by Breakup(lit)
the summer before, a grizzly had taken an eight-year-old boy in Skolai.
Didn't people read? Didn't they watch the news? Did they think all bears
were funny and cuddly like Baloo? Like Charles II, Walt Disney had a lot
to answer for.
The road turned right up the hill behind the mill. She followed it,
mouth dry, into the cluster of houses the mine owners had provided for
the manager and the senior staff and their families, ones with real
running hot and cold water, electricity and plumbing. There were plenty
of places all over America in 1911 that didn't have as much, but in
1911, with the price of copper what it was, money was no object, and
Morgan-Mellon-Astor-Carnegie-Guggenheim- whoever had wanted to keep
their upper-echelon employees happy and productive. The lower-echelon
employees, i.e., the ones who got the copper out of the ground and
loaded it on the railroad cars, stayed in the bunkhouse farther down the
side of the hill and shared the bathroom with ninety-nine others.
The houses were small affairs built of the same faded, peeling red
clapboard as the main buildings. There wasn't anyone on the roof of the
first house in line, and the soft, slushy, rapidly melting snow hid what
tracks there had been. She didn't hear the growl of an infuriated
grizzly, either, and she was listening for it pretty hard. All that was
audible was the roar of the Kanuyaq River, loud
57 enough to drown out the sound of an approaching bear until it was
right on her.
"Lady?" she called. "Lady? I've got a gun, I'm here to help. Your
husband's okay. It's safe to come down now." She walked forward.
One house. Around a corner and another. A cluster of scrub spruce and a
third house, a fourth and a fifth without incident.
"Lady?" she called again, and cursed herself again, this time for not
asking for the name. "Lady, can you hear me? My name is Kate Shugak.
I've got a rifle. Don't be afraid, you can come down now."
A sixth, a seventh, an eighth. The road wound around the ninth and Kate
halted abruptly.
The woman lay in the middle of the road, soaked to the skin from the
rapid melt of a winter's worth of snow, staring sightlessly at the sky.
Or she would have been, if she'd had any face left.
Her left arm was missing below the elbow, as was most of her belly and
thighs. Betrs were notorious for exerting the least effort for the most
result and went for the soft meat and the viscera first. The arm had
most probably been lost in trying to fight off the inevitable.
Blood was everywhere, the salty copper smell of it strong in her
nostrils, and the melting snow had kept it bright red, redder than the
fading walls of the little house in the background. The resulting slush
had mixed with the dirt track beneath and the area was a sea of
churned-up mud in which the paw prints of a very large bear were
prominent. The muddy, bloody prints led into the brush on the downhill
side of the road.
She couldn't move.
This could have been me, she thought.
If I hadn't moved fast enough, gotten up the bank when I did, this could
be me lying here. If the brush hadn't slowed her down coming after me,
if Mutt hadn't been barking, if her cubs hadn't been bawling for her.
This could have been me.
58 She could almost see herself, sprawled on her back in the little
swimming hole, sightless eyes staring up, the dark blood drifting out of
the backwater to be snatched into the swift, midstream current and
washed downstream, into the river and the gulf beyond. How long before
anyone would have known, if ever?
Her hands cramped, making her aware of how hard she was gripping the
rifle. She swallowed and forced herself to move forward, focusing
fiercely on one of the clearer prints, in which a puddle of reddish
water was already beginning to form. About six or seven hundred pounds,
she estimated, standing six to eight feet.
The pink shreds in the grizzly's claws had been human flesh.
She looked away, at the fading wall of the house, long strips of paint
peeling from its sides, and swallowed hard. Dimly, her own words echoed
in her head. It was that hundredth bear you had to watch out for.
She heard a sound behind her and spun around, rifle at the ready, to
find Mrs. Baker retching emptily on one side of the road. Mr. Baker,
white to the lips, was patting her shoulders soothingly.
"Oh great," Kate said before she thought. "Mandy is going to kill me."
59
George Perry ground-looped 50 Papa on a short final into Niniltna.
Two circumstances contributed to this unfortunate occurrence.
One, there was a fourteen-inch rut halfway down the icy surface of the
4,800-foot airstrip, which the latest grader pass had missed and which
the left front tire on 50 Papa had the misfortune to eaten precisely at
touchdown.
Two, Ben Bingley was barfing down the back of his neck at the time.
Kate drove up with the Bakers and the bereaved husband in time to see
the red and white two-seater pull sharply to the left, losing its center
of gravity just long enough to lean over and catch the ground with the
tip of the left wing. Newton and inertia took care of the rest as the
plane completed a snap roll so perfect it would have brought tears to
the eyes of an
60 Air Force flight instructor if only it hadn't been performed at zero
altitude.
In short, the plane flipped over and pancaked flat on its back. Under
the beneficent rays of the spring sun, the surface of the airstrip had
been reduced to a foot of packed snow, submerged beneath an inch of
water, providing a marvelous surface for a nice long gliding slide.
Five-zero Papa slid very well indeed, on a direct line heading for
Mandy's truck as it pulled to a halt in front of the post office. It was
a combination skid and spin; in fact 50 Papa was going around on its
back like a slow top for the second time, the ripping sound of tearing
wing fabric clearly audible to the stupefied witnesses in the cab of
Mandy's truck, just as the plane ran into them. Kate looked down,
fascinated, as one wing slid smoothly between the front and back tires,
and looked up just in time to see the wheel of one landing gear hit the
top of the driver's- side door with a solid thud that shook the cab and
rattled the passengers in it, although not as much as the grizzly had
done earlier.
The window bowed inward but did not break. There was the unmistakable
groan of bending metal, though. Kate, a little lightheaded, thought that
Mandy might not notice the dented bumper and the clawed finish and the
need for a front-end alignment on her brand new truck after all.
Her second thought was to wonder how full the Super Cub's tanks were,
one of which was at present resting directly beneath her ass.
Foolishly, she grabbed for the handle and shoved. The door, the right
gear of the plane jammed solidly against it, unsurprisingly did not
budge. "Out!" she roared. "Out! OUT! OUT!" Mr. Baker fumbled with the
passenger door and stumbled to
the ground. Kate, not standing on
ceremony, shoved Mrs. Baker and the husband out after him and scrambled
out herself to run around the truck. She sniffed, tense. No smell of
gasoline.
She went around to the Cub's right side and squatted to fold up the
door. A smell hit her in the face like a blow, powerful
61 enough to knock her on her butt. It wasn't gasoline, it was vomit.
She took a couple of deep, gasping breaths, muffled her face with a
sleeve and spoke through it. "George, are you okay?"
George looked at her, still suspended upside down in his seat harness,
bits of brown something spattered across the back of his head and neck.
"I hate breakup," he said.
"Never a dull moment," Kate agreed.
A rustle and the snap of a buckle came from the seat behind him. "No!"
George said. "Ben, don't-"
But Ben did, releasing the buckle on his seat belt. He fell heavily on
his head and shoulders against the ceiling of the fuselage. A cry of
pain and some futile thrashing around followed, after which George
contributed some acerbic commentary, because he now could not slide his
seat back to get out. Matters did not improve when Ben threw up again.
"AUGGHHH!" said George. He braced his feet up against the dash, reached
for the lever and shoved with all his might. The seat slid back and hit
Befi in the butt. Ben tumbled backwards in a corkscrew somersault into
the pile of U.S. Postal Service mail sacks that had been piled on the
floor in back of his seat and were now piled on the ceiling. It was too
much for him and he threw up for the third time.
George braced himself on one arm, popped his harness buckle and was
outside and on his feet a moment later. Thin-lipped and furious, he
addressed the area in language suitable to the situation. George was an
ex-helicopter pilot who had learned his trade under fire in Vietnam and
perfected it on the TransAlaska Pipeline before deserting the rotor for
fixed wing and starting an air taxi in the Park. He was also one of five
ex-husbands of Ramona Halford, the right-wing state senator representing
the area of Alaska that included the Park, which all by itself had been
an education in expletive deleted.
Over his shoulder, Kate caught sight of the widower, staring down into
the bed of the truck at the body, cocooned in a blue
62 plastic tarp. A few feet away stood the Bakers, color back in their
faces and by the wideness of their eyes evidently improving their
vocabulary with George's able assistance.
Cravenly, Kate ducked down again to help Ben Bingley out of the plane.
This wasn't easy, as Ben had heard George's lengthy and comprehensive
address and somehow received the impression that George might hold him
in some small measure accountable for the ground loop. He was of course
absolutely innocent of anything of the kind, but he had decided he would
stay in the plane for a while, like maybe until George went home, or
perhaps left the Park forever.
So he held on to the back of the pilot's seat, refusing to let Kate pull
it forward, until she had to kneel down in the slush. The aroma of
beer-based puke was gagging and Kate lost her temper. "Ben, stop being
such a big baby and get your ass out of this friggin' plane."
Ben was more scared of a mildly pissed Kate Shugak than he was of George
Perry at full volume and he wavered. "You promise you won't let him hurt
me?"
"I'll kill you, you stupid little shit!" George said from above.
"I promise," Kate said, more temperate now. Somebody had to be. "Come on
out, Ben."
"I don't know," Ben said doubtfully, "he sounds awful mad."
"He's just shook up from dinging the plane. Come on out, Ben."
"I'll rip your fucking guts out and use them for crab bait! "
"Maybe you could just bring me a beer," Ben said hopefully.
"I'll feed your sorry ass to the first bear to come down the pike!"
Kate winced, and was glad that in her current position she couldn't see
the expression on her three passengers' faces.
George ran out of breath and threats and Ben finally did come out,
standing so as to keep Kate between himself and the enraged pilot at all
times.
Kate began negotiations toward a truce and was making some headway when
Ben's wife appeared on the airstrip. It became immediately apparent that
he had way worse problems to deal with
63 than a plane wreck, an enraged bush pilot and vomit down the front of
his shirt.
Cindy had left the house without her jacket but not without her 9mm
Smith and Wesson, which she held in a business-like grip with the
business end pointed at Ben.
"Whoa!" George said, startled out of his wrath.
"You little prick," Cindy said.
"Now, Cindy," Kate said, eyes almost crossed on the barrel beneath her
nose, trying to see if the pistol was loaded. She could tell it was an
automatic, but the way Cindy kept waving it around she couldn't tell if
there was a clip in the butt Might be one in the chamber anyway, so she
wasn't safe whether she could see the clip or not, and stopped trying.
"Now, honey," Ben said, peering fearfully over Kate's shoulder.
"I hate breakup," George said.
"Get out of my way, Kate!" Cindy snarled. "That son of a bitch stole the
kids' quarterly dividends and probably drank up every last damn dime!
Why the hell don't you people do something so he can't get his hands on
the money!"
"I'm not on the board," Kate said.
Cindy dismissed this spineless and specious attempt at diversion with a
contemptuous wave of the pistol that brought George into the line of
fire. George took a hasty step backward, slipped and sat down hard in a
puddle. "You're Ekaterina's granddaughter, you say jump, they say how
high, who cares about titles! How am I going to feed the kids until the
salmon start running? Huh? How?"
Kate had no answer for her, and Cindy's smoldering gaze fixed upon her
cringing husband. "I told you, Ben, I told you if you ever did that
again I'd kill you!"
She meant it, too. Bang! went the pistol. The bullet went into the
driver's side door of Mandy's truck with a clang, missing the right tire
on the Super Cub by an inch.
Definitely loaded, Kate thought, orchestrating a graceful swan dive.
64 "Hey!" George roared indignantly. "Watch out for my goddam plane!"
Bang! went the pistol again, and George decided better the Cub than him
and dove after Kate.
Ben was left standing all alone, a sickly smile spreading across his
face. "Now, honey-" he began. Bang! went the pistol again, and he broke
and ran. Bang! Bang! and Cindy took off in pursuit.
Their thudding footsteps faded, followed by some crashing of brush and
yelps of pain. Kate, sandwiched between the Cub's wing and the pickup's
differential, raised her head to survey the area. Nobody shooting in her
immediate vicinity. This was good. She looked over at George. His eyes
were squeezed shut and he'd managed to jam himself almost all the way
beneath the truck, the bed of which had been ventil
ated at least twice
that Kate could see from her prone position. Kate wasn't worried. At
this point Mandy would barely notice the bullet holes.
"So, George," she said, "you think we should go after them?"
"Nope," George said, opening his eyes.
"Me neither," she decided. It was breakup, and she had nineteen other
things to do without adding the arbitration of Ben and Cindy Bingley's
