and an injured

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 26 avril 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773051970
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

ARROW’S FLIGHT
JOEL SCOTT





Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
About the Author
Copyright


Chapter 1
The halibut quota filled early, and I was on a plane back to Vancouver by the first week of September. I had shipped on the Freelund , a sixty-foot longliner out of Prince Rupert, and we’d had a fair season. It would have been an excellent season had we not been caught with our lines out in a sudden storm on the final trip; with no good choices left, we hauled in a forty-knot gale with seas breaking over the man at the roller, and ended up losing half our gear. We were luckier than some though — a rogue wave took out the wheelhouse windows on the Covenant in the same blow, and a shard of glass killed the man on watch, pinning him to the bulkhead by his throat.
It was raining heavily as my flight approached Vancouver International Airport. I looked down at the city’s shrouded lights and thought about the coming winter; every autumn for the past six years, I had left the fishing grounds with a large bankroll and a bigger thirst, and every spring gone back out broke, or near enough as made no matter. Sometimes in the off-season I took a job driving a truck or working on construction, but it never made much difference. I could always spend more than I earned.
Drinking, partying, sometimes a few weeks in Mexico or maybe a long, drunken hunting trip into the interior, and at the end of it all another spring and working on the gear before returning to the fishing grounds for another go-round.
I used to think it was fun.
The plane bounced down onto the tarmac, the wheels shrieking as they caught and came to speed. The stewardesses smiled gamely and passed us out the door, saying how special we all were and what a treat it had been to serve us. I walked through the terminal, stepped out into the driving rain, and caught a taxi to Annie’s.
I had been staying with her and Danny since my release from prison nine years earlier. Annie was Haida, middle-aged, and stocky, with high cheekbones and a gentle smile. Danny, her youngest, had been born of a brief second marriage to a Scotsman who died of exposure and alcoholism under an East End bridge long before I knew them.
Danny and I met and became friends in prison, his time was up a month before mine, and when I walked out through the big iron gates, he was waiting to take me home with him. I moved into the old house with Annie, her grandfather Joseph, and Danny, and within a month was closer to them all than to the grim remnants of my own family. There was a love and tolerance in that house that wrapped and surrounded you as close and warm as the old Chilkat blankets that hung on the walls.
Annie was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee with Erin and Jaimie, her sons from her first marriage. They were big, powerful men in their thirties, handsome in a fierce way, particularly Jaimie, who had the slow smile and easy confidence of an elder brother. Erin’s cheek had been ripped with a hook when he was running his little troller on the west coast a few years earlier, and the jagged scar gave his face a sinister cast as it caught the light.
Annie jumped up and hugged me, and I gave her the ivory hair brooch I had picked up in Kodiak.
“You’re looking good, Jared,” she said.
I shook hands with the boys and poured myself a coffee and sat down with them for the ritual bitching about shitty seasons, poor prices, and the goddam fish companies. Erin knew the man who had been killed on the Covenant , so I brought a heel of duty-free rum out of my duffle bag and poured a shot into our coffee and we drank his remembrance. The brothers recalled others who had gone out and never come back over the years, speaking in soft, murmuring voices of small boats and big storms before finishing up their drinks and heading home to their families.
Annie’s grandfather returned from his walk and took the chunk of argillite I had bought in a Kodiak bar off a king crab fisherman down on his luck. He nodded gravely as he accepted it, his soft voice a low murmur of sibilance; although he spoke only in the old Haida dialects, he seemed to understand everything I said. No one knew for sure how old Joseph was — somewhere close to ninety. He was around five foot eight, thin, and a little wasted now, but you could still glimpse the powerful man he once had been. His eyes were sharp and bright, and he always carried himself erect.
He went into the living room and brought back the carving he was presently working on, an old war canoe with the animal clans inside and Raven crouched brooding on the bow. It was a marvel of intricate carving and delicate workmanship; he had likely been doing that kind of thing for three quarters of a century. He never sold anything, just gave the pieces away to family and friends.
“Where’s Danny?” I asked.
Annie glanced at the clock. “Still working. He didn’t do very well this year, he hooked on with Fly-By-Night again.”
Danny could always get a job with the moving companies. The strongest man I know, he could easily manage the big fridges by himself with just a trolley. Stripped down, he reminds me somewhat of a lethargic seal, his body sleek and smooth, no bulging muscles, looking even a bit soft; but then he’d move into something with casual ease, lifting or stacking by himself what might take two other men to handle, and you saw that what seemed soft and flaccid at rest was a sinuous layer of muscle. I had watched him in the prison gym and seen the big-bulked men shake their heads as he worked the weights and pulleys.
We sat companionably in the warm kitchen, the old wood stove in the corner giving off an even heat, the fir snapping, the occasional slow hiss of resin. Every week the boys delivered loads of wood in their pickups, and Joseph split and stacked it inside the lean-to out back. He would work on even the most knotted of stumps, studying them for the longest time, as if searching out their hearts, before he finally raised the axe and struck.
Annie rose and left the room, returning with a stack of mail, which she put down in front of me. “I threw out the flyers and junk mail. There was an overdue bill from the chandlery that I paid off with one of your cheques.”
I shuffled through the pile. No personal letters, there never were. Bank statements, some bills, a couple of well-disguised appeals for money, and at the bottom, a bulky special delivery packet from a West End solicitor’s office.
“That came a week ago,” Annie said.
Inside was a sheet of office stationery and a hand-addressed envelope. The lawyer was brief and to the point.
Dear Mr. Kane,
I have been asked by Mrs. Margaret Calder to act on her behalf with regard to the last will and testament of William Able Calder, deceased.
Please be advised that I have prepared all papers and documents for the transfer of ownership of the sailing vessel Arrow from the Calders to you. They have been witnessed and signed by Mrs. Calder and all that remains is your presence at this office to complete the conveyance by signing the Blue Book and associated documents.
I look forward to meeting you at your earliest convenience.
— Robert P. Sproule
I dropped the letter on the table and looked up in disbelief.
“What?” asked Annie.
“It’s Bill Calder. He’s died. There must be some mistake; the lawyer says he’s left me his sailboat.”
I opened the envelope. It was a letter from Meg Calder.
Dear Jared,
Bill has died. Although I had been expecting it and thought I was prepared, it still came as a terrible shock.
His mind remained clear and active to the last. Hearing him talk and laugh as always made it hard to realize just how frail he had become. The last couple of months were hard. I had promised to let him remain on the boat to the end; his cancer was inoperable, and he saw no point in undergoing a harrowing course of treatment to delay the inevitable.
His final courage and grace strengthened me, and helped me get through those last few weeks. He was cremated, and his ashes scattered in the Pacific waters he loved so well.
Bill knew I didn’t wish to remain on Arrow by myself, and neither of us wanted to see her go to a broker; there is little demand for wooden boats of her age, and the thought of her slow deterioration at a dock while her price was dickered down was intolerable to us both.
We felt that Arrow might make some difference in your life. Perhaps the two of you will revisit some of her distant anchorages, and she will cross again her old tracks in the South Pacific; I think you both deserve it.
I do not believe we are predestined by events in our early lives to tread a narrow and circumscribed path. We can break free from our personal history and move beyond it, and I hope that Arrow will be the catalyst that enables you to do this. You must learn to like yourself, Jared.
Please do not dispute us in this, Bill has left me well provided for; my future is secure. Knowing that Arrow will be in the hands of a caring owner gives me great satisfaction.
I plan to return to England. You can write to me care of the lawyer if you wish; he is an old and valued friend.
All my love,
Meg.
I had met Bill and Meg seven years earlier. There was a strike i