by Fire
The young woman's face turned dead white and her body swayed as if receiving a blow.
Moses turned his back on them. The young man muttered something beneath his breath, grabbed her arm, and hustled her out of the bar.
Liam watched the door shut behind them, and turned to Moses. "What did you say to her?"
Moses was staring at his hands. They were powerful hands: brown, seamed, with large knuckles and thick, well-kept fingernails. "I told her his father's name," he said, and the sorrow and foreboding in his voice stopped Liam in his tracks.
Confused, Liam said, "She didn't know it before?"
"Oh yeah, she knew it," Moses said glumly. "She just didn't know it."
Bill came down the bar. "You okay?"
Moses dredged up a smile. "I will be." The smile turned lecherous. "I know I will be later."
She allowed herself to be sidetracked, and leaned across the bar for a kiss. Again, Liam was awed and a little embarrassed by the display of passion, the obvious appetite, the frank lust.
Moses pulled back and saw the look on Liam's face. "What, you think people over sixty can't have sex or what? Just because you ain't been getting any lately don't mean it's over for the rest of us! Now get the hell out of here! She's waiting on you, God knows why."
"Who is?"
"Who is--don't get cute with me, you dumb bastard, I'm your sifu. Her house is out on the bluff. Go south on Main, turn left on the river road, go three miles, and turn right just after the pavement ends." Moses turned away, and then turned back. "And if you have the strength of will to haul your sorry ass out of a bed with Wy Chouinard in it, stand post for at least twenty minutes tonight." He leveled a finger at Liam, the same finger he had leveled at Wolfe. "You don't use it, you lose it."
The glint in his eye told Liam that Moses wasn't referring solely to tai chi.
* * *
NINE
The Blazer was the property of the state and as such should only have been driven on official business, but since Liam didn't have a car yet, along with an apartment or an iron, he decided to risk the wrath of observant citizens and drive it anyway.
Like DeCreft's, Wy's house was on the river bluff. The road in was, again, almost but not quite lost in a tangle of brush and trees. When he had bumped his way to the end of it, he found a surprisingly neat clapboard cottage painted white, with a detached garage and shop, also painted white. Both buildings were old but well kept.
Wy's truck was in the garage. Good. There was a battered white Isuzu pickup parked behind it. Wy had visitors. Not so good. He climbed the steps to the door and raised his hand to knock. The door opened before he could.
"Liam!" Wy said brightly.
There were two people standing behind her in the act of shrugging into their jackets. A tall man with white hair, and a stocky woman with intent green eyes. He recognized them at once from the plane: the other Alaskan Old Fart, with Daughter.
"I don't think you've met Dan and Jo, have you?" Wy said, still in the bright, artificial voice. "Daniel Dunaway, Joan Dunaway, this is Liam Campbell. Liam, this is Daniel and his daughter, Jo. Dan is a friend of my parents. Jo and I went to high school and college together."
"How do you do?" Liam said, holding out his hand.
After a moment of hesitation, Daniel Dunaway took it. His grip was dry, callused, and hard. When Liam turned to Jo, she had her arms folded across her chest and was staring at him out of narrowed eyes. Liam thought better of holding out his hand to her.
Daniel settled one big hand on Wy's shoulder. "It was great seeing you, girl. I'll call your folks when we get back, let them know you're all right."
"Thanks, Dan."
Jo broke off staring at Liam long enough to give Wy a fierce hug. "Anything you need, you call, you hear? And I'm coming out over Labor Day for a week or ten days, okay?"
"Okay."
Daniel Dunaway put one large hand on Wy's shoulder and bent a forbidding stare on Liam. "Wy's one of the family."
"Yes, sir," Liam said.
"She's like blood to us. To me."
"Yes, sir."
The older man gave a curt nod. "So long as you know."
His daughter was a hair less subtle. As she brushed by him on her way out, she said in a low voice, "You hurt her again and you're toast, asshole."
"Yes, ma'am," Liam said. It seemed the most politic response.
The Dunaways climbed into the rental, waved good-bye, and were off.
"Friends of yours?" Liam said neutrally.
"The best," Wy agreed. "Come on in."
"What do they do?" Liam said, following her inside.
"Daniel's retired, sort of. Used to be a heavy-duty mechanic; he's got an IBEW pension. Nowadays he amuses himself with hunting, fishing, and some wheeling and dealing around the Bay. He's got a piece of property out at the airport--he's trying to sell it to one of the local fishermen."
"And his daughter?"
"Jo's a reporter for the Daily News. She just came along for the ride, and for the chance to visit with me."
Liam got his first good look at her, and blinked. Wy was wearing an apron. At least he thought that was what it was--he'd never seen her wearing one before. If he wasn't mistaken, there was lace around the hem.
"I'm just cooking dinner. Would you like some? I tried to get Dan and Jo to stay but they had to catch a plane."
He opened his mouth and his stomach growled, loud enough to be heard over the strains of Constance Demby floating in from elsewhere in the house. Constance Demby was one of his favorite composers, and he had given a CD of hers to Wy. If he wasn't mistaken, the particular cut playing just now was "Oceans Without Shores."
"Well," Wy said, bright and chipper, "I guess you're hungry." She gave a hostessy little laugh that sounded so unlike her he almost asked what was wrong.
Instead, he followed her through to the kitchen. It was a large room that took up the whole south side of the house. The south-facing wall was almost all window. A door opened out onto a large deck that faced the mouth of the Nushagak River where it flowed into Bristol Bay.
The broad expanse of grayish brown water, more than a mile across, moved steadily, powerfully, inexorably south between low bluffs thickly encrusted with trees and brush. Here, the current had swept a stand of spruce trees growing too close to the edge for comfort out to sea. There, it had carved out a backwater and lined a sand beach in a perfect crescent shape with a tidy row of driftwood bleached white by water and time. Farther down, where freshwater met salt, a dozen little estuaries nourished tall stands of marsh grass and dozens of species of wildfowl, from the elegant Canada geese to widgeons with calls like rubber duck squeeze toys to the long-legged, long-billed lesser yellowlegs. An immature eagle, as yet uncertain of the newfound power of his great wings, landed for a breather in a nesting area and was instantly dive-bombed by a flock of furious seagulls. A male merganser, red of neck and of temper, chased off a rival for the affections of the female merganser at his side. A large salmon jumped free of the current and smacked back into the water again with a large, loud splash that echoed clearly up to the top of the bluff and through the open windows of the house perched there.
The sun was still well up above the southwestern horizon, pouring an unceasing flow of golden light over them all. That same sunlight gilded the interior of Wy's house, and Liam tore his eyes away from the incredible view and took stock of his more immediate surroundings. There was a dining room table big enough to seat eight on the left and the kitchen on the right, the two separated by a counter and passthrough. Wy pulled out a stool and he sat down and accepted the glass she handed to him. One sip, and he knew the buttery-smooth slide of twentyyear-old Glenmorangie, which retailed for something like eighty bucks a bottle in Anchorage. God knew how much the stuff cost in the Bush, and Wy didn't drink hard liquor. He picked up the bottle and looked at the label. It was about two-thirds full, the same as the bottle at Bill's. Had she bought it from Bill to serve especially to him? That w
as how Moses had known what he drank, he realized with a rush of something like relief. There. He always appreciated a nice, rational explanation for the oddities of life.
A little voice whispered that the explanation might not be quite that easy in the long run, but he banished it at once and took another sip. "Nice," he said, putting down the glass. He didn't want anything about this night to be clouded in his memory. "How did you know I was coming?"
She was stirring something in a boiling pot. "What? Oh. Bill called. Said you were on your way."
"Where's Tim?"
Her face darkened. "In his room." She managed a smile. "He'd better be studying for his civics exam, or I won't just ground him until the next century, I'll ground him for life."
Liam studied the golden brown liquid in his glass. "We've got some catching up to do."
He felt rather than saw her pause. "Yes," she said, her voice a little breathless but determined enough for all that. "Yes, we do."
"You first," they said together. Their eyes met and they both broke into laughter. It was nervous laughter, but nevertheless it sounded good to Liam. It must have to Wy, too, because when the phone rang she said, "Shoot!"
"Let the machine pick up," Liam suggested. Phone and machine were sitting on the kitchen counter.
She hesitated, hand hovering. "No," she said, and gave him a rueful smile. "Might be work." She picked up the receiver. "Hello? Oh." Her face changed. "Just a minute." She held the receiver to her chest. "Liam, I'm sorry. This is kind of personal. Would you mind?"
He did, big time, but it wouldn't do to say so, or at least not yet.
He wandered into the living room, listening to the sound of her voice as he inspected the furnishings.
"Harry, I sent you a copy of the police report, and a copy of the statement made by the doctor who examined him when I brought him home with me. Plus Mrs. Kapotak's statement. You know what he's been through. He can't go back there. He won't go back there, and even if he would I wouldn't let him."
The living room was smaller than the kitchen and dining room. One small window looked out on a stand of birch and alder. There was a blue denim couch and two armchairs, shabby but comfortable. The beige carpet was worn but scrupulously clean. A do-it-yourself bookshelf stood against one wall, filled to overflowing with paperbacks, some history, some mystery, some both, and an eclectic mixture of nonfiction: The Home Book of Taxidermy. The 1998 Federal Aviation Regulations and Aeronautical Information Manual. The Gun Digest and The Shooter's Bible, The Handbook of Knots and Splices, The Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants, Bears of the World, a Yupik-English dictionary.
Liam pulled this last out and thumbed through it. "Ik'ikika" was defined as an exclamation meaning "so much" or "so many" or "so big." So much or so many or so big what? Liam wondered. Probably salmon, he decided, and replaced the dictionary on the shelf. Every other word of Native Alaskan he'd ever run across-Athabascan, Eyak, or Yupik--seemed to relate to salmon in some way. If it was Inupiaq now, he'd figure maybe it would modify snow. He'd heard the Inupiaq had fifty different words for snow.
An entertainment center held a small television and a component stereo system. The videotape collection was not genre-specific, either, including as it did The Little Mermaid, How to Steal a Million, Casablanca, Ruthless People, The Hospital, Little Shop of Horrors, and Aliens. The CD'S ranged from the Beach Boys to the Indigo Girls. He felt a pang at the knowledge that Jenny and Wy had had something in common.
There were four CD'S by the Neville Brothers and a dozen by Jimmy Buffett. Wy must have been hanging out at Bill's and been converted. There was the CD by Constance Demby, another by Louis Gottschalk, other albums he recognized as gifts from him. He was surprised she hadn't tossed them, and glad.
He himself hadn't been able to throw away anything she had given him, not the copies of her favorite books, not the picture of the moose triplets she'd taken during a charter into Denali, not even the Don Henley tape she'd made for him, which like to melt his eardrums the first and only time he'd played it.
Wy's voice sharpened. "Harry, what judge in his right mind is going to send a twelve-yearold boy back to his mother after what she did to him?"
There was a neat stack of magazines on the coffee table. Liam riffled through them and found a catalogue for Sparky's Pilot Shop. He thumbed through it. Everything you ever needed if you drove a plane. Sparky's F7C, a flight computer that would plot your course, file your flight plan, chart your location, predict your destination, divine your arrival time, and sugar your coffee, all for $69.95. There were videotapes: The Wonderful World of Floats, The Art of Formation Flying, Taming the Taildragger. There were SicSacs for sale, just what they sounded like, and Little Johns, also just what they sounded like. There was a Mile High Pin (specify gold or silver) that Liam couldn't figure out. What was so special about getting to 5,280 feet in an airplane? Ten thousand jets did it every day.
Wy said, "What the hell am I paying you for? You're supposed to be Tim's advocate, Harry." A pause. "Then .be his advocate!"
Liam wandered not so casually down the hall, walking softly. The boy's door was open a crack, and the boy himself was lying on his bed, Walkman earphones clamped to his head, textbook open in front of him. Even from the hallway Liam could hear the faint staticky sound of rap music coming from the headset. The boy didn't look up.
A whole generation of Americans was going to grow up deaf, Liam thought. Sony had a lot to answer for.
He padded on to the next room, Wy's. It was small and neat--a single bed with a down comforter, a closet, a chest of drawers. Unlike Laura Nanalook's, the top of Wy's dresser was neatly arranged. She had a small embroidered box she had brought back from Greece the summer her parents took her there, which held all of her jewelry--a dozen pairs of earrings, the strand of pearls her mother had given her when she graduated from high school, the gold nugget watch her father had given her on the same day.
He opened a few drawers. The second held a purse, a couple of scarves, gloves, and three nightshirts. He found what he was looking for buried beneath the nightshirts.
But it wasn't the discovery he made, or even the unconscious fears it confirmed that gave him pause; it was what it came wrapped in that held him rooted in place, immobile, speechless with shock. One trembling hand smoothed the vibrant blue spill of silk, the rich fabric catching on the roughness of his skin, and he had a sudden and unbearably clear recollection of the time and place when he had seen it last. He forgot who he was and the shame that had become invested in that man, he forgot the disgrace that had caused his reduction in rank and his posting to Newenham, he forgot even the bloody, lifeless sprawl that had been Bob DeCreft. He looked at the length of blue silk and was instantly transported back in time to those few halcyon days in Anchorage, so long ago and so far away.
It was the first week of September again, two, going on three years before, an Indian summer of warm, golden days and crisp, clear nights. Liam had driven to Tok, where Wy had picked him up in a plane she'd borrowed from another pilot (they had always been discreet to the point of paranoia), and they had flown into Anchorage, landing at the Lake Hood strip. The alder and birch and cottonwood were a continuous, rippling golden mass, the sky a bright, deep blue, and the peaks of the Chugach Mountains wore only the faintest layer of termination dust, winter as promise instead of threat.
They had four days. They biked the Coastal Trail, shopped along Merrill Field for parts for Wy's Cub (including a set of tundra tires whose possibilities Liam found perfectly appalling), bought Liam a new pistol (a Smith and Wesson 457 that kicked like a horse and cost more), stocked up for the winter at all the used bookstores, held hands through a movie, had gyoza at Yamato Ya and four-cheese pizza at L'Aroma and pasta alla arrabiata and too much red wine at Villa Nova.
They had four nights. They came home every evening to the Copper Whale Inn on the corner of Fifth and L to spend long hours in the enameled brass bed, loving and sleeping and waking to love again. Their host, a
friendly, chatty young man, thought they were newlyweds and left them to themselves. They would have been grateful, if they'd noticed.
There were discoveries. They both loved raspberries, playground swings, the American Southwest, the sound track from the movie The Last of the Mohicans. Flying terrified him; it was her profession. He'd quit smoking, but walked slowly through the smoking section of a restaurant inhaling deeply for his nicotine fix. "In lieu of a bowling alley," he told her, grinning. She wore contact lenses she had to remove for twelve continuous hours once a week, and after he got over the mild shock he decided he kind of liked her in glasses. He listened to classical music, she sang backup for the Ronettes, and they wrangled over the radio settings in their rented Ford. She wanted the tipsy clams at Simon and Seafort's, and when there were no reservations available he asked the hostess, "Well, then, do you maybe have something left over from lunch?"
They read to each other from Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, and they talked, nonstop, an unceasing flow of communication on every level that amazed them with its ease and empathy. "I didn't know," she said one night. "I didn't know I could talk to a man about everything, about work and poetry, about music and the movies, about society and sex."
Oh yes, the sex. They came together the first time like thunder, ardent, urgent, demanding, and it was so easy and so effortless and so incredibly satisfying that they both lay stunned in the aftermath.
Later, when there was time for play, she bound his wrists with a long blue silk scarf and he, the man always and forever in control, astounded himself by lying back and loving it. He made her come and come again, with his hands, his cock, his tongue, and she was amazed at her response and, she confessed, her head hidden in his shoulder, a little alarmed at her loss of control. He rolled to his back and said, "Feel free," and she startled them both by slithering down his torso and taking him in her mouth, until he was as mindless as she had been. "Jesus, woman," he said the fourth night, "is this the way it is with everyone? Have we been missing out?"
