Nothing Gold Can Stay

by Dana Stabenow

  She stood up, pulling her hand free.

  “Rebecca? Honey?”

  Her eyes darted around the room, looking at the thin mattress of the cot they’d slept on for the last three months, the corners of the room filling with darkness five minutes earlier this evening than the evening before, the stained and torn linoleum covering the floor, the battered counter that served as kitchen, laundry and bathroom, the rough, peeling surfaces of the uninsulated logs.

  There was a look on her face that he didn’t like. “Rebecca, I know it hasn’t come as easily to you as it has to me, but-”

  She pushed back her chair and walked around him to the door. She flung it wide, and he heard the splash of the neighborhood grizzly as he went into the creek for supper.

  Rebecca stood on the doorstep for a long time, but she never stepped outside.

  Kagati Lake, September 1

  An hour later they had the body bagged and in the plane, and the rolls of film out of the camera and carefully labeled. The prints Prince had lifted were in an envelope, also labeled. The family was gathered around the kitchen table, a fire in the fireplace shared by both kitchen and living room, and all the lanterns in the house lit. Leonard had insisted on cooking everyone a meal, fried salmon steaks, salad from the garden out back and boiled potatoes, also from the garden out back. Simple food, well cooked, it tasted of dust in Liam’s mouth and he knew from Wy’s expression that she felt the same. Prince cleaned her plate and asked for seconds.

  “Who could have done this?” Leonard said for what had to be the ninth or tenth time.

  “We don’t know yet, sir,” Liam replied. “It looks as if your wife was getting ready to open the post office for the day. What time might that have been?”

  “She was always early,” one of the daughters-in-law volunteered. “She was always at the counter by nine o’clock, catching up on the books, ordering stamps, stuff like that.”

  “What time do you normally get here?” Liam said to Wy.

  Wy pushed away her plate, still full. “Depends which way I fly the route. Sometimes I start here and work south, sometimes I start at Mable Mountain and work north. Today I started at Mable Mountain.”

  “Anybody know which way you’re flying on any given day?”

  She shook her head.

  “Who else lives in Kagati Lake?”

  Leonard answered. “Not that many. This area is just a collection of homesteads, but not the normal kind of homesteads, you know, buying land from the state, proving up with a cabin in seven years and then it’s yours. A bunch of gold miners came through around the turn of the century, on their way to the Yukon, and some of them stopped off to do a little panning. They found color, so they staked claims. Some stayed, like my great-grandfather.”

  Leonard pointed at a row of gold pans lined up on top of the kitchen cupboard that looked as if they had seen long and hard use. “He always said he was a gold miner, but he never did pack out much gold. Other than the one big nugget.” He got to his feet. “I’ll show you.”

  The rest of them waited. “What the hell?” they heard him say, and then he reappeared in the kitchen door. For the first time he looked angry. “Is that what this was about? Opal killed over a lousy goddamn gold nugget?”

  Not only was the gold nugget missing that had sat on the burlwood table for seventy years, but walrus bookends carved from jade, a hair clasp made of ivory and baleen carved in the shape of a whale, the ivory tusks that had hung from one wall, the collection of Yupik ivory animal charms from the mantelpiece, and a couple of the masks. Leonard pointed out the empty nails on the walls, his face dark with rage. “Somebody must have been ripping us off, and Opal caught him. Son of a bitch!” He rounded on Liam and said fiercely, “You got any idea who did this?”

  “No,” Liam said.

  Leonard glared. “Then what good are you?”

  Prince opened her mouth and Liam waved her to silence. “I’ll need the names and locations of all your neighbors, Mr. Nunapitchuk.”

  “Oh bullshit,” Leonard said. “Ain’t one of them going to do something like this. We’ve been living side by next to most of them for years.”

  “Any of them you don’t get along with?”

  “No!”

  “Dad,” one of the sons said. “What about Dusty Moore?”

  “Who’s he?” Liam said.

  Leonard’s lips tightened, and the son said, “Dad and Dusty have been mad at each other for ten years, ever since Mom won the postmaster’s contract. Dusty wanted it, and he wasn’t a good loser.”

  “He make any threats?”

  “He made threats all over the place,” Leonard said, “but he wouldn’t kill over something like this.”

  To the son Liam said, “Do you have a map of the area, with the settlements marked?”

  “You going to try finding them tonight?”

  “No, we have to get your mother’s body back to Newenham tonight so we can get it into Anchorage first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “I can do that, sir,” Prince said, and from the expression on her face immediately regretted it. She’d rather be in hot pursuit than ferrying a body.

  To Wy Liam said, “You give me a ride back in the morning?”

  She hesitated. “What about Tim?”

  He’d completely forgotten about Tim, and the reminder made him uncomfortable. “Tim,” he said. “Right.” He turned to Prince. “Give Bill a call, tell her to tell Moses that he’s got baby-sitting duty.”

  Prince nodded crisply. Natalie Gosuk had never mentioned Wy’s name, so Prince had probably not made the connection, Natalie to Tim to Wy. Liam was relieved. Prince was a straight arrow. She wasn’t going to take kindly to him helping to flout a court order, and he would just as soon put that evil day off as long as possible.

  “Certainly, sir,” she said.

  “Okay?” he said to Wy.

  “Okay.” To Prince she said, “Tell Bill to tell Moses to tell Tim I’ll be back before noon tomorrow.”

  Prince nodded.

  “About that map,” Liam said to the son.

  Later, the dinner dishes cleared away, Liam and Wy stepped outside to allow the family to mourn in private. “Poor Leonard,” Wy said.

  “I would have said, poor Opal.”

  Wy shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. This is the second time in eight years he’s lost a member of his family.”

  “Who else?”

  “They had another daughter. Ruby.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Nobody knows.” Wy sighed. “Leonard took all four kids out hunting one fall some years back. They spread out in back of a herd of caribou. Ruby got lost. They never found her.”

  “Poor Leonard,” Liam agreed.

  SIX

  Rainbow Creek, September 1

  Peter Obadiah Cole was widely believed by other Bush rats to be on the run from the law, and that was true.

  He was also on the run from Congress, the courts and the White House; in fact, from all branches of government. He was on the run from traffic, in the air, on the ground or out at sea. He was on the run from bad movies, and television commercials, and television reporters with shellacked hair who couldn’t pronounce the name of the place they were reporting from. He was on the run from Mormon missionaries knocking at the door wanting to save his soul, from local politicians who made promises to get into office and then made more to get into higher office and never did get around to keeping the first ones.

  He was on the run from no-smoking sections in restaurants.

  He was on the run from jets taking off around the clock from Anchorage International Airport.

  He was on the run from people tossing butts out of the windows of their cars while they waited for the lights to change at Fourth and L.

  He was on the run from Jet Skis run by drunks all over Big Lake. He was on the run from people letting their dogs run loose on the Coastal Trail, shitting all over the place and biting little kids and figh
ting each other every chance they got. He was on the run from the Kmarts and the Wal-Marts and the Fred Meyers and the Eagles and the OfficeMaxes, all the big ugly box stores full of high-priced crap that nobody really needed and paid too much money for anyway.

  He was on the run from faxes and e-mail and voice mail. He was most especially on the run from cell phones.

  He’d been born in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1949, the only child of parents who worked hard and never said much. His father had been a veteran of the war in the Pacific, and as soon as he was old enough, Peter followed in his footsteps and joined the Marines. He spent three tours in Vietnam, and never would have rotated out if goddamn Nixon hadn’t declared peace with honor and brought them all home, with the Cong nipping at their heels all the way.

  Nobody spit on him when he came home. He regretted it. You don’t train somebody in special weapons and tactics, hone him into a killing machine and then get in his face when he gets off the plane.

  Back home in Alaska, work was gearing up on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and there were Texans and Oklahomans everywhere you looked, most of them welders and drunk welders at that. They traveled in packs, swaggering around town in their cowboy hats and their cowboy boots and their flashy belt buckles and their snapped shirts and their tight jeans and they acted like they owned the world. He was in Chilkoot’s one night, back when he still believed in women, and a group of them took exception to him, as one of them put it, “cutting one of the fillies out of our herd.” He’d made it out the back door just enough in advance of the sirens pulling up out front, the bouncer giving him an approving thump on the back as he went through. The pipeliners had to be carried out, he read in the newspaper the next day.

  He held his animosity in when he went to work on the Slope for Alyeska. Had to, or he wouldn’t have lasted long at any of the pump stations, and there was always a line five deep waiting to take the next job that came open. He did a little plumbing, a little electrical work, some carpentry, pretty much anything that needed doing that he could do or teach himself to. He socked the money away, living in his parents’ house, empty since his parents had died in a small plane wreck. Pilot was drunk, but what could you expect.

  He had a plan. The house was paid off, and he had inherited the property on Rainbow Creek. The lawyer telling him about it was the first Pete knew of its existence. Records showed that his father had bought it back in 1971, no one knew why, not that his father had had any friends Pete could ask. He chartered a plane with the rest of his back pay and flew out to take a look. Rough, rocky, dangerously sloped landing strip, one-room cabin about to fall over, no well, an outhouse. The remains of a sluice box in the creek fifty feet from the front door. A greenhouse with the roof caved in and the glass broken out. There were mountains all around, and a dense thicket of trees, and only the rush of water between the creek banks and the wind in the trees to hear.

  It was his, his place on earth, from the moment his foot stepped out of the plane.

  He didn’t believe the government was coming to get him, like some of the Bush rats did. He didn’t think the Trilateral Commission was invading anytime soon, or the United Nations, or NATO or SEATO or OAS or any of the other acronymical organizations regarded with such suspicion by the conspiracy theorists of the world. He hated noise, that was all, only slightly less than he hated stupid people, and it seemed to him that the world was chock full of both.

  So he left. One day he looked at his bank account, decided it was enough, quit his job, cashed out his retirement, put the house on the market at the appraised value, and pulled together a load of supplies while he waited for the deal to close.

  That had been in 1982. He hadn’t left Rainbow Creek since.

  He wanted for nothing. He ran a trapline up the creek in winter, pulling in a few mink. It was exercise. In summer, he tended his garden. In fall, he always got his moose. In winter, he hibernated.

  Once in a while he got hungry for a woman. If the stack ofPlayboy s next to his bed wouldn’t get the job done, all he had to do was slip down to Nenevok Creek with five-finger Mary and watch the miner, paddling through the creek all alone, while his wife sulked up in the cabin. That was women for you. But one glimpse of her was usually all it took.

  Tonight he had had trout for dinner, fresh from the creek, rolled in oatmeal and pan-fried in bacon drippings. The last of his bacon, he noted. It cast a cloud over the rest of the meal, because he would soon have to run up the flag on the roof to signal a need for supplies. He wished Bob DeCreft hadn’t sold out to that woman pilot. Still, she’d kept the rates low, and she never offered to make conversation. He appreciated the courtesy. Sometimes, instead of landing, she dropped the mail off in the front yard, like today. He appreciated that, too.

  She even brought him a box of books once, stuff the Newenham Public Library was throwing out, probably in order to make room for more Jackie Collins. There was a whole collection of Thomas Hardy in the box, a writer previously unknown to him. He was grateful, and the feeling made him uneasy. Next time she dropped off the mail he put a Coors box full of smoked salmon in the back of her plane. Paid in full, was what he was thinking.

  She never made a big deal out of it, said the next time she was there, “My boy and I liked the salmon,” that was all. Yes, she was tolerable. Knew how to keep her distance. Knew how to leave him his privacy, and that was what he craved more than anything.

  He took the single chair from the kitchen table out on the porch and tilted it back against the wall. Coffee warm in the mug cradled in his hands, he looked up and waited for the stars to come back into the night sky. He missed the stars when they were gone in the summer, effaced by the constant sun which lurked above or just below the horizon the day round. When it got dark enough for the stars to come back, it was the signal for all the hunters and the fishermen and the backpackers to head south for the winter. Welcome to Alaska, now go home. Pete thought that made a fine state motto, although it might have made the Department of Tourism a little irritable.

  A star winked into existence over the clump of tall spruce at the edge of the yard. Betelgeuse. Or was it Rigel? He could never keep the shoulder and the knee of Orion straight, but that was what star maps were for. He opened the book on his lap to commune with the ancient Greek astronomers who had remade the heavens in the images of their gods.

  One great thing about the Alaskan Bush, at least in summer, you never had to make a dry camp. You could go on forever, stream to creek to river, so long as you had water to drink and bathe in.

  The trouble with following the water was that other people did, too. You had to be careful how you approached the sound of water rushing between banks. Even here, even in what most people still considered to be Seward’s Icebox, the last frontier, the back of beyond, a few found their way to the call of a clear sky and clearer water, where a man could find peace and a way back to the basics. Food in your belly, clothes on your back, a roof over your head, all those things were readily available if you weren’t shy of hard work. The rest was gravy.

  Still, a little gravy on the potatoes never hurt. The nugget pressed against his heart from where it rested inside the pocket of his jacket. He couldn’t wait for Elaine to see it. It wasn’t a diamond, but it would do.

  He’d walked all day, following one game trail after another. They were there if you took the time to read them: a stalk of fireweed crushed beneath a hoof, the cropped tops of a stand of diamond willow, a section of creek bank falling into the water. A pile of brush and bones. A grouping of small mounds of dried waste dotted with highbush cranberry pits. A knoll where the wild ryegrass was cropped short and the south face pockmarked with smaller holes leading to mediumsize holes leading to large holes. The branch of a birch tree, shaken free of leaves where something had run into it, the rest of the tree’s leaves still clinging stubbornly to life, unready to give up summer, unwilling to admit the possibility of fall.

  It was the same if you listened. The shrill whistle of marmot and groun
d squirrel, the boarish bay of the grizzly, the call of the moose bull in rut, the cry of the eagle soaring high above.

  The encroachment of man was the easiest of all to sense.

  Tired from the long day’s walk, he had burrowed between the roots of a giant cottonwood, blown over years before and now stripped down to the bare bark. Other, smaller creatures shared the hollow, who had smelled the smoke before he had and whose agitated rustlings had woken him.

  He eeled down the bank to drink from and sluice his face in the creek, taking care to stay hidden beneath a willow branch trailing leaves in the slow-moving water. The woodsmoke could have meant any of a number of things; there were four hikers scaling Alayak Mountain to the northwest, a group of Japanese fly fishermen pulling the last trout out of the streams flowing near Outuchiwenet Mountain Lodge to the north, two park rangers putting the campsite at Nuklunek Lake into winter mothballs to the west. And there were the isolated homesteaders and miners, firing up their hearths and stoves in anticipation of shorter days, longer nights and cooler temperatures.

  This was one of those. He had smelled this type of fire before, the concentrated smoke from a stove designed to burn wood slowly, giving off the maximum amount of heat to the room and letting as little of it as possible escape up the chimney. He rolled over on his back, parted the leaves with gentle fingers and squinted at the sky. Dark, or near enough. Seven o’clock, maybe seven-thirty, and he still had miles to go before he slept again. He was tired, and stiff from having slept on the ground, and wanting home, and the comforting presence of his fair lady, Elaine, Elaine-fair. He loved the old legends best, of Arthur and Camelot, and Lancelot and the Holy Grail, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Each with his quest. Elaine had told him once that Guinevere was not so noble as the knights in her life, that she was a liar and a deceiver and an adulteress. There was nothing tragic about her end, she deserved to be burned at the stake, not rescued and taken to live out her life in the comfort of a rich woman’s nunnery. He’d been angry with her, very angry. That was the first time she had run away, but she was soon back again, and sweetly forgiving.