The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [85]
"—but no, oh no, and God's little Finnlander telling me, 'Steady yourself, Wennberg, keep from the cards,' and himself squatting at the table with the Russians half the night. Man of God. God doesn't have men, he has demons of some kind to strangle women with the whooping cough and blast the back of the head off Melander and drown Braaf like a blind pup—"
Wind flapped the shelter cloth behind Karlsson's head, rain still was pelting. He and Wennberg in shared life those hundreds of days at New Archangel, now these dozens in the narrow canoe and beside the campfires, they had wrangled and come to blows, might yet come to worse, how was it you could be wearily familiar with every inch of a man and know not much of him at all? Unexpected as winter thunder, something like this, and as hard to answer.
"Wennberg, I—"
"What you said, just then." Wennberg was looking harshly across at Karlsson. "That about the cards. More than style is in it. Luck. Luck I haven't had since Varmland, except the goddamn black sort that ended me up w ith you."
It had quickened past them, the moment. They were plowshare and rock again. Karlsson heard himself saying as stone will answer iron—
"... you've had some in plenty, recent days."
"What, dragging along this boil-and-goiter coast? You pall that luck?"
"The two of us who are dead, neither of them is you. There's your luck, Wennberg. Now shut your gab and get some sleep."
At morning, sky and shore showed hard use by the storm. Both were smudged, vague. The ram had dwindled and the wind ceased, but less than a quarter mile in each direction from Wennberg and Karlsson and the canoe, fog grayed out the beach.
... Fog ought mean the wind is gone, we won't swamp. But this cloud on our necks we won't sec along the coast, either. Stays sand beach, that won't matter. Rocks though. Rocks'd matter. Can't mend it before it happens. Rocks we'll face when they face us....
"Whyn't we go it afoot, here on?"
Say for Wennberg that in his tumbril way, he had come this far past Braaf's death, past the rock-spiked coast, past the end of regular food, before balking. Not that Karlsson could see any of the credit of that, just now. What he turned to face was an unsailorly weary man who did not want to set forth in a canoe into fog.
This new corner of reluctance on Wennberg took all of the ear]y morning to he worked off. Karlsson's constant answer "¡is question hack: what when they hiked themselves to a river, or another sound, or headland cliff? Swim, Wennberg? Take a running jump at it? Fly?
"But goddamn, out into that cloud—beach here like a street, maybe there won't be water in the way—"
"Wennberg. Ever since New Archangel, there has been. Wish won't change that. There'll be water."
When at last the jitter wore out of Wennberg, he looked spent. So much so that Karlsson came wary that the man's next notion would be not to move at all. As wan as a man of his bulk could be, Wennberg this day. Plainly, the clam ration and the dreariness of hunkering in from the storm had exacted much from him.
Wennberg cast Karlsson up a look, though, and fanned enough exasperation in himself to blurt:
"Karlsson, one more time I hear 'need to' out of you and—"
"You'll be that much closer to the place Astoria each time you hear it. Off your bottom now. This's as close a tide as we'll likely get."
By the time they pushed the canoe the distance across the sand to the tide line, both were panting and stumbling. Wennberg hesitated, looked back at the beach. Then surf surged in, swirled up his shins. Wennberg shoved the canoe ahead, half-clambered half-fell into the bow.
The most wobbly launch of the entire journey, this one, the canoe