Moses poked and prodded her, too, until she and the boy stood in a parody of Moses’ assured stance. “Breathe,” he barked. “Feel the air, the breath of life, making a circle around your body, pulling all life to you and in you. Breathe, goddamn it! Bend your knees, deeper, deeper, I said! What are you trying to do, boy, pluck a duck? Give me a respectable tai chi cup on that hand. Yeah, okay, that’s close enough for now. You, girl, nobody yelled ‘Attention!’ Lower your chin. I said lower it, damn it, not fall face forward onto your chest. Bend your knees. Bend them!”
He kept them in one position for half an hour, always carping, always criticizing, grudgingly accepting their stances only as an imitation of the real thing. “Okay. Stand up. Where you going, boy?”
Tim halted. “I thought we were done.”
“Who told you to think?” Moses demanded. “Resume your position.”
Tim resumed his position. Bill was left to wonder how Moses did it. He was five feet seven inches tall, his features were boringly regular with the merest hint of his Yupik ancestry, he had no dignity to speak of, there was no authority vested in him by the power of the state, in fact no earthly reason for anyone to say “How high?” when he said “Jump!” Tim, who had had a very rough and very nearly fatal childhood in the Yupik village of Ualik and who had been rescued from it by the timely intervention of one Wyanet Chouinard, and who was only now learning how to be an American boy, jumped. Amelia, who had been beaten into a cringing and nearly servile subservience within the space of little more than five months, her obedience was easier to understand.
Still, Moses commanded. There was no other word for it. Maybe it was his eyes, a penetrating gray so light they seemed at times absent of any color at all. Maybe it was the grin, saved from being purely evil by the curl at one corner that invited you to laugh with him. Maybe it was his age, which no one knew but everyone agreed had to be ancient.
He sat on his stool in Bill’s and he drank an endless amount of beer, but never got too drunk to talk or make love, the two things most drunks most wanted to do and couldn’t. Petitioners for news of the future approached him with the deference normally reserved for royalty, or genocidal maniacs. Should I marry the father of my child, should I quit fishing and go to school, should I move Outside? From time to time he issued proclamations. He had declared Bill’s bar to be a cell-phone-free area, reinforced his edict by launching the mayor’s cell phone out the front door and into orbit, and no one had murmured so much as a protest. Nobody brought any more cell phones with them when they dropped by for a beer, either.
Half the people in Newenham thought he was crazy. The other half thought he was divine. The whole of the population trod with care in his presence, and most of them listened when he spoke. If and when they didn’t, they almost immediately regretted it. If they lived.
She watched him chivvy and chastise Tim and Amelia for two hours, a grouchy little bully even older than she was, and loved him and wished for him immortality, or to live as long as she did, because she had no wish to live without him.
“All right,” Moses finally decided, and stepped back.
Amelia, trembling in every limb, tears and sweat running down her bewildered face, folded up where she stood, subsiding to the ground with a thump and a grunt. Tim, more prideful, managed to walk to the porch and more or less fell onto one of the folding chairs.
“Now to the sweat,” Moses said. “Come on, come on, move it!”
Amelia began to cry in earnest. With no regard for her distress, Moses took hold by the scruff of her neck and yanked her to her feet. Tim, determined to work the old fart into the ground if it killed him, struggled upright on his own. Both of them tottered around the cabin to the sweat lodge next to the creek, a tiny, enclosed shack, weatherproofed more to keep the steam in than the cold out. There was a woodstove inside, vented through the roof, with a pan of rocks sitting on top and a bucket of water sitting on the floor. Built-in benches wide enough to lie down on provided space for four. Moses stripped both kids down to their underwear and more or less shoved them onto a bench. Tim tried not to look at the lacy little brassiere Amelia was wearing, or at the further bruising the removal of her clothes had revealed. Amelia lay down and closed her eyes, oblivious to his presence.
Moses’ head popped around the corner of the cabin. “You coming?”
Bill smiled at him. “A little too crowded at the moment for my taste.”
His grin was equal parts understanding and lechery. “Later.”
“Later,” she agreed.
EIGHT
Nenevok Creek, September 2
The bed shifted as Mark got stealthily to his feet. Clothing rustled as he dressed, the door creaked as it opened and creaked again as it closed. Rebecca rolled to her back and stared at the ceiling, at the patched, cracked, stained ceiling of uninsulated plywood four-by-eights cut haphazardly to fit. The double bed was shoved into a corner, and the air blew cold through the chinks. They’d used the down comforter all summer except for eleven days at the beginning of July.
Now it was September. September 2, four days from a flight home.
She was going home. There was no doubt of that. She was going home with or without her husband. She was going back home, going back to Anchorage, if not to that nice split-level in the old neighborhood in Spenard with the thirty-year-old prickly rose bush bending the back fence out of shape and the thirty-one-year-old birch coating the lawn with leaves. The yard sloped down in front of the house, and when the four different varieties of poppies she had planted and so carefully nursed through their infancies were in bloom it was like something out of Disney.
It was only a house. She could plant poppies in another front yard. This time she could plant some of those flashy Himalayan Blues. And raspberry bushes, dozens of them, so she could make framboise, and give it away to all her friends at Christmas.
Because she was going home. Mark could stay here, a thousand miles from nowhere, and wash dirt until the creek froze in around his legs if that was what he wanted. To honor and keep, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, so long as you both shall live. She had believed in those words. She was going home, with or without her husband.
There was enough water left in the kettle on the woodstove to fill the coffeepot. She used some of it to make a single cup of coffee and the rest to take a spit bath. She dressed in jeans and a tank top beneath a short-sleeved T-shirt beneath a long-sleeved flannel shirt. She would have worn long underwear if she’d thought to bring any with her. She hadn’t been warm since they had left Anchorage. She wanted electric baseboard heating in her new house, and a thermostat she could crank up to eighty degrees.
She wanted another cup of coffee, but the water was all gone. She put on two pairs of socks and a pair of short leather hiking boots, picked up the plastic five-gallon jerry can and headed for the door. At the last moment, she paused next to the counter and picked up the paring knife, a three-inch blade on the three-and-a-half-inch black plastic handle. Mark made fun of it and tried to get her to use the slim, deadly skinning knife he’d bought for her, in its own leather sheath meant to be threaded onto her hand-tooled leather belt, but she liked the paring knife. It was short and sharp, and it served for cutting up vegetables and trimming bead cord.
There was a stalk of fireweed next to the creek where they got their water. She’d noticed yesterday that the last group of blooms at the very top of the stalk had opened, and she wanted to bring them back to the cabin with her. She was designing a bracelet, a wide cuff with picoted edges and a raised pattern in a floral motif. She had two tubes of size eleven seed beads, one Ruby Rainbow Matte and one Purple Blue Transparent Matte, hoarded as her reward for sticking out the summer. They were as close to the color of the fireweed blooms as she had in her private stash, and the blooms would make a lovely motif for the bracelet. She would give it to Nina for Christmas. Nina loved reds and purples and hot pinks. Her Volkswagen Beetle was a silvery fuchsia. She’d always gone more
conservative with her car colors.
She left the cabin door standing open and trod the path to the stream with soft, carefully placed steps, listening for anything that might be beyond the bushes. She no longer started at every rustle or creak, but neither did she ignore them.
She hoped she wouldn’t run into Mark. She hoped he was prospecting up the creek somewhere.
It had been a long, still night. Neither of them had slept, but they hadn’t talked, either. Rebecca had said all she was going to say, and Mark was still confident he could change her mind. It was the second of September. Wyanet Chouinard and the Nushagak Air Taxi would come on the sixth of September. Four days, if she counted today. She’d made it through three months. She could make it through four days.
The brush opened up at the creek, where a small slope of reddish dirt fanned into a narrow gravel bank. The rocks were round and flat, and many of them gleamed white and sparkled in the early morning light. Quartz. Quartz and gold were found together, Mark said. She thought of the half dozen tiny vials filled with dust and the one nugget the size and shape of a kidney bean back in the cabin, the fruit of a summer’s labor, and shook her head.
She filled the jerry can. The fireweed was still there, still blooming. She used the paring knife to cut the stalk just below the last set of blooms, feeling slightly guilty as she did so. It had been perfect just as it was.
She sat down on the bank with her elbows on her knees and looked at the fireweed. She knew a little about herbs thanks to Amy Kvasnikof, who worked at Southcentral Foundation in Anchorage and who had come to Pedersen, Barcott, Tsonger, Jefferson and Moonin for help in a divorce case. Rebecca had worked on the case with Pete Pedersen, and she and Amy had become good friends.
Amy was from Nanwalek, what they used to call English Bay, and she had learned about Alaskan herbs at her grandmother’s knee. Fireweed leaves could be used to brew tea for indigestion, and dried fireweed root could be ground and mixed into a paste with bear grease and used as an ointment on sores or bug bites. It had its culinary purposes as well; young fireweed made for fine salad greens, and the tea didn’t have to be medicinal.
Amy had given Rebecca a book, Eleanor Viereck’sAlaska’s Wilderness Medicines, and Rebecca had brought it with her, thinking she might spend part of the summer looking for the herbs listed there. The book described the herbs in alphabetical order, each with a black-and-white drawing of the plant, and at the back of the book there was a glossary and a couple of lists, one A Therapeutic Use of Alaskan Plants. Under A it had Aphrodisiac-angelica. Under B it had Baby bath-rose leaf tea.
Baby. Babies. Rebecca stared hard across the stream, at the trunk of a cottonwood lying on its side. She wanted babies, at least one, preferably two. She’d always wanted them. She’d talked to Mark about it before they got married, and he had said sure, just not right away. “Let’s give ourselves time to play first,” he had said, and grinned, leaving no doubt as to what kind of play he meant.
It wasn’t as if she had disagreed with him, but this year they had celebrated their seventh anniversary. Rebecca was now thirty-two years old, and she was beginning to have visions of pushing a stroller and a walker at the same time. She’d tried to reopen the discussion with Mark over the Christmas holiday, but at the same time he started to tell her about this defunct gold mine for sale in the Wood River Mountains. He’d always had a hankering to look for gold, he told her, although in seven years of marriage this was the first she’d heard of it. He seemed so excited and so enthusiastic, though, and Rebecca tried so hard to be the good wife. This was obviously something Mark wanted very badly. How could she say no?
Halfway through the summer she began to wonder how much the gold mine was a ruse to avoid the baby talk. Moving out here, in the middle of nowhere, no hospital, no doctor, no pharmacy, how could she have a baby out here? The nearest school was in Newenham; how could she raise a child out here? She wanted to drive her child to soccer practice and ice-skating classes, and to the movies and Baskin-Robbins afterward. She wanted to go to parent-teacher conferences. She wanted to join the PTA. She wanted to shop at Gap for Kids and Gymboree.
Mark knew how she felt. They had talked about all the important things, children (not now, but no more than two later), money (one joint and two separate checking accounts, only one credit card each, both paid off at the end of the month, take care of the upkeep on the house first and the retirement fund second), where to live in Anchorage (Turnagain or Spenard), where to retire (Alaska, not Outside). They’d made separate lists and discussed each item, each taking care to respect the other’s viewpoint, reaching accommodation without too much blood on the floor. It wasn’t just the sex, which was thrilling, it was also a shared commitment to a long life together and a shared determination to make that life the best it could be. They had been very pleased with themselves, and Rebecca for one had marched up that aisle in the full conviction that she knew exactly and precisely what she was doing and that she had never done anything more right in her life.
He had bought the gold mine without consulting her first, emptying out their joint checking account and explaining it away afterward as “I had to, honey, he had ten other buyers waiting in line. I would have lost the deal if I hadn’t jumped on it quick.”
“I thought we were going to start a family this year,” she had said. “I thought that was why we’d saved all that money.”
He had laughed, a quick, excited laugh, and kissed her soundly. “We’ve got all the time in the world to start a family. We’ve got time to start a gold mine.” His hands wandered. “Besides, we’re not done having fun yet.”
Like always, her knees had given way beneath the onslaught.
It isn’t all his fault, she thought, still staring at the log across the stream, still twisting the fireweed between her fingers. I should have been more forceful. I should have insisted we sit down and talk about it, then and there. But he distracted me. Like he always distracts me.
“You know what’s wrong with Mark?”
“What?”
“He’s too good in the sack.”
Remembering the conversation with Nina at City Market, Rebecca realized just how often Mark had resolved their differences in bed.
It was ironic that here, in this place she feared and despised, in this place to which Mark had seduced her into coming, here she had found the time and the solitude to think, to reflect, to learn to see a different side of their relationship. It shamed her to realize that all he had to do was lay hands on her and she would do anything he wanted.
“Hey!”
Mark’s shout jerked her to her feet. She turned. He wasn’t there.
“Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Get out of there!”
The sound of a shot echoed off the walls of the canyon.
She grabbed for her waist, and only then remembered that she had been so angry at her husband that morning that she had forgotten to strap on the.357 before stepping outside.
For the first time that summer since the bear charged her, she was outside the cabin and unarmed.
Nuklunek Bluff, September 2
The air was very still that morning, probably why the sound of the shot traveled so far.
“Hey,” John said. “Did you hear that?”
“Yeah,” Teddy said, head cocked. “Warehouse Mountain?”
“Too far. Nenevok Lake, maybe.”
“Or maybe the creek.”
“The gold mine,” John said, and burped.
“Maybe she shot him.”
“Maybe he shot her.”
They both thought back to their first sight of Rebecca Hanover, and said simultaneously, “Nah.”
They stood, listening. There were no further shots.
“A bear, maybe,” John said.
Teddy made a face, and pointed in a vague, easterly direction with a half-empty bottle of beer. “You think we should go see?”
John drained his own bottle and set it down with exaggerated care insi
de the almost empty second case. “Sure,” he said, and picked his way carefully to where his rifle stood leaning against a tree trunk.
Teddy watched him go, bleary-eyed. “What about Wy?”
“Why?”
“Wy. Our pickup. Noonish. Round there, anyway. Maybe four. Five?”
John made a regally dismissive gesture with one hand. “Be back in plenty of time.”
Teddy, flush with beer, gave no thought to the various areas of dense brush and swampy muskeg between them and the shot they had heard, and agreed without a blink.
Kagati Lake, September 2
“I’ve got to get home,” Wy said. “I’m supposed to ferry a couple of fishermen back from Outuchiwenet Mountain, and I’ve got a couple of hunters to pick up this afternoon. I’ll need to refuel before I head out. See you back at the house?”
“Okay.” Liam squeezed her hand and let go. Prince pretended not to notice, and continued to pretend not to notice as Liam stood watching Wy climb into her plane, start the engine, taxi and take off to the north. The plane banked left and came back down the strip at two hundred feet and waggled its wings. Liam raised an arm in reply and turned back to Prince. “So nothing else, no similar incidents reported out this way?”
“No, sir.”
“No burglaries, robberies, no assaults?”
“And no murders.”
“I don’t like it,” Liam said.
“I don’t either, but we don’t have a lot to go on,” she said. “I sent the prints in with the body. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” She paused.
“What?”
“You sure about the family?”
“Yes. They were all at fish camp, anyway, all except Opal. She stayed behind to do her duty by the U.S. Postal Service. Come rain, shine, sleet or fish camp, the mail must go through.”
Nothing Gold Can Stay Page 9
