The Last Run Read Online Free Page B

sales signs in their display windows. In the harbors there were a few big trollers. But their gear had been stowed and their galleys and cabins stripped and the boats rocked sadly in their slips, the tide licking their hulls and making the bowlines creak, the wind moving their wire stays with a hollow tinkle. All of the noises of the docks now blended in a single note, a hollow note, as though a piano player had hit his last key but had kept a foot on the floor pedal.
    That fall the rains came almost every day. The clouds would brood over the mountaintops and then the sky would descend, heavily, and then everything was gray and the mountains gone and the rain black and lisping along the pier. Some days a fog covered the town and Bob Doyle would put down the shrimp pots he was repairing along the wharf and watch the O’Connell Bridge dissolve in it. He knew the bridge was still there but sometimes he liked to pretend that the fog had wiped it away, erased it, and that later, during the night, it had somehow been rebuilt from scratch. Other days the wind blew very hard and the silvery sky would lift and brighten and, pulling apart, allow tilted shafts of sunlight to fall through, lighting a rainbow. The rainbow would not last long. The sky would anger to black and soon the rain was coming again in gray, sweeping nets, lifting the channel in white, spurting jets and dripping from the tails of the ravens perched on the pilings.
    All of the sadness of the town came with the cold rains and there were days when he could not see the snowline, only the dripping streetlamps and the slick grayness of the sidewalks and the moldering roofs and shutters of the older cabins. It was not the most pleasant weather for walking but it was easier for Bob Doyle to think clearly when he was out roaming. He also found it more economical to walk than to drink and he had no other means of getting around. So he walked. Only sometimes as he walked would he feel as though someone was behind him, stepping in his footsteps. He would hear rustlings and voices worn away by the years. And sobbing. He would hear it for a time, mixed with the sound of the rain. When he heard the sobbing he had to tell himself not to turn around. Maybe a day would come when the echoes would die.
    The best places to wander in Sitka were on the main street and along the wharves. There were many ways to get from Georgia Kite’s, where he paid to sleep on a couch, to the waterfront. The quickest was down Jeff Davis Street. He would walk in the opposite direction of the veterans’ cemetery, make a right at the tennis court and then a stroll along Lincoln past Crescent Harbor. He had never seen anyone play on the court and he often wondered, in a place that saw more than 270 days of rain a year, if anyone ever got a chance to use it. Soon he would see the stone figures of the seals, glistening and lazy looking, and behind them, the harbor. The bigger boats—the
nicer
boats — tied up at Crescent. Many had fiberglass hulls and fresh paint and cabins and galleys as cozy as the rooms at the Super 8 motel over on Harbor Drive. It was a pretty harbor, a picturesque harbor, with the mountains, piney dark and coldly whitecapped in the backdrop, dominating the sound but far enough away to not leave any shadows, and yet he did not like it as much as the other harbors, the ANB and Old Thompsen. Perhaps it was too pretty a harbor; it lacked an edge. Still, he liked to walk past it on windy days when the boats pitched a little in their slips, their masts wagging this way and that in a strange unison, like the quills on the back of a moving porcupine. Some days he would spot bald eagles huddled darkly atop the masts and he and the birds would stare at one another. They were looking for their next meal, he would say to himself, and so was he. When he could not find work he might take a bench on the concrete landing and watch the eagles and listen to the surf under the pier. It was a lonely