Gamble had told him he was going in as ground crew for an independent airfreight business which operated out of the Bering airport. “You’re a pilot, you’ll fit right in,” the Fibbie had said with an airy wave of his hand, and right then and there Jim should have known enough to run for his life. When he located the ramshackle building at the other end of the airstrip that housed Baird Air, he wished he had.
The hangar slanted to one side like a sailor on shore leave for the first time in months. The office, a smaller version with windows, leaned against the first building as if it was a drinking buddy the first had picked up on the town. Both had corrugated tin roofs adorned with generously sized rust spots, and the orange-and-white logo over both doors had faded almost to invisibility. A large lake nibbled at the back edge of the property, on which there seemed to be a float plane landing or taking off every five minutes. Baird Air was directly below the approach. A seedy operation in a seedy location. Wonderful.
Like most pilots, Jim was uneasy when anyone’s hand but his was on the stick. He tried not to flinch each time a plane roared overhead. Adding to his unease were seven propellers of various sizes mounted on the exterior wall of the hangar, all with textbook groundloop curls to their tips. He counted to be sure. Seven times someone had dinged a plane. He hoped it wasn’t the same someone. He hoped if it was that that someone wasn’t still flying, in particular any of the planes taking off out back.
Inside the office everything, chairs, desk, file cabinet, coffee pot and radio; everything was patched with duct tape. Some of it was held together with duct tape, like the cushion around the back of the visitor’s chair. A Budweiser clock ticked loudly on the wall, next to a map of the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta framed nattily in silver duct tape. There were a lot of lines drawn on it in grease pencil from Bering to outlying villages. A bundle of rolled-up maps had been tossed carelessly behind the desk, all of whose corners had been reinforced with duct tape.
He turned and tripped over the coffee table sitting between the couch and the desk. It was cheap veneer with three of the four corners chipped down to the pressed wood. The fourth corner was caked with mud, as if someone propped his feet there early and often. There was a corresponding hollow in the seat of the black Naugahyde couch, which appeared to be held together with, someone’s original idea, electrician’s tape. At least the colors matched.
On the desk was a notepad, blank, and one Bic pen with the top chewed off. A desk calendar had been ripped all the way down to April twenty-seventh. A copy of Aviation Week lay folded back to an article on a float-plane accident in Southeast, the last words of the pilot reported as, “Oh, s***.” An overflowing ashtray made from a one-pound coffee can and what looked like river silt sat on a pile of paperwork. On top of the pile was a check for—he blinked, and looked again. He moved the ashtray to be sure. Twelve thousand dollars. Dated June fifteenth. Two weeks before.
“Who the hell are you?”
Jim looked up to see a man in the doorway, scowling at him from behind a squat stogie which glowed red and emitted regular puffs of smoke like a miniature steam engine. He was short and fat, with thin white hair that had arranged itself in a kind of tonsure effect. Pendulous pink cheeks quivered when he talked, and enormous saddlebag hips moved independently of the rest of him when he walked. His bib overalls were gray, stained beyond all hope of washing clean and cut off to just above a pair of pink, pudgy knees. Shiny black rubber boots came up to mid-calf. He appeared to be wearing nothing else. “Well?” He reached inside his overalls to scratch at something, or maybe to go for a gun.
Unhurriedly, Jim set the coffee can down. “I’m Jim Churchill. Your new hire. Job Service said you were expecting me.”
The man looked Jim over, grunted, shifted the stogie from his left cheek to his right and a wad of chewing tobacco from his right cheek to his left. He spat out a stream which landed three inches from Jim’s right toe. Jim noticed the generally brown character of the rest of the office floor, and deduced that this man didn’t hold with spitoons.
“Well, you’re big enough to handle the freight, I guess. You know how to run a radio?”
“I—”
“Cause you don’t, you can just hightail your butt on outta here. I’ve had it up to my eyebrows with the yoyos them dopes in Anchorage send me; most of you couldn’t find your ass with two hands and a flashlight. Not to mention which you’re all lazy.” He glared. “Not to mention which every last one of you’s fresh outta jail.”
Jim met the man’s fulminating gaze head-on without flinching, and spoke to the only inference that mattered. “I’m not lazy,” he said firmly. “I’m just very well organized.”
There was a brief pause. A slow smile spread across the man’s face. “Jacob Baird,” he said. “You can call me Baird.” He pulled his hand from beneath his overalls and stuck it out.
With real heroism, Jim took it.
“I’m your boss.”
“I got that much.”
“I own this here operation.”
“I got that, too.”
“You’ll be working twelve on, twelve off, noon to midnight, ’cepting the days you work more, no exceptions.”
“I was told.”
“Time and a half is all I go, no double time for the holidays.”
“Understood.”
“It gets to be the Fourth of July and you’re whining either cause you have to work or cause you’re not getting paid enough, I’ll kick your ass into the Kusko.”
“I’ll bend over and kiss it good-bye,” Jim said amiably. He liked Baird.
“All right then. What’s today?” Baird picked up the desk calendar. “Well, shit.” He slammed it down again.
“July first,” Jim said.
“Jesus, is it July already?” Baird looked around for the time.
Jim looked at his watch. “It’s two o’clock.”
“You’re on then, until midnight, when your relief shows up.” He looked over Jim’s shoulder. “Well, hey, what the hell are you doing here?”
“I brought the grocery list,” a voice began from the doorway, and then cut off abruptly.
Jim spun around like he’d been shot.
A joyous bark rang off the tottering steel ribs of the hangar and four sets of toenails skittered across the cement floor. One hundred and forty pounds of half wolf, half husky hit him square in the chest and knocked him solidly on his back on the floor stained brown with tobacco and spit.
“Oof!” He didn’t have time to say anything else, as his face was being comprehensively licked by a very long, very sandpapery, very enthusiastic tongue.
He sat up with a jerk, toppling Mutt to the floor.
A small woman stood in the doorway, framed by the afternoon sun streaming in around her. Her face was in shadow, but he would have recognized the outline of that figure in his sleep, as he had recognized the low rasp of her voice. “Kate?”
The familiar husky rasp of her voice was welcome, if its words were not. “What the hell are you doing here, Chopin?”
He stared at her, his mouth literally hanging open, unable to believe his eyes.
Baird’s voice seemed to come from a long way away. “You know this joker, Kathy?”
There was a long silence, while Kate and Jim stared at each other. For a moment he thought she would deny all knowledge of him. “Yeah,” she said finally. “I know him.”
After that first startled exclamation, she had, it appeared, nothing further to say to him. She met his eyes with no hesitation. She displayed no curiosity. She wasn’t happy to see him, not a big surprise, as he couldn’t remember a time when she had been. She wasn’t upset, either, as he might expect, considering the circumstances surrounding their last meeting.
No, she stood, hands hanging loosely at her side, one grasping a slip of paper, probably the aforesaid grocery list. She seemed, of all things, patient. Waiting. What for, he wondered.
He heard Chick’s words echo against the inside of his skull. No snap
, no crackle, no pop, no sparks at all. She’s pulled the plug.
“Mutt,” she said, without force. “Here. Mutt.”
Mutt swiped Jim with a final, lavish caress and trotted over to take up her usual position at Kate’s right side. She had a new scar on her flank, and another on her face, but both had healed cleanly, showing pink and firm beneath new fur. Her iron gray coat was thick and shone with health, and her yellow eyes were bright and alert. She moved easily, with all of her old strength and grace, a far cry from the wounded, and Jim had thought dying, creature of the previous fall.
The summer sun had turned Kate’s pale brown skin a dark gold. Her narrow hazel eyes were clear and sane. She looked thinner, in the hollows beneath her high, flat cheekbones, in the way her clavicle pressed against her T-shirt, in the way her jeans hung from a belt pulled in two extra notches. It emphasized the upward tilt of her eyes, making her look more Native than white, and more Tatar than Native.
The tan made the scar on her throat stand out in bold relief, five inches of rough, roped tissue. It never shrank in size the way most scars did, it was always right there, right out front, above the neck of a T-shirt or in the open collar of one of her ubiquitous plaid Pendleton shirts. He had always suspected that she used it like a dare. Yeah, somebody tried to cut my throat, what of it? Think you can finish the job? Come on ahead.
Few men Jim knew, at least those who were not practicing lunatics, would have taken up that gauntlet. Kate had always projected the demeanor of someone who was willing to do whatever it took to win. It didn’t matter that she topped out at five feet, or that she weighed a hundred and twenty pounds; all the old jokes aside, size didn’t matter. Determination did. Kate had taken out one man Jim knew of with a pack of wolves, another with a boathook. Whatever was ready to hand was what she used, if she deemed its use necessary.
Not a religious man, he was reminded suddenly of that old Biblical verse, something about if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, if thine hand offend thee, cut it off.
Or Kate Shugak would do it for you.
Her hair was short and neatly cropped, fitting her head like a smooth, ebony cap. He remembered the braid that used to hang down in back almost to her waist, hacked to the scalp by the time he and George had arrived at the lodge last September. He wondered again why she’d cut it.
The new style made him uneasy. It turned her into a different woman. He knew how to act around the old Kate, he knew which buttons to push and when. They had a history he could rely on, cases worked together—again he was reminded of the right-wing cult in Chistona—not to mention years of persistent flirtation on his part and blunt rebuff on hers.
He had no history with this new Kate. This new Kate might have a different set of all-new rules to go with her different appearance.
He got to his feet, brushing the debris of the floor from the seat of his jeans. Dog and woman stood without moving, staring at him, one with adoration, the other with apprehension.
The sight made Jim want to shout hallelujah.
It also made him want to knock the both of them on their collective ass. He opened his mouth to say so, and remembered just in time that they had an audience. He closed it again with an audible snap that made Mutt’s eyes widen and Kate’s eyes narrow.
“Way-yull, hay-yull.” Baird strolled over to stand next to Jim. “If I’d known you come with an endorsement from Kathy Sovalik, ground crew extraordinaire, I’d’ve sent in a request for you personal.” He paused. “Churchill,” he added, with extra emphasis. Kate’s use of Jim’s real name had not gone unnoticed.
They said nothing. Kate’s face had closed down. Jim couldn’t hide his anger but he could restrain his wrath, for now. Mutt stood with her head pressed to Kate’s hip, gazing worshipfully at Jim, gray plume of a tail waving back and forth in a graceful arc.
“At least somebody’s glad to see you,” Baird observed. “Okay, Kathy, since you’re still up, run the new guy through the routine. What’s going out and when is on the board.” He jerked his head toward the hangar. “The bunkhouse is out back.” He jerked his head in the opposite direction. “Kathy’ll show you that, too.” He grinned, displaying teeth with shreds of tobacco caught between them. “Separate bunks. Sorry, buddy.”
Jim was watching Kate. She did not respond with so much as the flicker of an eyebrow to the salacious intent of Baird’s remark.
“You got a choice for lunch,” Baird said, “cheese on your burger or not.”
“Cheese,” Kate said, not breaking eye contact.
“Not,” Jim said, maintaining his stare.
Baird chuckled low in his throat, a deep, surprisingly attractive sound, and left the room. Jim waited until he heard a car door opening, the creak of oppressed springs, an engine start.
When it had moved out of earshot, he said, “Kathy?” in a dangerously soft voice. “Kathy Sovalik?”
She answered in kind, although her voice displayed only the most passing interest in his answer. “Churchill? Jim Churchill?”
“Where the hell have you been?”
“What business is that of yours?” There was no antagonism in her answer, and even less interest. It was something to say, already laid down in the text.
“Do you know how many people are looking for you?”
“Unless you’re here to serve me my subpoena?”
“Or maybe you just don’t give a damn that anybody who ever cared about you is scared shitless because they haven’t heard from you in months!”
“I told you I’d be in town in time for the trial.”
The very indifference of her tone maddened him beyond all bearing. He had her shoulders in angry hands in one quick step. He shook her hard, snapping her head back.
Mutt’s tail stopped wagging.
“Goddamn it, Shugak! Nobody’s seen you for four fucking months! You couldn’t have called? You couldn’t have dropped somebody a postcard? Bobby and Dinah are worried sick, Bernie and George don’t know what the hell is going on except that it’s bad, and Billy Mike and Auntie Vi and the rest of your family think you’re dead!”
He let her go with a shove, and she staggered back a step.
“Wuff?” Mutt said, the only time in living memory anyone had ever heard her sound uncertain.
“You shut up,” Jim told her, and turned a furious gaze back on Kate. “Why am I bothering? You obviously don’t give a shit.” He swept off his cap with one trembling hand, smoothed his hair with the other and resettled the cap squarely on his head.
He couldn’t remember ever being this angry. He never got angry, he never permitted it, not ever, not in the face of the grossest possible provocation. When a drunk pipeliner stuck a .357 in Jim’s face at Bernie’s Roadhouse, Jim did not even pull his weapon. Just last year, again at Bernie’s, when a couple of feuding homesteaders had shot his hat from his head, he had remained calm. When he got passed over for promotion, when he got dumped by a woman, when he was assaulted by a suspect, when a case went sour at trial or an especially undeserving perp got off with a light sentence, Jim let it roll off his back. He had decided long ago that being angry took far too much energy best spent elsewhere.
Now he wasn’t just angry, he was enraged.
He marched through the door, forcing Kate and Mutt both to give way before him, and strode into the hangar to glare from side to side, barely taking in the boxes, pallets and totes of freight stacked everywhere, the large, walkin cooler in one corner filled with wet lockboxes, the approaching roar of a taxiing aircraft.
He turned to look at her, very much under control, at least for the moment. “I are a ground crew and I cain’t even spell one,” he observed in an even tone he congratulated himself on. “You going to give me the rundown on this job, or what?”
5
Yes, I said.
I know what they have done.
—The Last Wolf
Jim distinctly remembered “forklift operator” printed in the job title slot of the form he had filled out
in Anchorage, and he did operate the battered old propane-powered forklift from time to time. When he could be spared from loading and unloading the Piper Super Cub, the Cessna 206 on floats, believe it or not the DC-3 and, holiest of holies, the C-130 Hercules when they roared up, he was set to weighing freight, packing totes and pallets, making out waybills and load manifests, loading freight that had come in into the backs of pickup trucks, unloading freight to go out from the backs of other pickup trucks, answering the phone and the radio, entering times and locations for freight to be picked up and delivered on a grubby chart on the wall of the hangar, taking telephone reservations, and trying to satisfy Yupik callers who spoke little English and had no patience with those unfortunates who spoke even less Yupik.
He looked for Kate to handle the last of those calls, but she had long since disappeared, back to the bunkhouse, he presumed. Fine. Good. Let her keep her distance. Let her get on the next plane out of here. Let her get off in Anchorage, or better yet, Seattle, or best of all, Etadunna, Australia. Good for her to move her sweet little ass as fast and as far out of range of the toe of his boot as she could get it.
The metal banding he was currently winding round a loaded pallet twisted and snapped like a splinter of wood. He took a deep breath, removed the mangled end from the bander, and started over.
During a rare lull in the day’s activities he did point out to Baird the check on the office desk and mentioned the date on it, keeping his voice offhand. His new boss grunted and spat, picked up the pile and rifled through it impatiently. He handed Jim half a dozen pieces of paper, which proved to be checks totaling over thirty-six thousand dollars, some of which had been cut in March. Baird saw Jim’s expression and said defensively, “Well, hell, starting with herring I just don’t have time to catch up on every little thing there is to do around here. Write me up a deposit slip and I’ll take ’em down to the bank. I’d have Sovalik do it but she’s even worse at bookkeeping than I am.”
Midnight Come Again Page 7
