The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [52]
Twin glistens of tears laned Braaf's round face. "Say anything, either of you," he choked out, "and Til gut you."
After, Karlsson never was sure what the flag had been between Wennberg and him, how it happened that they faced each other, off along the brink of shore from the weeping Braaf.
Wennberg began fast, as if the words needed to rattle their way out of him. "Karlsson, listen now—we've— Hell's own clung ditch, we're fallen in now. The lucky one of us may be Melander. So—"
"You didn't trade places with him there at the grave."
"What? No!" Wennberg seemed startled by Karlsson's rejoinder. Then tried to muster: "No, bad choices're getting to be a habit with me. As when I went out that gate with you damned three."
"But out it you are." Karlsson scanned from Wennberg away into the forest, the constant shaggy nap of these islands. Tried to find concentration in the convoking of all the green beings, the way they touched each to each. Karlsson's head swam a bit and ached a lot and he was wearier than all the axwork of his life ever had made him, and here loomed Wennberg to be dealt with, and Melander dead, and..."And a far swim to get back in," Karlsson bought a further moment with. God's wounds, think now, how to halter this damned bull of a blacksmith....
"Karlsson, hear me. Just—just hear me, will you? We can't go at each other like cats with tails tied together and slung over a fence. Not now, not after—Someway we've got to make miles along this God-lost coast. So somebody needs to load. Decide, this way or that, or we'll meet ourselves in a circle in these bedamned islands. Not even Melander's going to make himself heard up through the earth."
Karlsson's weariness abruptly doubled. "So you're lifting yourself to it."
Exasperation flooded Wennberg. "Karlsson, goddamn—you won't see a matter until it lands on your nose and has a shit there, will you?" With effort, Wennberg tried to steady his tone. Karlsson remembered the same ominous tremor through the blacksmith, the earthquake in a man when temper fights with itself, the time Melander informed him the cache had been spirited away. "No, not—not me to lead. You."
As Karlsson tried to lay hold of the seven words he had just heard, Wennberg discharged more.
"It's sense, is all. There're the maps to be savvied and tin's bedamned canoe to be pointed, and you've done some of so, out with the bear milkers. So it's sense, you in charge of that."
Wennberg scratched his sidewhiskers as he sought how to put his next premise.
"All the other, we'll just—we don't need a sermon at every turn, like Melander gave. Divvy tasks without all that yatter, we can."
Wennberg paused. Something was yet to pry its way. Finally—
"Braaf, there. He'd never take to me as leader. Be happy to see him left here to bunk with Melander, I would, but we need the little bastard."
"And you." Karlsson someway found the mother wit to say this more as statement than question, "You'll take to me."
Another effort moved through Wennberg. He lifted his look from Karlsson, bent a bleak gaze to the ocean. He said: "I need to, don't I?"
Close by that night's firelight, Karlsson in kneel.
Untying the flap of the waterproof map pouch. Bringing out the scroll of maps. Performing the unrolling, then the weighting of each corner with an oval pebble from the beach gravel.
Into view arrived all their declension of the coast, an amount of ti ck across white space that surprised Karlsson, as though he Were gazing on sudden new line of tracks across snow.
Only the top map of the lot had Karlsson ever seen, the one on which Me lander's pencil route took its start at the square house-dots of New Archangel. That once, Melander had been borrowing opinion, and here was traced Karlsson's advice, the canoe's side loop around Japonski Island and then veering down and down, at last out the bottom of Sitka Sound. The night forest of a continent ten paces on one side of him and half a world of night ocean thirty paces on the other, Karlsson could scarcely credit it—that there had been time