Better To Rest

by Dana Stabenow

  Bill repressed a shudder. “And?”

  “And it’s old.”

  “Old? What do you mean, old? You mean like from an old man? How can you tell?”

  “No, I mean like desiccated old. I mean like from an old plane wreck, years and years old.”

  “You can tell that just from looking?”

  “Bill, I’m telling you, it’s practically petrified, it’s so old. You want another look?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t see how old it is when you first look at it; all you see is… well.”

  “Yeah.” Bill took a deep breath. “Bear Glacier, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ice is a great preservative.”

  “Yeah.”

  “No telling how long it’s been up there.”

  “No.”

  “You’re going to have to go look.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Liam said, with no visible enthusiasm.

  “So? Tell me more about Teddy and John.”

  “So I talked to Teddy and John, and John says it’s an old plane, and it’s painted army gray, and he knows that color because he slopped enough of it on anything that didn’t move out of the way in time while he was in the army.”

  “He get the tail numbers?”

  “Said they didn’t see the tail. Said there wasn’t much wreckage, if it came to that. They weren’t real coherent about it.”

  “Probably weren’t real sober, either.”

  “I think they were sober when they stumbled across the wreck. They weren’t by the time I got to John’s house, that’s for damn sure, and I can’t say I blame them.”

  “Why didn’t they call you?”

  “I got the impression they were about to when we knocked on the door. By then, they’d had a few, and they panicked.”

  Bill reflected. “Is there a law against possession of a severed limb?”

  “You’d know that better than I would.”

  “I’ll have to check my index of Alaska statutes. I’m sure it’ll be right under ‘Limbs, Severed.’ Right after ‘Lifesaving Medical Procedures’ and right before ‘Limitation of Actions.’ ” She shook her head. “I’d love to preside over that case.”

  “Yeah, right.” Liam tilted his glass and the last droplet of whiskey dropped onto his tongue with something approaching a sizzle.

  Someone besides Moses had gotten to the jukebox, and Santana was telling everyone within hearing to make it real or else forget about it. On the tiny excuse for a dance floor, Mark Walker was showing Cindi Guttierez how to do a natural underarm turn, only he missed her hand. She, an enthusiastic if uncoordinated partner, spun wildly out of control, careened off the table where Jerry Lee Kwethluk and Lyle Willoya were hunched over their usual battle for the Newenham arm-wrestling championship, and slammed up against Eric Mollberg.

  Jerked rudely from his peaceful slumber, Eric snorted, sat up, lost his balance, and fell off his bar stool. He might have stayed upright if that garbage sack hadn’t been sitting at Liam’s feet. As it was, he tripped over it and fell flat on his face. The arm with its clenched fist was propelled out of the bag and slid across the floor to come to rest against Eric’s face.

  The way he’d kicked it must have loosened the fist, because suddenly the fingers relaxed. Something small and round and bright rolled out of the palm, around Eric’s head, and into the middle of the dance floor. The music kept playing but people had stopped dancing, and it looked like stopped breathing as well.

  The coin rolled and rolled, right into the middle of eleven pairs of paralyzed feet, where it spun in an ever-shrinking circle and eventually came to rest, the side up gleaming dully in the dim light of the bar. Everyone watched it, mesmerized, or perhaps just reluctant to look again at the severed arm.

  Eric, whose eyes had followed the coin like everyone else’s and watched it until it came to rest, traveled back to the now almost-open hand, forefinger outstretched to where it nearly touched his nose.

  He screamed, a high-pitched sound of pure terror. He screamed again, leaped to his feet, and raced to the door, hitting it with both hands held straight out in front of him and disappearing into the night.

  “Oh, hell,” Liam said, and got down from his stool to stuff the arm back in the bag. He took a few steps forward and picked up the coin, trying unsuccessfully to read the raised print. It looked like it was in English, and it was heavy.

  When he stood up, his eyes met Wy’s, who was staring in horrified incomprehension from his face to the bag in his hands and back again.

  Tim sat next to her, and his eyes were pretty big, too. The back of Liam’s neck prickled in an unpleasant sort of way, and he took a step forward to see who was sitting across from them.

  “Hey there, Liam,” Jo Dunaway said with a sunny smile that was all teeth. “You remember my brother, Gary.”

  December 3, 1941

  The goddamn radio went out again. We were coming back from Attu and the ceiling came down and we were wandering all over hell and gone. I know the way Ive been over it enough times but even I cant see through clouds. It doesnt help that the frigging maps are all wrong. Half the rivers are missing and the lakes are fifty miles away from their actual locations and we almost ran into a mountain that was only supposed to be 3600 feet high and was really 4600 feet high. Jesus!

  Another letter from Helen. There’s some kind of problem with the baby she dosnt say what. I wrote and told her to go see the doctor and tell him well find the money to pay. If old Doc Bailey was still alive this wouldnt be a problem he knew my father and he delivered me he would know I was good for it. I wrote to Mom to go over there. I know they dont like each other but Helen shouldnt be alone. God how I hate being this far away.

  Peter the old Eskimo guy is quite a storyteller. He says he’s not really an Eskimo hes from a little village on the coast southwest of here. Hes got a name for his tribe but I can’t pronounce it let alone spell it. He was telling me the other day about how his people used to paddle big canoes from Alaska to Russia to fight each other. He showed me a vest he said was armor. It dint look real substantial to me but then I want to be bullet-proof and his folks probably only needed to be spear-proof.

  FIVE

  The next morning was clear and cold enough to generate a thin layer of frost, but the wing covers were quickly removed and the problem solved. She was sorry for that. She wanted to be very busy. Liam had the worst case of fear of flying she’d ever seen, and so long as she was doing things with the plane he wouldn’t bother her. If she made it look too easy, they would have to talk about the night before.

  They leveled off at a thousand feet and she drew a bead on Bear Glacier, which according to the map hung off the lip of Carryall Mountain. “Carryall,” if the little Yupik she retained from her upbringing in Ik’ikika, a village on the shore of One Lake, was accurate, was an anglicized version of one of the many words her ancestors on the Yupik side of her family used forbear. She didn’t know if it stood for black bear or brown bear or polar bear, or feeding bear or sleeping bear or running bear, for that matter. She ought to study up on her Yupik. Maybe she and Tim could take a class. Maybe she and Tim and Liam could take a class.

  She gave a mental snort. Yeah, right, that’d happen. Liam was all but packed for his transfer back to Anchorage, where he would have no use for Yupik. Other language skills, perhaps. Bureaucratese, maybe. Brownnosing, definitely.

  She pulled herself up short, ashamed for automatically assuming the worst. Just like Jo. Liam hasn’t said if he’s leaving or staying, she told herself. You could ask, instead of getting mad over nothing.

  Then again, if she asked, he’d have to answer. And then he’d ask her to come with him, which would entail leaving her home, selling her air-taxi business, and pulling Tim out of school to start all over again in a city whose population thoughtBush meant half an hour out of town.

  And then she would be faced with her own decision: Go or stay.

  It wasn’t like she didn’t ha
ve a choice. It hadn’t killed her to break it off with Liam the first time.

  It had only felt like it had.

  She found herself getting angry all over again. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, grateful the noise of the engine covered the sound. She cast a surreptitious glance over her shoulder at the man sitting behind her, rigidly upright, knuckles white on the edge of his seat, his breathing audible over the headset. Liam wasn’t noticing anything except how he was personally holding the plane up in the air.

  According to John and Teddy, the crash site wasn’t far from an airstrip not too overgrown with brush and long enough for a Super Cub, which in turn was accessible by what had been a game trail just wide enough to take a four-wheeler in from Icky. It was quicker to fly, though, and Liam had wanted to inspect the site as soon as possible.

  The Wood River Mountains grew on the horizon, four-and five- and six-thousand-foot peaks covered with the winter’s first snowfall. A series of four long, deep, narrow landlocked fjords filled up four long, steep, narrow valleys between the mountains, lying before them like the fingers of a giant’s spread hand. Not quite like the outspread hand of the night before, but close enough to bring it to both their minds.

  Liam cleared his throat. “So. Where are we landing?” He tried not to let the fact that he didn’t care where it was so long as he was on the ground, alive and whole and soon, show in his voice.

  Wy made an unnecessary adjustment to the prop pitch. “It’s a dirt strip, about three thousand feet. I think the Parks Service put it in during a survey of the Togiak Wildlife Refuge.”

  “And everybody’s been using it to hunt from ever since.”

  “Pretty much. I know Charlene patrols up here pretty regular, and she sees planes down there a lot.”

  Charlene Taylor was the fish-and-game trooper for the Newenham district. “Poaching?”

  “She thinks so, although she has yet to catch anyone in the act.” Wy adjusted her headset and fussed with the arm extending the voice-activated mike to her mouth.

  “You have any ideas about this wreck?”

  She shook her head. “It’s got to be old, before my time.”

  “Did you ask around the airport?”

  “Didn’t have time; you wanted to be in the air at first light.”

  “Right.” He made a minute shift to ease the strain on his vertebrae. The plane hit an air pocket and bounced. He stiffened back into immobility, like that would help smooth out the flight. Wy’s braid dangled over the back of the seat in front of him. It swayed gently with the motion of the Cub. He tried not to look directly at it.

  They flew on for a few minutes more, until they took a sudden, hard right bank and nosed down. Liam sucked in a breath. “There,” Wy said.

  It seemed to Liam’s fevered gaze that she was intent on their doing chin-ups on the peaks of the Wood River Mountains. “Right there, do you see it?” Wy said, and aimed 78 Zulu at a strip of snow that might have had a patch of gravel beneath it the size of a baby’s diaper. The strip got bigger the nearer they got to it but not much. Wy circled once, taking a look at the surface and coming much too close to the sides of the encircling mountains, and brought them in on an approach that feathered the tops of the stand of slender birches surrounding the strip. She pulled so far back on the throttle that they were practically hanging stationary in the air when they touched down. They didn’t use up much of the strip, either-a good thing, Liam thought when a bull moose wandered out of the trees at the other end of the runway. He stopped and regarded them with an expression of mild surprise for a moment, before wandering back into the woods, evidently unworried by the thought that they might be after his rack.

  They set off, finding and following the track through the brush and snow left by John’s and Teddy’s four-wheelers without difficulty. It was late October and they were lucky. It had snowed twice already that year, but so far only enough to stick, and the good news was it wasn’t over their boots.

  “Did they get anything?” Wy said when, after twenty minutes, the silence got too oppressive to bear.

  “What?”

  “Teddy and John. Did they get anything?”

  “Oh. Yeah. A moose. Big bull. It was skinned out and hanging in the shop.”

  “Good.”

  “Yeah. Isabella and Rose’ll be happy.”

  She stood it for ten minutes more. “Liam-”

  “Look,” he said. “We’re here.”

  They had emerged from the woods into an area of glacial moraine, pile after pile of gray gravel so uniform in size it looked graded.

  “There’s no snow on the gravel,” Liam said, confused.

  “That’s why,” Wy said, pointing.

  In back of the moraine loomed the glacier, and even at that distance they could hear the sound of running water. “It’s not cold enough yet to stop the meltoff. Won’t be long, though. Teddy and John hit it just right. Another snow and they wouldn’t have found a thing. How close did they say they were to the face when they found the arm?”

  He pointed at the four-wheeler tracks, which continued straight to the mouth of the glacier. “I figure we follow those, we find what Teddy and John found.”

  Wy took another look at the glacier, which looked far too unstable for her tastes. “Right.”

  They followed the tracks, which ended short of the wall of ice. The bottom half of the face was rotten and riddled with holes that created gaping caves, too dark to see inside.

  “You don’t think it’s inside one of those?” Liam said.

  “Even John and Teddy aren’t that dumb,” Wy said. She felt a prickle at the base of her neck. It was nippy out this cold, clear morning. She should have exchanged her jacket for a parka.

  They cast back and forth along the wall of ice, careful not to stray too close, the detritus from recent calving fresh on the ground in front of them. They’d almost given up when they found the blood and guts of the moose John and Teddy had shot. Wy unshouldered the.30-06 she had brought from the plane.

  “You hear a bear?”

  She shook her head, eyes watching the edge of the trees. “Not yet,” she said, which didn’t reassure him.

  “I thought they were all asleep by now.”

  “Nope.”

  There were ravens gathered at the corpse, shredding intestine with strong, bloodied beaks. They were unalarmed by the arrival of the humans, and continued to feed.

  “So I’m not seeing any plane wreckage,” Liam said, almost relieved. “They might have been shining us on.”

  Wy felt the prickle at the back of her neck again and tried to zip up her jacket, but the zipper was as far up as it would go. The face of the glacier glittered in the cold, clear light, fractured and chasmed and impenetrable. Bushes and grasses had implanted themselves at the sides of the face wherever a handful of dirt had collected in a hollow of rock. Even-

  “Hey,” she said. “Blueberries.”

  They were large, as big as the first knuckle of her little finger, and frozen. They melted in her mouth like candy, sweet and tangy.

  Blueberries. She’d loved them as a child, loved picking them, loved the rich blue stain they left on her hands and lips and tongue, loved the tart, tangy taste that exploded in her mouth when she bit down. She could hide herself away in the bushes taller then than she was, and sit with a pail in her lap and pick and eat and pick and eat, and not come out again until the strident voice of her foster mother called her out. And sometimes not even then; sometimes she thought that if she could just fall asleep in the blueberry patch, when she woke up her real mother and father would be there, all love and smiles and welcome home, Wyanet.

  An eagle flew overhead, for a moment blocking the sun, aware of their presence but indifferent to them, and she started, staring down at the handful of berries. “Liam! Come have some berries! They’re-” She stopped.

  Hidden until she’d been drawn to the berries, hidden almost completely behind a pile of ice-encrusted gravel overgrown with d
iamond willow, was a large patch of gray. As she approached, it resolved itself into a fragment of airplane fuselage. The edges were ragged and worn, the gray paint streaked and faded.

  “No tail numbers,” Wy said out loud. It wasn’t much more than a foot across and she lifted it easily. “I’ll be go to hell.”

  His footsteps came to a halt behind her and she felt him look over her shoulder. “What is it?”

  “World War Two,” she said.

  “What about it?” He caught on. “Oh, you think-”

  “I could be wrong, Liam, but I think this is a piece off an old C-47.”

  “What’s a C-47?”

  “It’s the cargo equivalent of a DC-3.” When he continued to look blank, she said, “Liam, I can’t believe how little you know about flying and still manage to live in Alaska. The DC-3 was the first economically successful commercial airliner. The C-47 was the military application, a cargo and troop transport. Parachuters bailed out of them during the invasion of Normandy, for crying out loud. Mudhole Smith built Cordova Airlines around them. At the end of World War Two, when we knew we had the war won, the plant in Georgia started converting the cargo plane into the passenger plane, and Alaska Airlines puddle-jumped one all the way across the continent to Anchorage in May 1945 and started flying passengers.” She looked at him and said incredulously, “Do you mean to say you’ve never been in one?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, trying hard not to sound defensive. “I never pay any attention to the plane I’m in, Wy; you know that. All I care about is that they stay up in the air long enough to get me where I’m going.”

  She shook her head. “Man.”

  “Besides, that’s just a little piece. How can you be so sure it’s-well, it was a DC-3?”

  “A C-47,” she said. “It was a military plane. The color alone tells us that.”

  “How long’s it been here? When did it crash?”

  “We need to find something with numbers on it.” Wy began foraging, climbing over boulders, pulling brush to one side only to have it pull free and slap her in the face. “Ouch. Damn it.”

  “John said they found the arm next to a big chunk of quartz.” He walked upslope, crunching through a surface trickle of water frozen into a thin, rapidly melting crust. It had spent the summer running off the end of a slab of ice the size of Wy’s house, with man-high holes melted through it. “There.” He clambered over the ice, pieces of it collapsing beneath his weight as he went.