by Stan Jones
"If you can't keep her happy—" They went down and the second drunk's advice on satisfying a woman was lost in the crash.
Active reached the dogpile simultaneously with Hector Martinez. They pulled the combatants apart and hauled them to their feet.
Martinez had ended up with his hands on the collar and belt of the second drunk. "All right, you get out of here, Jonathan. I told you before not to mess with anybody's wife in my place." He headed for the door with Jonathan staggering ahead of him, arms and legs flapping loosely like a marionette's. The crowd that had ringed the gladiators drifted away.
"What about this one?" Nathan shouted.
"Ah, Simeon's harmless except when somebody dances with his wife," Martinez yelled back over his shoulder. "Let him go."
Active released Simeon and he staggered toward the men's room, his fingers pressed to a cut on his lip that was leaking blood down his chin and onto a white sweatshirt that said Point Hope Harpooners.
Active righted his chair and pulled it back to the table, which somehow had stayed on its legs through the scuffle. He looked around for Emily and finally spotted her on the dance floor with Travis. It looked like they were in a contest to see which one could swallow the other's tongue first.
He pulled on his parka and shoved his way to the deck outside the Dreamland's doors. He paused, trying to push the image of pretty pregnant drunk Emily out of his mind and concentrate on her words. Leeches killing fish? What did it mean, if anything?
Suddenly the double doors banged open behind him. A woman flew out, staggered across the deck, and landed on her back in the gravel and snow. As the drunks around the front of the bar scattered, Simeon leapt through the open door, dived off the deck, straddled the woman, and began pounding her face with his fists. The drunks closed in again to watch.
"Goddamn you shit," Simeon screamed.
Active plunged in, knocked Simeon off, planted a knee in his chest, and realized the nearest handcuffs were in the Suburban. Just then, the city police van pulled up.
Mason, the cop, trotted over and took Active's place on Simeon's chest. Mason was pulling out a set of handcuffs when a bystander walked over and said in a high voice, "It's OK, man, she's his wife."
Mason looked closely at the brawler's face, then at the woman, then at the bystander, and said, "Oh, yeah, you're right, Kinnuk." He helped the man up, then shook him. "Don't let this happen again, Simeon."
"Go ahead, arrest him," Active said. "I witnessed the whole thing. This is an easy assault conviction:"
"Sorry, Nathan. The D.A. says no domestic violence prosecutions without a complaint from the victim. And this victim won't complain." Mason turned to the woman and helped her up.
"You should arrest him," she said, blowing bubbles in the blood and mucus coming from her nose. "He always beat me up."
"Mary, if you'd quit drinking and fooling around, this wouldn't happen," Mason told her. "Besides, if I do arrest Simeon, you'll just drop the charges when you sober up, same as always. Now you go on home to your kids."
He turned back to Simeon and shook him again. "And you go to your mom's house for the night, or I will arrest you, Simeon."
Instead, Simeon jerked his head toward the bar. Mary nodded, and they walked back into the Dreamland, arm in arm.
"This is what the D.A. calls a dodney," Mason said.
"Adodney?"
"D-O-D-N-H-I. Drunk On Drunk, No Human Involvement. The new D.A.'s supposedly gonna be a woman. Maybe she'll see it different, but right now all we can do is scold 'em."
Active was putting his key in the Suburban's ignition when it hit him. His adoptive parents' home in Muldoon, the first few years they lived there. No public water or sewer yet, so they had a well in a corner of the front yard and a septic tank at the downhill end of the back yard. In summer, the area just below the septic tank was always the greenest, lushest part of the lawn. That was where wastes from the tank seeped into the soil. The leach field, Ed Wilhite had called it. But in Muldoon, the leach field only meant more mowing for young Nathan Active. It had never killed any fish. Poor dim little Emily Hoffman hadn't understood what George Clinton was telling her, but at least she had remembered it.
He started the engine and put the Suburban in gear, but something about the crowd around the front of the Dreamland made him jam on the brakes. He studied the faces for a moment, then rolled down his window as a familiar female figure started for the double doors.
"Lucy!" he shouted. "You don't really want to go in there, do you?"
Slowly, she turned and faced him. Slowly, she crossed the deck, descended the steps, and walked to the window of the Suburban.
"I never wanted to before, but tonight I do," she told him. "I can't do anything right."
She felt his eyes on her, but she didn't look up.
"Get in," he said. "I'll take you home."
"Oh, you're not afraid I'll trap you again?" She looked into his eyes, then away. "No thanks."
"Is that what Pauline told you? That I said you trapped me?"
She clenched her teeth to keep her chin from trembling and squeezed her eyes shut against the tears. She felt them trickle down her cheeks anyway and stood in silent helpless fury by the Suburban. Just like a woman, he was probably thinking.
She saw him fumble in the glove compartment. Then he handed her something. Oh, no, apacket of Kleenex!
"Get in," he said again. "We'll get some coffee at the Korean's place if you don't want to go home yet. We need to talk."
"I don't want anybody to see my eyes like this," she said. She opened the packet and wiped them with a wad of tissue.
"All right, I'll get the coffee to go and we can drink it in the Suburban," he said. "That way it'll be official business. OK? Will you get in?"
"Hmpph," she said.
"You're a lot like your grandmother, you know."
"Hmmph," she said again. But she found herself walking around to the passenger door and climbing in.
Nathan drove them to the Northern Dragon and went in for the coffee. The moment the door closed behind him, she flipped open her purse and made emergency repairs to her face. When he came out and handed her coffee in a Styrofoam cup, she inhaled deeply, then took a big gulp. It cleared out her sinuses some, but not as much as she had hoped. She would probably still snuffle like a kid with a runny nose if she tried to talk.
He drove the Suburban across the bridge over the lagoon, past the trail to the cemetery, and a little way toward the tundra lakes that supplied Chukchi's drinking water. He stopped where the road topped a rise and turned the Suburban to face the village.
The night was cloudy. No moon, stars, or aurora in sight. Just the lights of the village, spread from left to right like a beaded bracelet.
"Kind of pretty from this distance," he said. "Who knows, if the liquor ban passes, it might even be pretty from close up someday."
She said nothing, but took another slug of coffee for her sinuses. He turned on the radio and tuned in KSNO. The news was on. The announcer said something about the balance of trade. A snowmachine buzzed past, its headlight illuminating the interior of the Suburban.
She studied him from the corner of her eye. His eyes were so careful and wary, they made his face seem as cold and far-off as the northern lights. But then the lips, unexpectedly full and vulnerable, turned those wary eyes into pools of loneliness so deep that, as always, she felt herself drowning.
The snowmachine passed and his face receded into shadow. She took a final sip of coffee and a deep breath.
"I'm sorry about last night." Her voice sounded fairly normal, at least to her. And her sinuses felt fine. "Pauline is just so old-fashioned."
"Old-fashioned?"
"You know. If two people like each other, they should just get together and let everything take care of itself."
"She gave me the same lecture about going in the tent and starting a baby," he said. "But I don't think things are so simple now."
"You didn't enjoy i
t?" She put a hand on his thigh. "You acted like you did." She thought she felt him stir, then he put her hand back in her lap. Politely but firmly.
"You kidding?" he asked. "Your body, it's like that warm place the old-timers thought we would go in the afterlife. Inupiat heaven. Of course, I enjoyed it. I'm a man, after all."
"I noticed," she said. "I'm still tender. And so?"
"And so I'd like to drop the rear seat and invite you back there this minute."
"OK," she said softly.
"No, that wouldn't be right," he said in that sober way of his. "It would be OK if we were both serious . . . or even if we were both just fooling around. But I don't think you want to fool around and I don't want . . . I can't be serious about anything but my work right now. I have to make my way in the troopers." He turned the Suburban's heater down a notch and unzipped his parka.
"You're not serious?" she said. "What about at work? You hang around Dispatch all the time because you like telephones?"
"That was a mistake. I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking."
"Maybe you think too much, Nathan!" She stopped herself from saying more, alarmed at the complaining tone in her voice. Where did that come from? She had to sound less reproachful. "Don't you ever just jump in?" she asked softly.
"I think I'm an example of what happens when people just jump in," he said. "My mother jumped in bed with my father when they were both too young. Now I have to buy twice as many presents on Mother's Day as a normal person."
She unzipped her parka and shrugged out of it. From the corner of her eye, she saw him studying her. She put her hands behind her neck and leaned her head back. She felt his eyes drop from her face and slide down her throat, then over her breasts. When other men did that, she was angry. But with Nathan it was like a caress. She felt herself flush, first at the throat, then lower and lower. She waited for him to kiss her or at least speak. But he turned his eyes back toward the lights of Chukchi and said nothing.
She pulled the coat over her shoulders again and tried to think how to get the conversation back to the two of them, but no ideas came. "What happened to your father anyway?" she asked. She had to fill the silence with something. "Your real one, I mean. Is he still around?"
"He was a Nome man named Charles Penn. A couple years after I came along, I guess he joined the army to get out of the Bush and learn to fly helicopters. He was shot down in Vietnam. Once, when the traveling version of the Vietnam Wall came to Anchorage, I went down and found his name and made a rubbing of it."
Nathan's voice was flat, like a kid giving a book report in school. There should be something in it—anger, sadness, something—she thought. "What did you feel?"
"Not much," he said in the same flat voice. "A little regret that I never met him, a little curiosity about what he was like. But by then I knew who I was. The adopted-out son of an Inupiat woman, the adopted son of two white people."
"Your nalauqmiut parents weren't good to you?"
"Of course they were. But there was always something missing . . . like they were full-time baby-sitters instead of real parents. I don't know."
Another snowmachine buzzed by, this one headed into town and pulling a dogsled, a rider on the runners. She couldn't think of anything to say now. The silence built up and up until he broke it.
"What about your parents?"
"They live upriver, in Ebrulik," she said. "My dad runs the village store there."
The engine of the Suburban rumbled and the heater droned. Now neither of them said anything for a long time. She thought Nathan must have run out of ideas too.
"So where are we?" he asked finally.
"About a mile from town, I guess."
"You know what I mean. Are you all right now?"
She sensed he was wrapping things up, trying to close her like one of his case files, but she couldn't think of anything to do about it. His resistance to intimacy was a wall she couldn't climb.
"No, I'm not all right," she said. "But I'll live. I won't go into the Dreamland if that's what you mean. At least not tonight." That tone of reproach she hated was back in her voice, but she couldn't help herself.
"Look, if you want to get out of Chukchi, I might be able to help you find a dispatch job with the troopers in Anchorage," he said.
So now he was trying to send her away. What a mess she had made. "Just take me home!" She heard the tremor in her voice and felt her eyes starting to go again. She fought to keep from bawling.
"What ? What's . . . Just tell me what I missed."
"Shut up, damn you. Take me home." She gave up and started sobbing.
She saw him shake his head and put the Suburban in gear. He switched on KSNO as they started back to town.
"To Rodney in Chukchi from Dad in Nuliakuk," the announcer said. "Sending a seal down by Lienhofer's tomorrow. Bring your snowgo to the airport."
CHAPTER 11
Sunday Morning, Chukchi
IT WAS A FEW minutes before eight and a Sunday morning to boot, but the lights were on when Active arrived at the log cabin that served as the Chukchi outpost and living quarters of the Alaska Department of Environmental Protection. An Arctic Cat with a small dogsled hitched to the back stood at the kunnichuk door, which was propped open with the shell of an old Macintosh computer.
He shut off the Suburban and walked around the tail of the sled into the kunnichuk, then backed out as a big cardboard box barged toward him at chest level. The box was labeled "Childs, ADEP, Bethel." Two smallish hands were its only visible support.
"Do you mind?" said a woman's voice from behind the box. "I gotta get this shit to the fucking airport. You'd fucking think they'd fucking pay somebody to do this since it was their fucking idea, but, no, I gotta do it my own fucking self."
"Hey, let me get it." He took the box, dropped it into the basket of the sled, and turned to face Kathy Childs, the environmental department's only biologist in Chukchi. In fact, as far as he knew, she was the department's only employee north of Nome.
Childs had a lean, sinewy body, brown hair in a long thick braid, and blue eyes that blazed startlingly from a face tanned nut brown by near-constant exposure to wind and sky. This morning, she was outfitted in a pair of rust-colored Carhartt bib overalls with a set of thermal underwear beneath, and Sorel boots. Her foul mouth, he had concluded on the basis of a nodding acquaintance and a few quick conversations, was attached to a fine mind and a good heart.
"Oh, thanks, Nathan. Didn't recognize you from behind the box there." She plopped down on the sled.
"Day off to a bad start?"
"Yeah, you could say that. I'm being transferred to Bethel."
"Not Bethel! My God, why?"
"It's probably the only place they could find with more drunks and mosquitoes than fucking Chukchi."
"No, I mean why are you being transferred?"
"Beats the shit out of me. Ask Juneau."
"Yeah, like Juneau talks to me," he said. "When's your replacement coming? Who is it?"
"There isn't going to be one. This office is being mothballed indefinitely." She stood up and started back into the house. "They'll service Chukchi out of Nome. Like a bull services a cow, would be my guess."
"Hang on a minute. How much stuff you got?"
"Tons. Two sled loads, maybe three. And I gotta get it on the morning flight." She looked at her wristwatch. "Which, fuck, leaves in forty-eight minutes. Shit."
"Let's use the Suburban. We can get it in one trip and that'll give me a chance to pump you a little bit."
"In your dreams, Macho Man," she said. But she grinned and hoisted the box out of the sled. He opened the Suburban's rear doors and she slid it in.
"Shut that trash mouth a minute and listen," he said. "I need some information about the Gray Wolf."
"The Gray Wolf and Bethel in one day. Jesus fuck."
"Well, we don't have much time if you're leaving on the morning plane."
"My stuff is, but I'm not. I'm taking the dogs up the Isignaq for a
few days and knocking down some caribou. At least my mutts will eat well in Bethel. We can come back here and talk after we're done at the airport."
He helped her load the other boxes from the office into the Suburban. Some were addressed to her in Bethel. Others were marked for the environmental protection district office in Nome. When the boxes were all loaded, she kicked the dead Macintosh out of the way and slammed the kunnichuk door. He closed the Suburban, drove the two blocks to the airport, and heaved the boxes up onto the Alaska Airlines freight dock as she signed papers for the agent.
The pressure off now, they drove back to what had been her office. He sat on the dead Macintosh and she slumped on a tattered brown couch held up by a can of Spam where a leg was missing. Unlike the boxes on the way to Bethel and Nome, she explained, the couch belonged to the landlord.
"I'd offer you some coffee but the machine's on its way to Bethel too. So what do you want to know about the Gray Wolf? It's a copper mine, it's big, and everybody loves it."
"I was just wondering about those fish kills on the Nuliakuk. Is the Gray Wolf causing them?"
"Of course not. Haven't you heard what GeoNord says? They're the result of natural mineral seeps in the area. Nothing whatever to do with by-products from the mine."
She leaned forward, unsnapped the shoulder straps of the Carhartts, and rolled the front and rear bibs down to her waist. Then she pulled the cuffs of the thermal undershirt up past her elbows. "Fucking hot in here."
The house's inner door and the kunnichuk door were both partly open and the temperature was about zero outside. He was feeling a little cold, despite his parka. Not for the first time, he marveled at the raw physical vigor Kathy Childs exuded and wondered what she would be like in bed.
Also not for the first time, he realized he didn't have the slightest desire to find out. Was she a lesbian? Or was he just intimidated by this woman who talked and seemed to think like a man? He looked away from her and tried to get back to business. "Is that what you think? The fish kills are natural?"
"Fuck, it could be. There's always been mineral seeps into Gray Wolf Creek. That's how they figured out there might be copper there in the first place." She picked at a rip in one of the couch cushions. A little clump of white stuffing squeezed out.
