She remade the bed with clean sheets and came out of the bedroom to find the bathroom door opening. The stranger shuffled out, Old Sam holding him up with both hands. The man was dressed in jeans that were two inches too long and a T-shirt from Johnny’s Kanye West period. He had about as much mass as a scarecrow and the clothes hung on him. Old Sam had threaded a double strand of what looked like dental floss through the belt loops of the jeans. It was the only thing keeping them from sliding to the floor.
“In here,” she said.
Old Sam laid him down on the bed, and Kate covered him up. He stared unblinking at the ceiling.
“Mister,” Kate said. “Who are you?”
He said nothing.
“Can you tell us your name? Your family’s bound to be worried. We could call them, tell them you’re all right.”
The man stared past Kate and his face twisted. “Aaaah,” he said, starting to shake again. “Aaaaaaaaaaah.”
“It’s okay, buddy,” Old Sam said. “You’re all right. No bogeymen here, just us.”
Old Sam’s rough voice seemed to calm the stranger more than Kate’s raspy monotone. He quieted.
“You’re safe here,” Old Sam said. “You’re safe. You’re safe.”
The man’s eyes closed, perhaps lulled by Old Sam’s litany.
There was silence. “He’s not dead, is he?” Kate said.
“Sssshh.” Old Sam put his gnarled hand down gently on the man’s chest. After a moment, it rose and fell with the man’s breathing.
“He’s sleeping, right?” Kate said in a whisper. “Not in a coma, or anything?”
“Jesus Christ,” Old Sam whispered back. “Of course the man’s asleep. He’s been lost in the Bush for what looks like the hell of a while, he’s clean and fed for the first time in who knows how long, you’d be sleeping, too. Go on, get out of here.”
“Maybe somebody should stay with him,” Kate said, looking over her shoulder.
“Maybe somebody should leave him the hell alone,” Old Sam said, shoving her out the door in front of him and closing it firmly in Auntie Vi and Holly Haynes’s faces.
“He never told us his name,” Kate said.
Holly Haynes took a shaky breath and let it out again. “Um—”
“You know him?” Kate said. She thought of the steel-toed boot, the boot of someone who worked around heavy equipment. “Someone from the mine?”
Haynes hesitated, and shook her head. “I was going to say, what happened to that hiker that the ranger was so upset about?”
“What hiker?”
“Remember, in the café? Memorial Day weekend?”
Memory came flooding back, of the wannabe backwoodsman in Dan’s office on the Step, of his raggedy-ass gear and his romantic notion to hike up to Bright Lake. “If anyone had gone missing, everyone would have heard before now. And Dan’s guy—” She hesitated, thinking back. “The toe of one of his boots had been punctured.” She shook her head. “No, it was the right boot. This guy had his left one.”
She looked at Old Sam. “But it couldn’t be, anyway. Dan’s guy said he was headed for Bright Lake.”
Old Sam snorted. “Bright Lake’s in about exactly the opposite direction from here. If this is him, bastard sure took the scenic route.”
Haynes persisted. “It’s been a month. I know it’s a long way, but anybody can go pretty far in a month.”
True enough. Kate compared her memory of the man in Dan’s office that day to the one sleeping in Johnny’s bed. If memory served, this guy seemed to be about the same height. His own mother wouldn’t have been able to identify him from the mess of his face.
“Probably should get him to Anchorage, have him checked out,” Haynes said. “I’ve got a pickup. If we put some padding in the back we can take him in in that.”
“Let him sleep,” Auntie Vi said. “Best thing for him.”
“Damn straight,” Old Sam said. “Dumb bastard.”
Ten
It’s not Davis,” Dan said that evening.
“Why not?”
Dan’s eyes were red-rimmed, his face sported a grayish red stubble, and his clothes looked slept in, but regardless he spread his arms and burst into song. “He once was lost, but now is found …”
Kate flinched. Old Sam winced. Mutt put her nose up in the air and howled.
“Thanks, Mutt, another country heard from,” Dan told her, and looked up again. “Davis did go missing. Wasn’t anything we didn’t expect. You saw him,” he said to Kate. “He was either gonna die or get rescued.”
“He got rescued?”
“He’s three days out and he stumbles over his own feet, falls down a couloir on the trail up to Bright Lake, and breaks his leg. He trips his beacon and I had to call in the goddamn Air Guard out of Eielson to pick him up. Cost sixty fucking grand. Our tax dollars at work. This guy ain’t him. I personally put him on a plane for Anchorage and told him to stay the hell out of my Park.”
There was a brief, charged silence. Kate and Old Sam looked at each other. “You aren’t missing anyone else?” Kate said.
Dan had to smile at the hopeful note in her voice. “Sorry.”
“So,” Old Sam said, putting into words what they were all thinking, “who the hell is this guy?”
A day later the Grosdidier brothers had their patient at the airstrip, bandaged like a mummy and ready to load on George’s Otter turbo for transshipment to Providence Hospital in Anchorage. Out of what she assured herself was a misplaced sense of responsibility, Kate was there to see him off. Peter Grosdidier roughhoused with Mutt while the other three brothers stood talking to Kate. Old Sam, who had taken a proprietary interest in the stranger, was present, too.
“He’s still not talking?” Kate said.
Matt shook his head.
“What’s wrong with him?”
Matt shrugged. “It could be post-traumatic amnesia. Or maybe dissociative amnesia, or even repressed memory.”
“What’s any of that goddamn medical mumbo jumbo mean in English?” Old Sam said.
Matt made a vague gesture that encompassed the Park. “His mind might be repressing something that happened to him out there. Hell, everything that happened to him out there. Pretty fair guess that it wasn’t a walk in the, well, Park for him. How long post-traumatic amnesia lasts is usually related to how serious the injury is.”
“Do people usually come out of it?”
“Yeah,” Matt said. “Usually.”
The corollary to that being sometimes they didn’t. “He had a lot of injuries,” Kate said.
“Tell me about it,” Matt said with feeling. “I had to order in a new supply of four-by-fours.”
Kate looked down at the unknown woods warrior. “If he does come out of it, how long will it take?”
Matt looked down at the guy, too. “No idea. But you don’t get over that amount of trauma in a day or two. One thing for sure, he probably isn’t a Park rat or he would have survived his trek in better shape.”
“And he woulda got himself found a lot quicker,” Old Sam said.
Maybe, Kate thought, and maybe not. Not every Park rat was as backwoods apt as Old Sam.
Everyone looked at the unknown hiker wrapped in olive green Army blankets, his one good eye open and fixed in a thousand-mile stare on something over his head that none of the rest of them could see. They all looked away again with the half-ashamed, half-relieved embarrassment the sane felt in the present of the not so. Kate had been relieved to see that the swelling on his face was reduced to the point where the shape of his features had returned to something less gargoylian, although it was still a roadmap of what he’d been through.
It was with relief they heard the approach of the Otter, and turned to watch it touch down at the end of the strip. It pulled to a halt in front of the Chugach Air Taxi hangar and George came out to open the door and pull up a step stool for the passengers to disembark. Mine workers got off the plane in less of a hurry to go back to work than they had go
t on to go on R & R. Many looked rather the worse for wear, and Kate hoped none of them would be operating heavy equipment any time in the near future.
Lyda Blue was last out, slinging a daypack over her shoulder. Kate caught her eye and raised a hand.
Lyda nodded and walked over to say hello. Her eyes dropped to the lost guy and the daypack slid from her shoulder to the ground.
“What?” Kate said.
Lyda opened her mouth and nothing came out. The color drained from her face and she started to go down.
“Whoa,” Kate said, catching her. “Guys. Guys! Help me out here.”
The Grosdidier brothers scampered around and caught Lyda before she went splat. The Otter’s step stool was confiscated and slid beneath Lyda’s butt, and her head was pushed gently but firmly between her knees. She submitted for several deep gasps of air, and then she struggled free, coming down on her knees next to the stretcher. A shaking hand reached out, a fingertip touched the lost guy’s cheek.
“Lyda?”
Lyda Blue looked up, her face frozen but for the tears spilling down her cheeks. Through numb lips she said, “It’s Wayne.”
Between them the lost guy stared unblinking at the sky.
And Sergeant Jim Chopin of the Alaska State Troopers chose this moment to set his Cessna down light as a feather at the end of the runway. He taxied to the much smaller hangar next to Chugach Air, killed the engine, and got out, to be greeted by an ecstatic Mutt who had identified the sound of his engine when he was still a mile out.
She escorted him back to the group at very nearly a prance. He studied Kate’s expression, eyed Lyda Blue’s crumpled face, passed briefly over Old Sam and the four Grosdidiers, and came to rest on the man on the stretcher. “What seems to be the problem here?”
But Dewayne Gammons is dead,” Jim said.
Kate had never heard him sound more at a loss. She didn’t blame him. “I know.”
“You found his body,” Jim said, reminding her, reminding everyone in the room. “Bear snack.”
“I know,” Kate said again.
“This girl—” Jim looked at Lyda, who was sitting in a chair looking pale and strained.
“Lyda,” Kate said. “Lyda Blue.”
“You know him well enough to make a positive identification?”
Since Lyda seemed incapable of speech, Kate said, “She works admin out at the mine. Plus they were friends.”
“She just identified him today?”
“She just got back from her week off. It’s the first time she’s seen him since he showed up.”
Jim was determined to be obtuse on the subject for as long as possible, because he knew what was going to happen when he stopped. “When, again, did you say this guy came out of the woods?”
“Yesterday,” Kate said. She knew what was coming, too, and she wasn’t any happier about it than he was. “Fourth of July.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Didn’t you say what’s her name, Hollister, Haversham—”
“Haynes,” Kate said.
“Yeah, Haynes, the goddamn Suulutaq staff geologist, didn’t you say she was at the homestead when this guy came crashing out of the woods?”
“Yes.”
“And she didn’t recognize him?”
“Jesus, Jim,” Old Sam said, defying all efforts to exclude him from what he knew was a hell of a story in the making. “He wasn’t hardly human when he come out of the woods. His own mother wouldn’t a recognized him.”
“Okay,” Jim said. “So now he’s on his way to—”
“Anchorage. Matt said he needed a big hospital, preferably one with a stable full of shrinks.”
“Okay,” Jim said again. “Say he is Gammons. He parked his truck, hiked out into the Bush, got lost returning his body to nature—”
Lyda flinched at the sarcasm in his tone.
“—evidently nature turns him down, and a month later he staggers onto Kate’s homestead. That about it?”
Nods all around.
“Okay,” he said for the third time, and there was no mistaking his irritation now. “Just fan-fucking-tastic. If Gammons is alive—more or less, from what I saw—then who the hell belonged to those pieces you people pulled out of the woods a month ago?”
And he glared at Kate and Old Sam and Lyda like it was all their fault.
Eleven
It was coming on seven o’clock at night, and Niniltna was in post-holiday mode, with crooked bunting hanging from the eaves of houses and Alaska and USA flags fluttering from porches. Everyone who wasn’t at fish camp or waiting on Alaganik Bay for the Fish and Game to announce an opener or working at the Suulutaq was out in force. Many of them had been drinking since the day before and were full to the brim with good spirits and bonhomie. Jim turned a blind eye to any and all lingering fireworks, and against all expectation on his way home did not actually see anyone driving under the influence, for which he was profoundly thankful.
He and Kenny had caught their bad guy in Ahtna, although the bad guy had not given up without a fight. Jim, not a small man, and Kenny, a very large man indeed, had both been put to strenuous effort to subdue one guy maybe five eight weighing maybe 150 pounds. All he had to do was resist and keep on resisting, and this he did with vigor and enthusiasm. The trailer park mob that poured outdoors to watch didn’t help, many of them previously known to both Kenny and Jim and many more well lubricated in celebration of the day. For a while the arrest appeared to be teetering on the edge of precipitating a riot. Kenny was finally driven to putting his hand on his sidearm in a show of force. He didn’t pull it, he didn’t go that far, he just let it sit on the butt of the .357 Magnum. Jim was fully occupied in hanging on to their bad guy and couldn’t even hitch his gun belt in support, but that was okay. Enough of the crowd had seen Dirty Harry and were ready to abandon their fellow to his fate on the strength of it.
Their guy’s energy leached away with them and Kenny and Jim bagged him along with a trailer full of stolen property, including a closet full of weapons. The most interesting of these was an assault rifle with a canvas grip full of loaded clips. “Ah, Mr. Kalashnikov, I presume,” Kenny had said. “And if I’m not mistaken, a Type 81. I wonder where the hell that came from.” He looked at Jim. “Other than China originally, I mean.”
Jim didn’t care. He wasn’t a gun nut. He could clean and load a 9 mm Smith & Wesson automatic and his backup piece, an M&P .357, and produce a respectable grouping of shots on the police silhouette target he printed out on his computer once a month. He wasn’t a hunter, he didn’t own a rifle, and he owned no recreational weapons. A closet full of probably stolen and certainly unpermitted weapons, a majority of which appeared to qualify under AS 11.61.200(h)(1)(C) as prohibited, looked to him like a Class C felony and nothing more.
The good news was Bobbie Singh was going to be able to keep the perp out of his hair for at least five years and probably more if Jim was any judge of his character. The gentleman did not appear to him to be a viable candidate for time off with good behavior.
Still, yesterday’s had been a tense afternoon, made more so by a close encounter of the newspaper kind, this in the form of an interview by one Benjamin Franklin Gunn of the Ahtna Adit, the town’s weekly newspaper. He made Kenny and Jim pose for a photograph in front of the pile of illegal weapons. Jim liked trophy shots about as much as he liked interviews. He was left feeling sore in body and in spirit, neither of which was alleviated by the necessity of reopening an investigation into a case that had been disposed of a full month before. While he did not grudge Dewayne Gammons his return to the ranks of the living, he was seriously pissed off over the prospect of trying to identify the month-old remains of yet another idiot who had gone wandering off in the Park without a clue as to what was lying in wait for him there.
The only way to make something foolproof was to keep it away from fools. He didn’t know who’d said that but it was a rule to by god live by if he’d ever heard one. He wondered when science would
invent a buzzer that would go off on Maggie’s desk when a fool stepped off a plane at the Niniltna airstrip.
All he wanted now was food, a hot shower, and a bed. And the promise of at least a few fool-free moments.
Kate was on her way home, too, by prior arrangement detouring first by Auntie Edna’s. The best bulk cook among the four aunties, she always had something on the stove in a quantity large enough to feed the crew of an aircraft carrier. Her father had been a Filipino and a damn fine cook and he had taught Auntie Edna well, and today what was on the stove was lumpia, chicken adobo, and rice.
None of that was new. What was new was the line at the door, made up mostly of, you guessed it, Suulutaq Mine workers. Kate arrived to find Auntie Edna in the act of exchanging a recycled garbage bag containing four white Styrofoam containers for a fistful of cash from a young mine worker who might have been drooling a little out of the corner of his mouth. Kate didn’t blame him, given the collection of aromas wafting from Auntie Edna’s kitchen.
Auntie Edna looked up to see Kate take her place at the end of the line, and waved her forward with an imperial gesture. “My niece,” she said, “very important, busy person.” Everyone else shifted their feet and sighed and sulked and Kate could feel their resentful glances boring into her back, but none of them was so foolish as to walk away and lose their place in line.
A Night Too Dark Page 15
