The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [70]
Braaf peered with interest at the side of Wennberg's head, as if concerned that the gun barrel rested comfortably there. "So, blacksmith? Back at New Archangel, you wanted a sleigh ride down this coast. Ready to join us again?"
"Braaf, I ... you ... yes, put the damned gun off, I—I'll let the bastard be."
Braaf stepped back carefully, the rifle yet in Wennberg's direction.
... Saved my skin, Braaf, But there'll be Wennberg at me again, first chance, unless ...
"Wennberg. Hear me out." Karlsson made himself stride to within a step of the burly man, with effort stood steady there. "This is our last job of coast, all the others up there north behind us. We've been making the miles without maps. We can make as many more as we need."
... Careful with this now, make it warn but not taunt, ...
"Wennberg, maybe I chose wrong, not telling about the maps. Maybe so, maybe not. But turn it either way, I've got us this far, all the corners still on us. They say it takes God and his brother to kill a Smålander. So far I haven't met up with either on this coast."
Wennberg rubbed his car, spoke nothing. Somehow, a very loud nothing. Then scowled from Karlsson to Braaf, and back again. His eyes seemed empty of fury now but neither man could tell just what else dwelt in them, acceptance or biding. In the fireshine Wennberg looked more than ever like a bear with a beard, and who can read the thoughts of a bear?
Wennberg shook his head one time. Again, billing or acceptance, it could have been either or neither. Then turned and aimed himself off down the beach toward the's east acts • The other two watched his bulky outline shamble away in the moonlight.
"There goes a fool of a man," Braaf said.
"Before we've done," said Karlsson, "we may be wishing Mister Blacksmith is nothing worse than fool."
He picked up the map case, out of habit tied it snug, tossed it into the canoe. "We won't load the rifles tonight. And unload that one."
Braaf once more was a spectator of the moon. "It's not loaded. There wasn't time."
Karlsson woke to rain sound. Except for the triple windrows of surf the day's colors were all grays, sea and sky nearly the same, rocks and forest darker. The tint in it all was fog. The big cape to the north was obscured.
Wennberg this morning looked as if he was trying to pick the bones out of everything said by Karlsson or Braaf. lie offered no words of his own, however, until past breakfast, and then turned loudly weather-angry. "I'issing down rain again!"
Braaf slurped tea, gazed to the grayness. "Could be worse, blacksmith,"
"Worse? How's that, worse?"
"Could be raining down piss."
***
Again now, that wait to see when the fickle weather would lift itself from them.
After a few hours of Wennberg squinting resentfully into it and Braaf putting wandering glances up at it and Karlsson calculating whether the gray of it was as gray as an instant before, the murk was agreed to be thinning a bit.
They pushed off from the beach sand, paddled carefully out around the end of the seastack wall, and had a moment when they could sec more seastacks along the coast ahead. Then the rain took the shoreline from them.
"This's like having our heads in a bucket," Wennberg complained nervously.
"The high rocks will steer us," Karlsson said with more calm than he felt. "They're near shore all along here. Pass just outside them and we're keeping to the coast."
There was no midday stop. No visible ledge of shore on which to make one. Karlsson divvied the last of the dried meat and they took turns to eat, one man doing so while the other two kept paddling.
Sometime in the afternoon—the hours of this day, gray strung on gray, were impossible to separate—a timbered island some hundreds of yards long loomed out on their left.
Karlsson steered along its outer edge, with intention to turn to shore beyond the island. But then at its end, through the rain haze rocks bulking in the water between island and coast could be made out, stone knuckles