Broken Angels

by Неизвестный

  The receptionist buzzed Kestrel and then pointed Kris down a corridor toward her office. Kestrel was on the phone when she arrived and Kris hovered in the doorway waiting for her to get off. Kestrel was Native, hair permed, wearing a skirt, stockings, and short heels. She waved her hands as she talked and her voice was friendly though with an edge of authority in it. The office was on the south side of the building and on a floor high enough off the street for Kris to be able to see, through the city’s haze, the white disk of the sun hovering above the horizon. Tropical plants hung from the ceiling, grew in big pots in the corners, and in smaller ones on top of file cabinets and along the edges of her desk. What would Ringer say about tropical plants a hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle?

  Kestrel hung up and beamed at Kris, her arm outstretched.

  “What do you think of my plant?” she said, after they’d introduced themselves and Kris had sat down. She picked up a small plant with rubbery leaves and a single red blossom on a short stalk. “I grew it from a seed a friend sent me from Costa Rica.”

  “Don’t think there’s much chance of it becoming the kudzu of the north,” Kris said, siding with Ringer. Seinfeld’d had a show about kudzu.

  Kestrel laughed. “Not a chance. So, what can I do for you?”

  “I need to go to Allakaket and the woman down at Frontier Flying said you might know of a place I could stay there.”

  Kestrel’s eyebrows shot up. “I wasn’t expecting that,” she said. “Why would anybody who doesn’t live there want to go to Allakaket at this time of year?”

  “I think my brother might be there,” Kris said and she told her enough of the story for it to make sense.

  Kestrel didn’t speak until Kris had finished. “Corvus isn’t in Allakaket. If there were a strange boy living there I’d have known about it inside of a day. It’s a tiny village, less than three hundred people. Nothing happens there that everybody doesn’t know about.”

  Kris’s face went stony.

  “But let me give the village office a call and see what they know.” Kestrel found the number, punched it in and when someone answered, asked about Ben. She listened, then put her hand over the phone, “No one saw Ben with a boy. In fact, no one saw much of Ben at all that winter. Usually he comes down to the village a couple of times a season to pick up bush orders sent up from Fairbanks, but the last year he was there, he never came down. They don’t think he was working his lines either.”

  Then, as an afterthought, she said, “Remember that the village was pretty chaotic that year; it was still recovering from the flood.” Kestrel looked at her questioningly. “Anything else?”

  “I want to go up to his cabin,” Kris said, impulsively. If Corvus hadn’t been seen in Allakaket, the cabin was the only other place Ben could have taken him.

  “Whoa, it’s getting serious up there, you know,” Kestrel said. “Not much light there and colder than here.”

  “Is there someone who can get me up there from Allakaket?”

  Kestrel spoke into the phone again and then hung up. “Beth’s gone to get Johnny. He’s got a new snow machine and can probably run you up.” Kestrel looked concerned. “Corvus is not going to be up there, Kris.”

  “Maybe I can find out what happened to him. Maybe Ben took him somewhere else.”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “I know all the villages north of here and south of the Brooks. If a strange boy came into one, I’d hear about it.”

  “Who’s Johnny?” Kris asked, changing the subject; she didn’t want to be talked out of going up.

  “A good kid, eighteen or nineteen. Doesn’t talk much. Sober. Lives mostly subsistence, traps some in the winter, knows what he’s doing. I’d feel safe going out on a snow machine with him.”

  “Thanks,” Kris said.

  “You’re part Native?” Kestrel asked.

  “My mother was Athabascan. I don’t know what my father was.” Kris felt uncomfortable. She didn’t want any ties pulling her back here.

  Kestrel told her stories about life in the villages until the phone rang. She explained what Kris wanted, listened and then said to her. “Johnny will take you up, but he has to get back early—big basketball game tomorrow evening.”

  “How far is it?” Kris asked.

  Kestrel pushed the speaker button and repeated Kris’s question.

  “Maybe seventy miles,” Johnny said. His speech had a heavy Native lilt; Evie’d had a trace of it too. “Harold broke trail up to Mettenpherg Creek last week, he’s putting a line in up there. It’s probably blown in some and after that we have to break it new. They’ll be overflows, but the ice is good. The river closed in a few weeks ago.”

  “Can you do it in a day?” Kestrel asked.

  “Four or five hours up and three coming back. Long day.”

  Kris raised her voice. “I won’t come back with you. I want to stay up there for a while.”

  Johnny thought about this. “You want me to come get you later?”

  “Yes. Four or five days.”

  “Give her a good price, Johnny,” Kestrel said.

  “A hundred plus gas for each trip.”

  Kestrel nodded to Kris.

  “OK,” said Kris. “I leave here tomorrow at eight-thirty on Frontier. Can you meet me at the airport?”

  “I can do that.”

  “Ready to go?”

  “We’ll have to gas up, is all.”

  Kestrel said goodbye and hung up. “Take cash and everything you need up with you. There’s a store, but not much in it and it’s expensive.”

  Kris stood, gathering her parka and mittens.

  “It’s pretty courageous going out in the bush this time of year. There’s not a lot of margin for error. Have you got all the gear you need?”

  “I can get it.” She could borrow stuff from Annie.

  Kris wandered the aisles behind her shopping cart without a really good idea of what she needed. Meals at home depended a lot on adding water, stirring and ten or fifteen minutes in her toaster oven. She threw in some cup-of-soups, cans of beans, frozen burritos—if she left them outside tonight they wouldn’t thaw—a couple of Rice-a-Roni packages, Kraft macaroni and cheese, frozen lasagna, and coffee. Going through the checkout, she loaded up with candy bars.

  It was three-thirty when she pulled into the staff parking at the library. Annie saw her come through the doors and waved.

  “How was your day?” she asked, looking up from behind a stack of new kids’ books she was pressing bar-code stickers on.

  “Good,” Kris said. “I’m going up to Allakaket tomorrow.” She unzipped the parka and stuffed her mittens in its pockets.

  “You’re what?”

  “I have to be at the airport at eight. I’ll just sleep there so you don’t have to get up early to drive me in.”

  “Allakaket? What are you going to do there?”

  “Go up to Ben’s cabin.”

  “Honey, it’s the middle of the winter.”

  “I got a ride up on a snowmobile.”

  Annie settled back in her chair, her eyes on Kris. “You move fast, my friend. Let me get this stuff done and we can talk on the way home. Why don’t you check out our mural.” She pointed into the kids’ reading room. “See if you can find the cheechako.”

  The painting was in the corner of the room and stretched from the floor to the ceiling. On a hill was a fairy castle and, wending their way toward it with banners rippling in the summer breeze, was a long line of fairy-tale people. Kris examined each one. Near the bottom, lost in the trees, she found a mosquito huddled in a parka. That was the cheechako, she figured, bundled up and shivering in the middle of summer.

  Annie wasn’t being subtle.

  __________

  “Oatmeal. You got to have oatmeal. The quick-cooking stuff, you can eat it hot or cold.”

  Oatmeal wasn’t something she was likely to eat. Hot or cold.

  “And you can load it with calories: butter, honey, raisins, and nuts. You’l
l need piles of energy.” Ringer scooped cupfuls of the cereal out of a red and blue cardboard barrel into a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. It looked like shredded newspaper. “Let’s see,” he said, squeezing the air out of the bag and sealing it. He reached under the counter and pulled out a red box the size of a suitcase. “Powdered milk.”

  Evie’d brought powdered milk home from the food bank once on one of her sporadic attempts to improve themselves. Kris had poured it into the toilet the next day while Evie’d pushed the flusher.

  Kris looked without interest at the growing line of neatly packed Ziplocs. There was no point in arguing with him; she’d chuck what she didn’t want later. The food Kris had bought lay heaped at her feet; half of it rejected. Ringer had pulled out all the cans; “They’ll just freeze and burst.” It’d pissed off Kris that she’d forgotten that. Christ, she’d grown up with frozen pipes. “You need a microwave for this”—he’d tossed aside her two packages of frozen lasagna—“and even if you cooked it up in a pot, you don’t want to lug the plastic containers around with you.” He made a face at her Rice-a-Roni and macaroni and cheese but let her have them, taking them out of their packaging and writing the instructions on the inner envelope. “Got to watch your weight.”

  Annie wandered over and surveyed the food and gear spread out on the table. “Tampons?” she asked. Kris shook her head; she had a week yet.

  “Water is a big problem. It freezes in minutes. You keep this”—he lifted a flat plastic bottle—“inside your parka. This one”—it was wrapped in foam fastened with duct tape—“is insulated. If you put boiling water in it, it should stay liquid for a couple of hours. Drink this first, then the other.” He put them next to the pile of gear he’d laid out for her. Ringer’s enthusiasm was oppressive and she just let him do his thing. He didn’t seem to understand that she was going up on a snow machine; she wasn’t going to be trucking this shit across any frozen tundra.

  Friday, November 20

  “Will ya look at that,” Ringer said with disgust, pointing through the truck’s window at a woman tiptoeing through the inch of snow that had fallen during the night. “Can you believe somebody’d be wearing heels in Fairbanks? In the winter?” The woman stepped into the rut a tire had made in the snow and followed it toward the terminal. Kris remembered Alvilde, who’d come to Evie’s funeral in heels, and which had kept sinking into the wet ground as she stood by the grave.

  Ringer pulled into an empty slot and popped the clutch. “She needs a good pair of mukluks.” He slid out, slamming the door. The back gate screeched when he lowered it to pull out the pack. He slung it on his shoulder while Kris reached in and grabbed her duffle. Last night, the pack had been too heavy for her to lift after Ringer’d finished stuffing it with all the food and gear he thought she’d need, and she’d made him repack half the food into her duffle.

  Inside, the terminal was bright and busy. The first Jenny in Alaska still hung motionless from the ceiling. They walked over to Frontier Flying and the woman behind the counter remembered her.

  “Did you find Nancy?” she asked.

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “So you’re all set?”

  “Yeah, I got someone to meet me there.” Kris dropped the duffle on top of the pack, which Ringer had already dropped on the scales.

  “Sixty-five pounds. You’re over weight.”

  “You’re at minimums,” Ringer said. “You can’t go any lighter and you’re not even packing a tent or cook stove.”

  “It’s a dollar a pound for anything over forty-five pounds. Another twenty.”

  Kris pulled out a bill.

  “Gate C. Have a good flight.”

  Ringer walked her down to the gate.

  “You don’t have to hang around,” Kris said. She didn’t like good-byes and she owed Ringer too much to feel comfortable sitting with him.

  “Yah, OK. I got to hop on my chores, anyway.” He stuck out his hand. Kris took it.

  “It’s beautiful country up there,” he said, surprising her with a moment of reverence. “It’s God’s country. Enjoy it.” He squeezed her hand. “Later.”

  Kris brushed aside an unexpected feeling of loneliness as he walked away. She turned and surveyed the waiting area; eyes that had been resting on her dropped as she met them. There were four other people, all Native and certain to be wondering what she was doing, a stranger, going to Allakaket in the winter. They had open faces—one man looked back up and smiled at her—but they were strangers and she looked away. She wanted a cigarette, glanced at the clock, but there wasn’t enough time. She sat and waited, fidgeting with her parka zipper.

  At twenty after, the woman who had written her ticket came down and opened the door leading onto the tarmac. Cold air rolled into the room. Kris zipped her parka and lined up behind the only other woman on the flight. Framed by the door was the morning’s darkness, punctuated by lights that flashed and sped by on low tractors and baggage carts. In the distance, a jet lumbered into the black air. The woman smiled at her and took her boarding pass. Kris filed across the tarmac to a small plane. Standing next to the steps up to the plane’s door was a uniformed stewardess in an open parka who looked part Native; a half-breed like Kris. The stewardess pulled her out of the line when Kris approached.

  “Wait here a sec,” she whispered.

  Now what? Kris watched, irritated, as the others climbed into the plane before her. The stewardess greeted each by name. When the last had climbed on, she motioned to Kris.

  “Up you go,” she said and climbed up behind her. Kris stooped under the plane’s low ceiling and started down the narrow aisle for an empty seat in the rear, there were only eight seats in the plane, but the stewardess plucked at her parka and steered her forward into the cockpit, pointing at one of the pilots’ seats. Kris sat down uncertainly and stared at the instrument panel in front of her. The stewardess turned back into the main compartment and pulled the plane door closed. She recited her safety lecture and passed around a basket of candy and earplugs. She offered it to Kris, saying, “Take some candy to keep your ears from popping, but you won’t need the plugs.”

  Then she squeezed between the seats and settled into the one on Kris’s left. She glanced slyly over at Kris while pulling her arms out of her parka and settling it around her. “First rule. Always be the last one on a bush plane, that way you can sit up front.” She stretched behind her shoulders for her seatbelt and clipped herself in and then reached over and pulled Kris’s seatbelt over her; it was more complicated than the one on the jet. She showed Kris how to click the different belts into the circular buckle at her waist. Then she handed her a pair of earphones and Kris fitted them over her head.

  “I’m Jen,” she said, the electronics making her voice sound small and impersonal.

  This is the pilot?

  “Kris,” Kris said into the microphone. Her voice sounded in her own set, but the first letter had been clipped off. ‘Ris.

  Jen had a checklist open on her thigh and was rapidly going down it, flipping switches and pushing buttons. The cabin lights clicked off and Jen’s face was speckled with green and orange lights from the control panel. The plane shuddered and Kris heard the whine of an engine begin to rise in pitch. A few seconds later, the second engine caught and its whine followed the other’s up the scale. When the whines were equal, a man in coveralls stood in front of them and signaled. Jen rested her finger on a gauge. When the needle moved into the green, her hands moved across the controls again, then one settled on the steering handle in front of her and the other on buttons labeled “Throttle” and “Feather.” She pulled them out slowly and the plane moved forward.

  Jen’s voice spoke, full of easy authority, in Kris’s earphones; someone else responded. The plane moved across the pavement and turned into a lane marked by yellow lines. They taxied alongside the runway. When they reached the end, Jen spoke again, and was answered, “cleared for takeoff.” She pulled the throttle out and the plane accelerated as they turned onto
the runway. They straightened out and Kris was pushed back into her seat as they raced down the pavement. Jen pulled the steering wheel in front of her and the plane lifted into the air. Two heartbeats later, she spun them in a tight curve to the right and Kris looked down at the airport shrinking away from her.

  The plane flattened out of its curve and continued climbing. Jen was punching buttons on a small instrument in the control panel between them; abbreviated names of villages flashed across a tiny display.” Allkt” appeared; she locked it in and settled back, her hands off the controls.

  “Don’t you just love it?” she said, looking at Kris. “Damn. I’d do this for free.” She laughed. Kris turned away, uncomfortable with her own smile. The lights of Fairbanks were behind them now, but the ground below was still littered with unwinking white and yellow dots that traced roads branching away in the darkness. Even those lights soon passed beneath them and the darkness that surrounded them took on its own shapes. Hard black hills cut the unfeatured sky and the silver sheen of snow-covered lakes and rivers broke the bottomless black of the forest.

  “How’d you get to be a pilot?” Kris asked.

  “Not a problem. Just busted ass,” Jen said.

  “Wasn’t it hard being a woman?”

  “You mean ‘cause of the guys?” She looked over at Kris. “All you got to do is be better than them. That’s not a problem either.” She laughed.

  Jen asked her why she was going to Allakaket and Kris told her briefly.

  “Pretty gutsy,” she said. “You shouldn’t have any problems, though. You know it’s going to get cold?”

  “How cold?”

  “Cold. See that star?” She pointed off to the left. “Betelgeuse. The sky’s starting to clear. Once the clouds are gone, the temperature will drop.”

  “How cold?”

  “Forecast is thirty below at Allakaket by this evening. Colder tomorrow as the high settles in. Probably even colder up river.” Kris saw Jen’s green and orange reflection in the windshield grin. “It’s going to be an adventure.” She clapped her hand on Kris’s knee and shook it. “You excited?”