"What kind?"
"Aerospace."
"You want to build rockets?" "I want to fly them," she said.
"Oh," Jim said. "You a Star Trek fan?"
Her smile came back, wider this time, matched by a twinkle in the brown eyes. "Star Wars." "Aha," Jim said. " ' weapons--"
"--and a hokey religion--" she chimed in irresistibly.
"--are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid,' " they both intoned.
She giggled. It was an enchanting sound. In the next instant she was serious again, her voice back to its whisper. "They never should have taken Darth Vader's mask off." "In Jedit he said.
"Yeah."
"What should they have done instead?" She thought about that, very grave. "They should have let us see his face in Luke's," she said at last.
Jim was trying to decipher this cryptic utterance and form a reply that wouldn't get him laughed out of town, when Stephanie's face changed. Jim watched her realize that she was talking to a stranger on a lonely road late at night, a male stranger, and a gussuk male stranger, at that. She stood up.
Jim did, too. She was right; she shouldn't be talking to strangers.
Still, he said, "You want some help getting your Cub home?"
She shook her head, ponytail whipping vigorously back and forth.
"Yeah, well, I guess you got it out here all right." He stood looking down at girl and model plane. "Why are you out here so late at night, Stephanie?"
Her change of expression was swift and immediate. All she did was shrug, but Jim felt the definite slam of a door in his face. "I'd like to see you try out her wings in daylight sometime. If that's okay?"
Another shrug, a good way to return a noncommittal answer to a specific question. She tucked the plane beneath an arm and set off down the road in the opposite direction from the airport.
"Good-bye," he called after her. "Nice meeting you."
She hesitated, and looked over her shoulder. Their eyes met straight on for the first time, and he thought he saw her smile, but he could have been wrong. She started walking again, a sturdy, determined little figure, neon pink lights flashing from her heels.
It was a lonely stretch of road, and he worried about her for a moment.
But she lived here and he didn't, and she obviously knew where she was going. Still, he wondered what her parents were thinking, to let her out at this hour.
He wondered if her parents knew she was out at all.
He shook his head and retraced his steps back to the airport.
"Hey, you need a ride to town?"
The question came from a guy in a pickup, the bed loaded with gear, parked in front of the main terminal building.
"Yeah, sure, thanks," Jim said, and climbed in.
"Where you headed?"
"Ah, the docks," Jim said with sudden inspiration.
"Great, me, too," the driver said, and put the truck in gear.
"Mike Mason."
"Jim Churchill."
"You looking for work, Jim?"
Jim shook his head, hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the receding airport. "Got a job. Baird Air."
"Oh, yeah?" Mason laughed. He was a wiry, sandy haired man with a thin face and an eager expression, as if he was excited about what was around the corner, as if life had not yet kicked him in the teeth too many times to dim that excitement. He wore a shiny new gold band on his left hand that he kept touching, tapping against the wheel, rubbing between his fingers, as if to reassure himself that it was really and truly there. "Yeah," Jim said, "I just started today."
"What's he pay?"
Jim realized he didn't have a clue, but he had his pride. "Top dollar."
"He ought to," Mason said frankly. "He works his help like dogs, is what I hear."
"Woof," Jim said.
Mason laughed. "I'm a fisherman myself."
"I figured, from the gear. Salmon?"
Mason nodded. "I just tore up a set on a deadhead last week." It didn't seem to bother him much, in spite of the dollar value of the gear involved, which ran into the thousands. Maybe the wedding band accounted for his unquenchable optimism.
Just wait, Jim thought. He himself couldn't get along with women he wasn't married to. He skittered away from that thought and said, "Who do you deliver to?"
"Whoever pays the best," Mason replied.
"Who's been paying the best lately?" "Lately, it's a tossup," Mason said, braking for a pair of Canada geese and nine fuzzy offspring grumbling sleepily along in their wake. They made it safely across the road, and the truck rolled forward. "The Japanese are usually the highest bidders, but there's buyers coming from all over now. Korea, Taiwan, Russia, you name it."
Russia. Suddenly Jim remembered why he was in Bering. Not to mention the body bag currently enroute to Anchorage and the medical examiner.
"Russia?" he said casually, trying to sound like a rube. "You mean like actual Russians from actual Russia?"
"Yeah, although they're awful picky about what they'll take. Guess the communist manifesto has given way to crass commercialism. About time, too. Better they should spend their money on fish than on bombs."
"Ahuh," Jim said. "I personally have never felt the need to glow in the dark."
Mason gave him a suspicious glance, as if he doubted Jim's patriotism, but you get that a lot in the Alaskan Bush and Jim felt safe in ignoring it.
Jim thought for a moment. Mason was a fisherman, Burinin aka Burianovich had purportedly fallen from a boat on the docks. It had to be common knowledge by now, and natural curiosity should serve as a reason for asking. "Speaking of Russians, we had to load the body of one on a plane for Anchorage this evening. You hear anything about that?"
"Oh hell, yeah, I practically saw it happen." Jim went on alert, but he said casually, "No shit?"
"Oh yeah, man, it was a mess. I was just finishing up delivery to Peter Pan when there was this big hooraw about three boats down. We all went to look." He shuddered. "Man, he was a mess. Blood everywhere."
Jim reflected on how odd it was that Baird and Mason, two men who wrested their living from sea and air, could be so squeamish about a little blood. To be fair, he'd seen more than his share.
"What happened?"
"He fell. Pitched headfim right off the side of the boat and landed on his head next to the gangway."
"What did he fall from?" Mason shrugged. "Nobody really said. There were Russians all over the place yelling in Russian, and then the trooper showed up and tried to calm everybody down. Easy on the eyes, the new trooper, you seen her yet?"
Not from head-down inside a tote, Jim thought. "No."
"Not that I'd be interested," Mason added hastily, fingering his wedding band.
"Doesn't hurt to look," Jim said soothingly. "Right, right, locking's no sin." Mason didn't seem convinced. "Anyway, this one Russian, hairy little bastard, looks like Mr. Spock, you know, with the ears, he yells at the rest of the Russians to shut up, or at least they did so I guess that's what he said. The trooper asked him if anybody saw what happened, and he said no, and they all went along with him."
Jim caught the inference. "But you don't think so?"
"Well ... " Mason's voice trailed off. "There were about thirty of them, is all. Seems like somebody would have seen something."
"Anybody from shore see anything?"
Mason shook his head. "One guy, beach ganger, said he heard the sound of the fall and went to look. That was about it."
"What do they think happened?"
Mason shifted down to cross a narrow, railless wooden bridge over one of many streams. "The trooper got out a tape measure, and did some climbing around on the boat. Said from where he landed he must have fallen from the starboardside ladder to the catwalk outside the wheelhouse."
Again there was doubt. "But?"
Mason shrugged again, irritably. "Hell, how should I know? Trooper's paid to look into that sort of thing, she said how it was, that's how it was."
Jim ma
intained a not unhopeful silence.
"Hell," Mason said again. "It's just that the bulkhead of the Kosygin is well inside the gunnel, four feet or more. If he fell from the catwalk he'd hit the deck, maybe the gunnel."
"But not the dock?"
Mason shook his head. "Maybe in high seas, with the boat rolling back and forth. But not tied up in Bering."
"Could he have fallen from the gunnel?"
"Could have. He even could have tripped and fallen down the gangway, except he was to one side of it instead of at the foot."
"What makes the trooper so sure he fell from the catwalk?"
"She found something caught on the catwalk railing, a piece of clothing or something. She put it in a Ziploc and took it away. Might have been a piece of his shirt, something like that."
"Oh."
"Anyway. Seen lots of nutty stuff happen at sea, never mind shore."
"I guess." Of course, Jim thought, if the body had been found on the deck of the boat, the boat would have been subject to search. As things stood, the scene of the accident had been removed to the dock, public property as opposed to private. Domestic territory as opposed to foreign. Convenient for the owners of the boat however you looked at it.
The road meandered around lakes and more lakes, and houses grew gradually closer together as they reached the center of town. Jim had heard that Venice, another city built on lakes, was slowly sinking into the Adriatic; he wondered where Bering would be in another decade or so.
Of course, by then they would have fished out the salmon the same way they had the king crab and the halibut and it wouldn't matter, except to the Yupik.
Mason let Jim out with a wave good-bye and drove away. Jim looked at his watch. It was three o'clock, and although the dawn was more than two hours away the sky was perceptibly lighter, having faded from mauve to a pastel shade of lavender. No stars, he thought, standing still and staring up. They disappeared from the night sky from May to August, displaced by the midnight sun.
He remembered stars in California, lying on his back in an artichoke field, next to Sally Ann Schaefer, the artichoke field's owner's daughter. She'd been two years older than he was, a senior to his sophomore, and in those few sweet hours he'd learned about artichokes, and about other things as well.
He imagined telling Kate Shugak that story. He imagined the sneer that would follow, the snide comment, something about how every one of his memories seemed to be tied to a roll in the hay, or in this case, artichokes. Why shouldn't she; it wasn't as if he hadn't lived that life, cultivated that image, and had a great time while he was at it.
He'd never intentionally hurt anyone, he'd made sure his partners were on the same page before they turned it with him, together. He had no regrets, and some great memories.
He realized his teeth were grinding together, and made a deliberate effort to relax his jaw muscles.
The town itself was quiet. A hum of activity came from the direction of the river. A lane led between two two-story buildings, one a warehouse with a Sealand sign on the side. From the other he heard the drone and clank of machinery. He walked down the lane to emerge onto a wooden dock as wide as a two-lane road, where he was nearly run over by a forklift.
"Get outta the way, dipshit!" the driver yelled.
Not anything Baird hadn't been yelling at him all day. He dodged back a step and the forklift roared by.
The dock seemed to go on forever in both directions, curving with the northern, convex edge of the shoreline. The water was deep brown and moved slowly, almost sluggishly, bearing boats, skiffs, tankers, uprooted trees, deadheads, a loose oar, a half-submerged cardboard box, a plastic Sprite bottle, a waterlogged dory, a tangled section of meshed gear, maybe part of Mike Mason's; all of it ever and inexorably down, down, down to the bay and the ocean beyond. It looked like something out of Mark Twain, and Jim caught himself looking for a raft with a boy and a man on board, heading down the river before one of them was sold there.
Floodlights fixed to the walls of buildings and the rigging of boats lit up the scene. Processors taller than the canneries on shore were moored to the sea wall bow to stern to bow, and occasionally side by next. The fishing boats were most of them open skiffs with only the most rudimentary of cabins, if they had cabins at all, and were rafted together three and five at a time. The area was a hive of activity, forklifts beeping, hydraulic lifts whining, lines snapping and tackle clattering, black rubber fuel hoses slithering up and down, beach crews yelling and cursing as they loaded and unloaded fish and supplies.
Fishers never sleep. Not between May and August. Unlike the stars.
Some of the fishing boats were tied up to some of the processors and were delivering their catch direct. Other boats were tied up to spaces between the processors and were delivering to onshore buyers. Here, a buyer sorted the best-looking reds to be frozen in the round and shipped air freight to points Outside and international. There, a tote of more scarred fish was dumped onto a conveyor belt that disappeared into a cannery, destined for one-pound tails and half-pound flats beneath generic labels on Safeway shelves.
Jim dodged people and fish and made his way up the docks, passing the Kyoto Kozushima out of Edo, Japan, the Chongju out of Seoul, South Korea, the Northern Harvester out of Anacortes, Washington, the Arctic Princess out of Freeport, Oregon, until he came to the Kosygin, out of Vladivostok, Russia.
Alone among the processors, the Kosygin appeared deserted. The bridge was dark. The boom was still. The deck was bare, of fish, deckhands and beach gang. There was no one at the head of the gangway that stretched down to the dock. There wasn't anyone at the foot of the gangway, either. The hull was rusted right down to its trim line, which was riding three feet above the water. It wasn't exactly overloaded.
He found an overturned fiberglass tote in a corner that left his line of sight unhindered in both directions and settled in to watch. A half hour passed. The light increased, the beach gangs finished unloading half a dozen gillnetters, and knocked off for a break. Jim ambled over and got in line for coffee and enormous sugar doughnuts.
"Great morning," a voice next to him said.
He turned to see a short, slight man, about fifty. His hair was hidden under a Greek fisherman's cap and he wore stained brown Carhartt overalls. His chin was stubbled with three-day-old beard and he looked at Jim out of deepset dark eyes, face creased into a slight smile.
"You're new." Nothing to do but agree to that, so Jim said, "Yeah."
"Thought so. I'm the foreman, so I would know." "Oh hell," Jim said.
The smile widened into a grin, deepening the crow's feet at the corners of his eyes. "Gene Brady."
"Jim Churchill." Jim stuck what was left of the doughnut in his mouth, wiped the sugar from his palm on the seat of his jeans and accepted Brady's hand. "Sorry about this," he mumbled around the doughnut.
"No biggee." Brady examined him with a critical eye. "You don't look like a bum."
"I'm not, I'm gainfully employed."
"Where?"
Jim made a vague gesture with his coffee cup and swallowed the rest of the doughnut in one indigestible lump. "Baird Air." The grin became a laugh.
"What's so funny?"
"You working for Baird. Anybody working for Baird."
Jim relaxed. "Yeah, well." He shrugged and did his best to look rueful.
"Step into my office." Brady indicated the edge of the dock.
Since Jim had a bellyful of Brady's doughnut and he was working his way through a cup of Brady's coffee, he accepted the invitation.
"How'd you wind up in Bering?" Brady said.
Jim gave a fleeting thought to Gamble. "Job Service."
"Ah." He caught Jim's sideways glance and grinned again. "No offense.
Some of my best friends were sent out from Job Service." "Yeah, right,"
Jim said.
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 10 - Midnight Come Again Page 10
