CARSON WAS TOO TIRED TO EAT after the dive class at the university adjourned late Sunday afternoon. He’d thought the class would’ve been an easy teach and scoffed at the dean’s suggestion that he reschedule it for a time when he was “feeling better.” All he had to do was show some slides and film clips on the AV equipment, talk a while, answer questions, draw some stuff on the blackboard. The students in the class were all experienced. There would be no need for long explanations or simple kid talk. But in retrospect, teaching beginners would have been a helluva lot easier. The way the divers had studied him had put him off. It was as if they were looking for cracks in his armor. Waiting for him to collapse onto the floor. And then, not an hour before the class finally ended, he’d given them what they’d been waiting for. He stumbled into a desk and all fourteen experienced, young and physically fit divers had leaped to their feet as if to catch him before he fell.
Ironic, that he’d been scheduled to teach this class long before his accident, but it was his experience with being rescued that had been the source of multiple questions from the divers, who all feared the same fate. He told them what he could, but mostly he was relating facts that he’d been told by Trig, who’d made the actual rescue. He personally had little recollection of anything at all after the cable had tightened around him and dragged him into the wreckage.
After the conclusion of the second day one of the students walked with him to his truck on the pretext of asking a few extra questions, but Carson had the distinct impression that he was being chaperoned. At the truck, the young man had stuck out his hand and then realized that Carson’s hand was swathed with bandages and instead had patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. “It was a great class and I learned a lot. You’re a legend amongst us divers. You’re the king, man, the best of the best.”
A washed-up and crippled legend. An old king. Hell, he couldn’t even play pool anymore. He’d gone to the pool hall the night before because Saturday night was traditionally pool hall night. He thought he’d have a few beers and shoot a few games with the guys after teaching the first day of the diving course. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, nearly six weeks had passed since he’d last stopped in, but Carson realized after his second beer and during his first game of pool that he was in no way ready to take up where he’d left off before the accident. In fact, halfway through the first game, while taking an easy rail shot, he’d collapsed over the table in a fit of coughing brought on by both bending over the table and the movement of his arm, which somehow combined to aggravate his lung. Which had brought Gracie rushing to his side, but not the way he’d envisioned. He’d wanted her to sidle up to him the way she used to, when she was feeling playful and kittenish and thinking about spending the night with him on his boat. He’d wanted her to act as though he was still man enough for a hot-blooded woman like her, and then he’d wanted to prove her right.
Instead she was helping him straighten up off the pool table, taking the stick out of his hand, her face a mask of concern. “Oh my God, Carson, sit down. Are you all right? Should we call an ambulance?”
An ambulance? Shit!
Twenty minutes later he gave up all pretense of playing pool and was pulling on his coat. Gracie was serving drinks when she glanced up and caught his eye. She came around the bar and gave him a brief, motherly peck on the cheek. “Are you sure you’re all right to drive?” And then, reading his expression, she reached out and touched her fingertips to the only place on his face that didn’t have a scar. “Carson, please, if there’s anything I can do, let me know,” she said.
He limped out to his truck and sat for a while in the cab. Stupid idea, coming to the pool hall. Ridiculous, to think that he could walk through those doors and act as if nothing had changed. Foolish, to think Gracie would be loyal enough to volunteer to warm his bed. After all, he’d been the one who was so adamant about a casual relationship. No strings. No commitments. But even if she’d hinted at coming to the boat after getting out of work, what then? What if his performance was no better between the sheets than it had been at the pool table?
That was it for him. No more playing pool, and until he got back up to speed, no more thoughts of carnal lust with Gracie. The entire weekend had left him feeling demoralized, and now he had to pack his gear for the trip to Evening Lake. Most of it was already stashed in the back of his truck. He’d drive to the float plane base tonight and load it into the Otter. He wanted to get an early start in the morning. Maybe he’d feel better about things once he got out of Anchorage and started looking for the plane and the treasure it held. A week or two out in the Alaskan bush would give him time to come to the front. Even if he wasn’t quite as appealing to women as he had been before the accident, he still knew how to run a salvage operation. He’d prove to Libby Wilson that he could find the plane wreckage she was so keen to recover, and when he did, maybe he’d recover some of his self-esteem.
Still, Gracie’s peck on the cheek had rankled.
GRAHAM WASTED NO TIME on the trip up the west arm to take Libby to meet his father. For thirty minutes they traveled in silence, unable to talk over the sound of the outboard motor until they reached the place where the Yaktektuk River emptied into Evening Lake and Graham beached the boat. The river water was a thick milky blue that diluted visibly in an ever-widening delta into the darker lake water. “The Yaktektuk is full of glacial silt from the spring runoff,” Graham explained in response to Libby’s question about the color. “Bad fishing, right here. In a month or so the water will clear, but the silt settles at the mouth of the Yaktektuk and makes the lake water too rich in minerals for the fish. It’s good in a way. Keeps the whites away from my father’s place.” He helped Libby to shore, tied the boat to a nearby tree and shouldered a fully laden pack basket while Libby retrieved the small cooler holding more of Karen’s food and donned her own pack.
“We walk from here,” he said. “There’s too much white water up ahead. Keep your eyes peeled for bears. We’re in their territory now.”
They started up the faint trace that Graham’s father had worn along the banks of the Yaktektuk in all his years of living in this country. “Frey told me that you’d caused him a lot of grief with the DHS over the way he treated his employees,” Libby said as she fell in behind him.
“The DHS slapped him with a big fine. So did the Department of Labor.”
“He omitted that information,” Libby said, struggling to keep up. “But the fine didn’t change his attitude. He doesn’t treat Luanne very well. I felt sorry for her.”
“Don’t. Luanne might come across as browbeaten, but she’s not. She’s a college student. Berkeley. Majoring in social science. She’s been working for him for two summers now. He pays great wages, almost twice what the Whittens can pay. She’s also working on her thesis paper and Frey’s providing her with all sorts of ammunition. The information she passed along to me is why Frey got fined.”
“She’s certainly dedicated to the cause of enlightening the world.”
“Yes, she is. I just wish the world would listen to her.”
“How long has your father had a cold?” she said, beginning to gasp for breath.
“Too long.”
“I know about medicine, and I’m half Athapaskan. Maybe he’d let me help him.”
“Maybe,” Graham said. “But if it’s white man’s medicine you’re practicing, you’d better have Athapaskan ways.”
“I’ll be as diplomatic as I can be with a medical degree from Tufts,” Libby said, her lungs starting to labor for air. “Frey told me this lake was bottomless. How deep is a bottomless lake?”
“Deep enough to keep its secrets,” Graham said.
“You think the plane that crashed can’t be found?”
“I think the lake is deep. You’re a real doctor?”
“Yes. The Libby Foundation helped pay for my schooling.”
Graham traveled swiftly and within minutes Libby was so out of breath that had she wanted to as
k more questions she would have been hard put to voice them. Soon the day pack she was shouldering and the small cooler became like a leaden weight, and she wondered, as the seconds and minutes and seeming miles passed, how much farther it would be. City life had softened her, made her weak. Eight years of living in steel-and-concrete buildings, surrounded by artificial light, had changed her into something that was now alien in this land she used to know so well.
About ten minutes later it became apparent why they’d left the boat on the beach. A steep drop of high water and big rocks turned the Yaktektuk into a boiling cauldron of rapids for a good hundred yards. Just above the rapids, where the river opened into a wide calm pool and the turbulent air became quiet again, Graham stopped so abruptly that she ran into him with a jarring bump. “That’s not so good,” he said, staring ahead. Libby peered over his shoulder and saw the log cabin that huddled beside the deceptively placid stretch of river.
“What’s not good?” she said.
“It’s a cool evening and there’s no woodsmoke.”
Libby felt a twinge of unease as Graham began walking even more quickly toward the weather-beaten old cabin. He opened the door, bent to clear the lintel and disappeared inside as a pack of skinny sled dogs tethered to one side of the cabin sprang to attention and howled a belated warning.
Libby followed Graham into the cabin’s dim interior. He was bent over a bed in the corner. He’d taken his hat off, holding it in one hand while the other closed on his father’s shoulder. “Dad? Dad, it’s Graham.”
There was a hoarse muttering in response, and Libby moved up beside the bunk. A very old man lay beneath a plain wool blanket. His shoulder-length hair was pure white and his face as brown and wizened as a walnut shell. Libby could hear the fluid rattling in his lungs as he breathed.
She shrugged out of her day pack. “It sounds to me like pneumonia,” she said, trying to hide her shock at the old man’s critical condition. “Could you build a fire in the stove and heat some water?” She unzipped the pack on the edge of the bunk and removed her medical kit. It was compact but fairly comprehensive. Libby knew what life in the bush could be like and she wasn’t about to travel anywhere unprepared. “Does your father understand English?”
“When he wants to,” Graham said, crumpling a wad of old newspaper and shoving it into the firebox along with several generous handfuls of dry spruce twigs. He struck a match and before Libby could don her stethoscope the fire was off and running. In moments the metal stovepipe began to tick with heat, the cabin began to warm and a pot of water was heating.
“Help me sit him up,” Libby said. “I’d like to listen to his lungs.”
The old man was too weak to protest Libby’s ministrations. She didn’t have to be diplomatic as she took his pulse, and then his temperature. “I’m going to give him an injection of a powerful broad-spectrum antibiotic.”
Libby raised her voice as she filled the syringe with antibiotic. “Solly, you have a bad sickness in your lungs. The sickness is keeping you from breathing and making you very weak. This medicine is very powerful. It will sting a little when I give it to you but it will make you feel better and help you get strong again.” She swabbed the site on his arm with alcohol and injected the antibiotic. The old man didn’t flinch. “Can you heat up the soup that Karen packed? I’ll try to get some into him,” Libby said over her shoulder in a voice tight with anxiety. “But IV fluids and oxygen at the hospital in Fairbanks would be a thousand percent better.”
Graham shook his head. “He won’t go. He would tell his spirit to leave him if you tried to take him away from here.”
Libby realized the futility of argument. She knew how the traditionalists could be. Her own mother was the same way. She might not agree with their beliefs, but she respected them. “Solly, I’m going to have you sit up. I think it will be easier for you to breathe.” When the old man was as comfortable as she could make him, she motioned to Graham and together they stepped outside the cabin.
“Your father really needs to be hospitalized.”
“I’ve had this argument with him before. He won’t leave here,” Graham repeated. “He says when he dies to burn the cabin to the ground with him in it. That’s what he wants.”
“Okay then,” Libby said, “like it or not, he’s going to have to put up with a half-breed Athapaskan cleaning his cabin and fixing him something decent to eat.” She glanced around the corner of the cabin to where five scrawny sled dogs watched intently from the ends of their chains. “You’d better tend those poor neglected huskies. I’ll heat the soup.”
BY 10:00 P.M. LIBBY had gotten a bowl of beef broth into Solly one patient spoonful at a time. He dozed while she scrubbed and cleaned and swept the dingy little cabin. He never roused when she changed the bedding on his bunk, sliding him onto the freshly made bed as gently as she could. He didn’t weigh much at all, and she wondered aloud how long he had been so sick.
“Last week he had a bad cough,” Graham said. “But he was up and about. I spent the night and he ate a good breakfast before I left. He’s lost a lot of weight in the past year or so. I don’t think he eats too good.”
“It’s going to take some time for the antibiotics to kick in,” Libby said. “I can leave pills for him to take, but if he doesn’t take them, they won’t help. What he really needs is a good nurse.”
“I’ll come back here after I drop you at the lodge and stay with him,” Graham said. “I can borrow a motorboat, be at the dock at sunrise to take the clients fishing, check back here at lunch, be back at the dock for the evening crowd. In a motorboat I can get back and forth quick.”
Libby straightened the blanket over Solly. She crossed the small room to the woodstove and looked at Graham. “I don’t have to be anywhere until tomorrow morning. Your father needs a doctor right now and if he won’t go to one, then I really think I should stay.”
Graham glanced to where his father lay on the bunk and lowered his voice. “He’s that sick?” Libby nodded. He stared at her with those dark, unreadable eyes. “I’ll go back to the lodge and tell them where you are, and bring the motorboat back tonight. If he’s that sick, we’ll both stay.”
IT WAS A LONG, SLEEPLESS NIGHT for Libby. She lay in the top bunk, wrapped in a sleeping bag that Graham had brought back from the lodge, and listened to each labored breath that his father drew in the murky light of the midnight sun. Graham slept on the floor, between the woodstove and the door. No mattress, just the sleeping bag. He lay flat on his back and breathed so quietly she didn’t know if he was awake or asleep, but as long as the little cabin was filled with the sound of Solly Johnson’s breathing, the straining of his fluid-filled lungs and the deep rasping coughs, she knew that the old man was alive and struggling to stay that way.
At 2:00 a.m. Libby slipped out of the top bunk and built up the fire in the woodstove. She boiled water and laced it with dried sage. She made a tent of a blanket and held the pot of water under it, so the old man breathed the steam. He roused only briefly while she did this, then slipped away again. She kept the stove stoked against the chill night, kept the water boiling, kept the steam vapors trapped beneath the blanket so the old man breathed them.
At 5:00 a.m. Graham rose and made coffee. He handed her a cup. “He’s breathing better,” he said.
It was true. Solly’s breathing was improved. He was resting easier. Libby sipped the coffee slowly, savoring the strength it gave her. “I’ll give him more broth before I leave, and make sure he takes his pills.”
“I’ll come back at lunch time and feed him again, and spend the night, too,” Graham promised.
By 6:00 a.m. they’d returned to the lodge, and Graham was soon back out on the lake with three clients who had been waiting on the dock. Libby retreated to the warmth of the kitchen and sipped another cup of coffee while placing an indecently early call on the lodge’s satellite phone to her mother’s caregiver. Susan’s voice was thick with sleep.
“Your mother’s fine, Lib
by,” she said, “but she refused to let me in the house. She told me she ate a good lunch, one of the meals you prepared before you left, and she promised me she took her pills.”
“Susan, when you go over today, ask if she likes to play cribbage. That might get you through the door.”
“How’s Graham’s father?” Karen asked when she was off the phone.
“Very sick with pneumonia. He should be in the hospital, but Graham says if we try to take him away from his cabin, he’ll die out of spite.” Libby paused. “Karen, I came here to talk with Daniel Frey, but I’m not a journalist. Making up that story was the only way I could think of to get to see him. I’m actually a doctor, but the real reason I’m here is to find the plane that Connor Libby crashed in this lake twenty-eight years ago, and I didn’t think Daniel Frey would want to talk about that. I’m sorry I deceived you, but I’m glad I brought my medical kit.”
This confession didn’t seem to phase Karen at all. “And I’m glad you took care of Solly.”
Libby finished off her pancakes and reached for her mug of coffee. “I’m expecting a visitor today. His name is Carson Dodge and he runs a salvage company out of Anchorage. He’ll be flying in sometime this afternoon. I’ve hired him to look for the wreckage of the plane but I’m not sure he’s going to take the job. I was hoping Mr. Frey might know the location of the plane, but he said he didn’t. In fact, I didn’t find out anything from him at all. And Solly’s too sick right now to tell me anything even if he wanted to. The only other person I haven’t talked to yet is Joe Boone. Is he guiding today?”
“Yes, but he should be back in around lunchtime. I’ll hook the two of you up.” Karen pushed to her feet with a weary sigh. “I suppose I’d better get back to work. The two Fairbanks girls we hired a month ago to work for the summer quit last week. It’s hard keeping employees way out here. Hard getting them and hard keeping them.”
“Do you provide room and board as part of the pay package?” Libby asked.
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