Slade's Glacier by Robert F. Jones

Author:Robert F. Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

SAM HEALEY

1980

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

BUT GOD he was a mess. His head looked the size of a basketball, and lines of black stitches zigzagged across his scalp, down his forehead and over his left cheekbone. His left eye was puffed shut and he never would regain full vision in it. His nose was broken and his jaw hung crooked and there was a deep slash across his throat, stitched up by the Indian now, but from then on he would talk in a hoarse whisper, like some racetrack tout with a hot tip or a stumblebum asking for a handout. We tried to cheer him up. Old Jack was tough all right.

The girl was something else. Not much of a looker in my book and a real Goody Two-Shoes in many ways, but she was clearly head over heels, changing his bandages, plumping his pillow, feeding him tea and soup, sitting next to him when he slept so that if his fever came back she could lay cold compresses on his torn head. I’d picked her up in Gurry Bay. She’d been Outside, she said, to bury her mother. My pardon came through, finally, and I’d flown in from Juneau with the company plane to see the old gang and find out how Jack was faring.

After the dustup on the dock, I’d made a beeline for the Canuck border, put down in Whitehorse, and sold the Dakota to a couple of guys who planned to head down to South America and see what was happening air-freight-wise. Then I lined up a job roughnecking at an oil camp near Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories. Under a phony monicker, naturally. The outfit was Morgan Petroleum, Jep Morgan’s show, just getting under way in the business that would ultimately make him the biggest independent north of the border.

Jep was a long drink from Louisiana, a big, hamhanded, walnut-faced redneck with an eye for the main chance. He’d come out of the Marines a bird colonel after the war and made a killing in cheap housing. He wanted to get into the oil game down home but all the good leases were sewed up tight, so with the dough from his ticky-tack developments, he headed north and began wildcatting there in the tundra. He hit a couple of good wells and sold them off to the big companies, and with the money from that he started expanding. By the time I got to know him, he had four rigs, two canneries, ten salmon seiners, a small logging company in Southeast, half a dozen whorehouses up and down the coast from British Columbia to Nome, and lots of political clout in Juneau. My kind of guy.

In those early days, Jep still catted around with the crew, played a lot of guts poker and slugged back the hooch with both fists. He liked his nookie. Thanks to my bush flying experience, I knew every worthwhile split-tail in the North and fixed him up with some good stuff.

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