The end of this story is pretty well known, since people wound up getting killed and the trials were in the news. My brother Jake was portrayed in a lot of different ways. Some said he was just a patsy who had gotten caught up in the scheme of these upstart gangsters. Others said he did it for the money. Then there were the ones who actually believed he was an activist of some sort, or a gentleman robber, and I suppose it was easy to sympathize with that on account of what happened to him. But none of those versions is true, or entirely true. I intend to tell it straight and lay out how it all happened, and how I became involved.
It started when Jake showed up at the Westco plant and boatyard, the day we got back from herring season. That was the end of February, last year. A Monday. I was standing at the stern of the Western Lady across from Sugar, this giant Haida guy who shares the licence with Albert, the skipper. Sugar and I were the ones working the hold, but we had to wait around in the drizzling cold for the plant workers to get the hose and Transvac pump in place and line up the sorting bins. They were union guys and on the clock and in no hurry. Albert was up top, directing them from the wheelhouse.
‘Holy Mary,’ he yelled at them, which is about as close to swearing as he gets. ‘You fellows gonna move that thing or just hope it wanders down here by itself?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ they said.
But they moved a little faster. Albert has that effect on people.
I rubbed my bad hand with my good one. The hand that got crushed hurts something fierce in the cold, even now, years after the accident. Sugar held the water hose with the steel nozzle cradled against his hip, casual as a gunfighter. While we waited, he directed it into the hold and let out a jet-blast of water, churning the fish. The herring, all belly-wet and slickly silver, were packed together in a soupy mix of blood and brine, still flecked with flakes of ice. It was a perfect-looking hold (Albert doesn’t over-fish and only ever takes his quota) but it still made me sad as hell to see. The herring