Charlene had been waiting for John and Teddy at the airport that time, alongside a steaming Finn Grant, mustache crawling down either side of his mouth like Fu Manchu’s. “Gosh,” Teddy said, eyes wide, “I didn’t hear anything. Did you hear anything, John?”
John shook his head. “Nope.”
Teddy turned to Grant. “Sorry we can’t help, Finn. I think it’s just awful the way some people go around popping off guns in the woods, don’t you? Somebody could get hurt out there.”
Grant threw a punch at him, which Charlene stepped in to block, and for a few halcyon moments Teddy and John basked in the delightful prospect of pressing charges for assault. “Don’t push your luck, boys,” Charlene said dryly, so they loaded John’s pickup with meat and headed into town to distribute their haul, to the loud hosannas of both families. Times were tough in Newenham, the salmon catch down and down again for two years running. For some families, if they didn’t get their moose they didn’t eat meat that winter.
It was serious business, providing meat for their families, and John and Teddy took it seriously. Mostly. Which meant that sometimes they took beer, and sometimes they didn’t.
This time they had.
That morning they had dropped a bull that would provide them with six hundred pounds of meat, dressed, something to celebrate, John said, and Teddy agreed. They’d already got their caribou, hanging in quarters now from trees around camp. There were four dozen ptarmigan in canvas bags, and another dozen geese, gutted but not plucked.
“We deserve a beer,” John said, standing and stretching. The moose was gutted and skinned and hanging next to the caribou. The heart, tongue and liver were set to one side and steamed gently in the crisp fall air. Liver and onions tonight, he thought, smacking his lips, and pictured his mother’s face when he came in the door. “You’re a good boy, John,” she always said, whether he brought home the meat or not. This fall, he felt he’d earned it.
“Hell,” Teddy said, “we deserve six,” and opened the case of Miller Genuine Draft with bloodstained hands.
Newenham, September 1
Liam did what he had to do without compunction, without reconsideration, without, in fact, any thought of his sworn oath to uphold the law and Constitution and parental rights. He ordered his usual fatburger and fries at Bill’s and ate them to the accompaniment of Bill’s countdown of Things to Be Done While I’m Gone. The recipient of all this good advice, Dottie Takak, took it as she took most things in life, stolidly, silently, without question or expression on her wide brown face. She’d been cooking for Bill for nine years, she’d subbed for Bill when Bill went on Costco runs to Anchorage, when Bill and Moses took time out for trysts during walrus hunts or purse seining or New Year’s jaunts to the Kenai Princess Lodge, where once Bill claimed she had actually talked Moses onto cross-country skis. Dottie listened stoically as Bill told her not to forget to restock the beer, wash the glasses, sweep the floor, unplug the jukebox (currently floating Ivan Neville’s “Why Can’t I Fall in Love” out over the room, definitely not one of Liam’s many problems, so he tuned it out), scrub the grill, take out the trash and lock the doors, the front and the safe’s. Count the till each night, keep each day’s take in a separate envelope, messages should be entered in the Daily Diary for Bill to peruse when she chose to return. As far as magistrating went, she’d keep a schedule at ten a.m. every morning on the shortwave at the fish camp; tell the hyperventilating to call her there. If there was a murder, she might come back. Otherwise, they could wait.
Finally Bill ran down. Dottie, still silent, took the list and vanished into the kitchen. Bill looked at Liam. “You weren’t gone long.” She found a saltshaker and passed it over the counter.
He anointed his fries. Could never have too much salt on potatoes and popcorn. He could feel Bill’s eyes on his face as he continued to eat.
“What happened?” she said.
He rubbed a fry in the pile of salt on his plate. “Case I’ve got.”
“You weren’t gone long enough to acquire a new case,” she said. “Must be one of the old ones.”
He ate the fry.
“What, I’m supposed to guess?”
“No,” he said, swallowing. He put half his burger down, his appetite gone. “Just this woman, beat up on her son, she came back into town carrying a court order says she can visit him. It’s limited, supervised, but…”
“What pea-brain judge signed that order?”
“Legere.”
Bill’s snort said that she shared Liam’s opinion of the jurist in question.
“The kid’s terrified of her, doesn’t want to have anything to do with her, and he’s just starting to settle in where he’s at now. This is really going to shake him up.”
“Who’s got him?”
Liam raised his eyes. “Wy.”
There was a long silence. Liam watched Bill’s face as realization dawned. “Natalie Gosuk’s the one with the court order?”
He nodded. “She’s sober, too, who knows how long. But she’s got the order, she knows what it means and she’s going to use it. I think she’ll run off with him first chance she gets.”
Bill’s eyes narrowed.
“Sooner or later, she’ll start drinking again, like she always does. But for the moment, she’s here, and she’ll be knocking on Wy’s door, wanting to see Tim.” He looked down at his plate. “Too bad Moses brought him in from fish camp. School doesn’t start until Monday, and Natalie never lasts longer in town than three or four days.”
She spoke carefully and deliberately. “You miserable, manipulative, Machiavellian son of a bitch.”
He nodded with no particular pleasure.
She tossed the bar rag and turned to go. Over her shoulder she said, “You want to be a social worker, you better lose the trooper uniform.”
FOUR
Nenevok Creek, September 1
Rebecca Hanover was a reluctant gold miner.
“I like to knit,” she had told her friend Nina in Anchorage in April. “I like to bead and quilt and cross-stitch.”
“You can do all those things at the mine.”
“Yes, but I like to do all those things in front of a roaring fire in a stone fireplace with an episode ofBuffy the Vampire Slayer on the television. I like getting up during the commercials and going to a bathroom that has a flush toilet.”
“Ah. Then it isn’t beading you like, it’s indoor plumbing.”
Rebecca refused to be diverted. “I like meeting you for coffee and canella at City Market on Saturday mornings.” She raised her cup and gestured at the large room full of loud cheerful voices and the mingled aromas of Kaladi Brothers coffee, Italian sausage sandwiches and spicy sesame chicken. In the parking lot cars were idling, waiting for an empty space. “I like people. I like eavesdropping on their conversations. Like that guy?” She pointed with her chin. “He’s a superior court judge, and that isn’t his wife. Before you got here they were planning a weekend in Seattle, until he remembered that was the weekend of his anniversary. She hasn’t spoken to him since.”
Nina shifted in her chair and managed a covert, over-the-shoulder look. “Isn’t that Shelby Arvidson, the anchor on Channel 6?”
“Yes, it is, and you’ll notice, she’s still here.”
“Your point being?”
“The weekend may still be on, anniversary or no. And you see the couple in the corner? The dark woman in the red T-shirt with the tall blond guy?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s Lois Barcott.”
“The defense lawyer?”
“Yeah. And that’s Harry Arner, the district attorney. I bet they’re cutting a deal on the Baldridge case.”
“I love having a friend who’s a legal secretary,” Nina said. “Who’s Baldridge?”
“Used to be a banker, accused of embezzlement and fraud. He made nine million dollars in unsecured loans to people who turned out to be close personal friends of his.”
Nina did her best
to look shocked. “Goodness me.”
“The bank went under. The trouble is the state has a lousy case, no witnesses and a lot of boring paperwork. I bet Arner holds out for dismissal of all charges. But, like I was saying.”
“Rebecca. I thought you told me Mark was really excited about this placer mine you’d bought.”
“He bought it,” Rebecca said, an edge to her voice.
“Ah.” Nina examined the coffee in her cup with close attention.
“Without even asking me if I wanted to spend the whole summer out there, he goes and buys a gold mine. God, Nina, I don’t even know where it is.”
“Did he say?”
“West of Anchorage, north of Bristol Bay.”
“That takes in a lot of territory. Is there a town nearby?”
Rebecca gave her head a gloomy shake, her fine blond hair escaping its ponytail to fall into wisps around a face that had been described variously as an angel’s (her mother), Hayley Mills’ (her father), Grace Kelly’s (Nina, enviously), and “fucking drop-dead gorgeous” (Mark). Her figure had been described as “a little too plump, dear” (her mother), “healthy” (her father), “stacked” (Nina, enviously), “built like a brick shit-house” (Dale, her roommate before she married Mark) and “it’s like Christmas every time I unwrap you” (Mark, although he hadn’t said that in months).
“I like going to two movies on a rainy Sunday afternoon,” Rebecca said. “I like biking the Coastal Trail, and hiking Near Point. I especially like it that there is a hot shower and a soft bed at the end of a day of biking and hiking.” She raised her cup ceilingward. “I like lights that turn on with the flip of a switch.”
“There’s no electricity? How do you get the gold out?”
“How should I know? By gold pan, I guess.”
“I thought they only painted on gold pans these days.”
“Me, too, but Mark brought home half a dozen yesterday. Plastic ones. They’re green or black, so they show the gold more, and the bottom of the pans are riffled, you know, little ridges? So the gold falls down between them and is trapped when you rinse the dirt out. Because it’s lighter.”
“Lighter than what?”
“The gold.”
“Oh. Sounds like you know something about it.”
“I don’t have a choice. It’s all he talks about anymore.”
There was a short silence. “You want a refill?”
“Sure. Heavy on the half-and-half. Which I also have to give up. No cows in the Bush, I bet.”
Nina returned with full cups the color of café au lait, and Rebecca accepted hers with the air of one who was determined to savor every drop as if it were her last.
“Rebecca, you don’t have to go,” Nina said. “Just say no.”
Rebecca sighed. “He’s been working double shifts all winter to save up for time off this summer. He’s got nine weeks coming, plus his regular two weeks off, plus the week he won at the Christmas party. Twelve weeks in all. He’ll be out there the whole summer, Nina.”
“Let him be.”
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought of it herself. “I can’t.”
“What about your job?”
“He wants me to quit.”
“Rebecca. You love being a legal secretary, and you love your boss.”
“Yes,” Rebecca said mournfully, thinking of the bright, bustling office on the seventh floor of 710 K Street. “I do.”
“He can’t ask you to do that.”
“He’s my husband,” Rebecca said. She tried to smile. “Forsaking all others, and all that. You know.”
Nina, who had never been married, didn’t know, but she was that good and rare friend who listened without judging and so she sipped her coffee and smiled. “You know what’s wrong with Mark?”
“What?”
“He’s too good in the sack,” Nina said, and grinned.
Rebecca rose to Nina’s obvious expectations and made an elaborate show of bristling. “And you would know this-how?”
Nina toasted her. “Only by reputation, girlfriend. Only by reputation.”
They laughed and changed the subject.
And now here Rebecca was, five months later, waking up in a one-room shack deep in a canyon somewhere in the Wood River Mountains, part of the southwestern curve of the Alaska Range. The mine sat on a creek in a deep, narrow crevice formed between three mountains four, five and six thousand feet in height. The sun could have been up till midnight but Rebecca couldn’t swear to it; the only time the mining camp got direct sunlight was between the hours of ten and two. It might as well be December. There was even snow packed into various hollows on the north-facing slopes of the peaks.
It had not been a fun summer. Not only was there no electricity, there was no running water, and the plumbing consisted of a teetery outhouse with bear hair stuck to the outside where the local grizzlies had come to scratch. With the advent of salmon up Nenevok Creek, the bears had come for more than scratching their backs. And if there weren’t bears, there were moose, mama moose with babies and attitude. One day a porcupine had wandered into the outhouse and frightened her outside. Mark had come running at the sound of her shrieks and roared with laughter at the sight of her hobbling around with her pants down around her ankles.
Mark had bought her a.357, which nearly knocked her flat the first time she’d shot it, and she wore it faithfully whenever she stepped out the door, but guns made her nervous and she preferred to remain inside, beading and knitting by the soft glow of the kerosene lamp. Mark had gotten a little tight-lipped when she had run out of kerosene for the second time, but that nice woman pilot with Nushagak Air Taxi had dropped off two five-gallon cans on a trip from Newenham to the fishing lodge at Outuchiwenet Mountain. The three Danish fly fishermen on board had taken one look at Rebecca and tried to persuade the pilot to leave them there, too. They spoke little English, but Rebecca, starved for conversation in any language, had been reluctant to let them go.
The pilot had also brought in a bundle of magazines,Newsweek s andTime s andSmithsonian s andCosmopolitan s, and Rebecca had been moved nearly to tears. The pilot, a leggy woman in jeans with dark blond hair stuffed carelessly through the back of a Chevron baseball cap, could not quite conceal her sympathy. Rebecca, who had her pride, pulled herself together enough to express her thanks, wished the fishermen luck and helped push the tail of the plane around, yet another skill she had acquired this summer. The Cessna blew dust into her eyes as the engines revved up for takeoff, but she stood where she was, watching as it barely cleared the birch trees at the end of the rudimentary little airstrip with the uphill grade and the surface made of rocks rubbed smooth from a hundred years of tumbling in Nenevok Creek. The engine roared a protest in the thin mountain air as the pilot hauled on the yoke and the plane slipped through the minuscule space between Mounts Pistok and Atshichlut. Rebecca had tears in her eyes from more than the dust.
And now here it was, September 1, a Wednesday. On September 6, Labor Day by the calendar but Christmas, New Year’s and her birthday all rolled into one for Rebecca, Nushagak Air Taxi was scheduled to fly into the Nenevok Creek airstrip and pick up Mark and Rebecca and fly them back to Newenham, where they would board an Alaska Airlines 737 (until this summer the smallest plane Rebecca had been on). In a little over an hour, they would land in Anchorage. Nina was meeting them, with orders to have in hand at the gate a grande cup of the day from Kaladi Brothers, with half-and-half and a packet of Equal already stirred in. Rebecca could almost taste it, and looked up from the watchband she was beading for her grandmother to the calendar on the wall, as if by doing so she could make the days, the hours, the minutes go faster. Dinner at Villa Nova, she thought, or maybe Simon’s, or Yamato Ya, or Thai Kitchen. She was so sick of salmon. She was a good cook, but there were only so many ways to prepare fish, and she had tried them all.
Maybe a trip to the Alaska State Fair in Palmer, she thought, examining her palette and selecting a number 11 seed bead in lim
e green. Rain or shine, the fair was always crowded over the Labor Day weekend, kids standing in line for their last Octopus ride before school started, serious, tight-lipped women examining the crafts building for blue ribbons, cowboys roping calves in the arena, lumbermen rolling logs in the pond, Roscoe’s Skyline Restaurant selling the best barbecued ribs this side of Texas on the Red Path. But no, Roscoe had forsaken the fair for the Sears Mall, and for that matter, Labor Day was the last day of the fair, wasn’t it? She used to know these things. Fine, they could stop at Roscoe’s at the Sears Mall on the way home. Rebecca’s mouth watered at the thought.
No more washing dishes in cold creek water, of filtering drinking water for both sand and beaver fever. Rebecca thought of the Amana Heavy Duty Washer, with its Extra Large Capacity and Seven Cycles, and of the Amana Heavy Duty Dryer with Nine Cycles residing in the laundry room of their home on the Hillside. No more scrubbing of clothes in the tin washtub. No more spit baths in that same washtub. No more listening to Mark complain because his jeans never dried on the line strung between the cabin and the toolshed. How were they supposed to dry without sun? It wasn’t her fault he’d chosen to buy a gold claim stuck down a hole.
No more picking lettuce out of the garden, instead of buying it already picked-and washed-from City Market, like a civilized human being. She could look for a new job, a real job in a downtown office with a computer and a modem and a telephone and copy and fax machines, in an office with no mosquitoes or black flies, where she could go down to M.A.’s hot dog stand at the corner of Fourth and G and have a Polish Special on a sunny summer day, and to the Snow City Cafe for a salad sampler on a crisp winter day.
Nothing Gold Can Stay Page 4
