Still, that was no reason to allow him to attack unchallenged. “Is this my night to get beaten up by every man in my life?” she wondered out loud.
“It’s sure as hell your night to get beaten up by me.” He didn’t sound like he was joking.
“Always a pleasure,” she said. “You want something to drink?”
“Got any scotch?”
Liam did, single-malt, and Moses knew it. “I was thinking of something more along the lines of a mugup. You have any more to drink this evening and you’re going to roll right off this deck.”
“Who gives a shit?”
“Pretty much anyone who knows you, though I’m beginning to wonder why,” she retorted. “Why don’t you come inside?”
“I’m fine out here.”
“You be fine out here, then.” And she gave him the satisfaction of stamping back into the house and slamming the door behind her until the glass rattled in the frame.
He was still perched on the top step when she came back outside with two steaming mugs. This time she had her down jacket and her boots on, and she brought out a blanket, too, and wrapped it around his shoulders. It surprised her, and made her a little uneasy, when no scathing commentary followed on it being a fine thing when the wimmenfolks felt they had to swaddle up a grown man like he was some kind of baby too dumb to stay out of the cold.
They sat next to each other on the top step, if not in companionable silence then in silence. She’d made them tea and laced it well with honey. After an initial contemptuous snort, he drank without complaint.
Orion was well up in the sky, the Pleiades a bright cluster just out of his reach.
Wy loved flying on nights like this, when the stars went on forever and the lights on the control panel were a dim green glow, with no sun to create thermals to bounce over and the comforting drone of the engine the only sound. She hated to land on night flights, wanted to keep going as far as she could, as long as she could, wrapped in an immense cloak of warm, black velvet studded with bright, glittering rhinestones, just her, and the plane, and the night.
A meteor streaked across the sky, another, followed by a third. What day was it? That’s right, October 21st, the first day of the Orionid meteor shower. One day she wanted to be Outside in August during the Perseid meteor shower, maybe Colorado, high up in the Rockies, to see John Denver’s “raining fire in the sky.” Meteor showers were invisible in Alaska in the summertime; the days were too long.
Moses had been quiet for a long time, when his expressed intent in coming here had been to give her grief. “What’s wrong, uncle?” she said, using the honorific earned by every elder the length and breadth of the YK Delta just for outliving their contemporaries.
He raised his head and stared out across the river. “You asked me about your father.”
Wy forgot to breathe.
His voice was dry and without expression. “His father ran out on him before he was out of diapers, and his mother did the best she could, but the booze got hold of her and she wasn’t much use after that. Still, he was a cute little bugger, and smart, too. He managed to make it all the way through high school, supported them both working deckhand, and could have had a full-time job with just about anybody when he graduated. But he wanted to work the big boats, Alaska Steam, the ferries.”
Moses paused for tea, and Wy discovered her hands had clenched around her mug. She unclamped them, one finger at a time, cautious not to make it obvious, terrified that even the smallest movement would distract him, change his mind.
“He worked for a couple of years, saving his money, and he was all set to go to school in Seattle when he fell in love.”
Her mother.
“I have never seen any two people more in love in my life,” Moses said, sounding almost judicial in tone. “They were crazy for each other, dancing the night away at the bars, necking in his truck out at the end of River Road, holding hands so they couldn’t hardly get through a door when they needed to.” He shook his head, and in the softest voice she’d ever heard him use, said, “No. That’s not how I mean it to sound. That’s not how it was. They were in love, girl. Head-over-heels, fly-me-to-the-moon, I-only-wanna-be-with-you love. You understand?”
Her throat tight, she managed to say, “Yes.”
“Thought you might.”
She waited as long as she could. “What happened?”
He shrugged. “What usually happens when two people fall in love? They got married.”
“Was she pregnant?”
“What? No. They didn’t have to get married; they wanted to. He told her all his plans, and she was all for it, so they were careful not to let anything happen to get in the way. They needed a place to live, though, so he used up his savings to buy them a little house, and he went back to work deckhanding, saving up enough to get the both of them Outside and him to school. She was miserable with him out on the water most of the time, but she handled it. Got herself a job down to the cannery on the slimer. Then she got herself an idea, and the next time he was in town and they had come up for air-”
His dry tone made her smile involuntarily.
“-she tells him. They could apply for a loan. They’d just opened up a local branch of an Anchorage bank, and he was a local boy with a good reputation. No reason somebody wouldn’t lend him money. So they did.”
You really are a master of the dramatic pause, you miserable old son of a bitch, she thought, not a respectful way even to think of one’s elder and teacher. She was determined this time not to ask, but she didn’t last thirty seconds. “What happened? Did the bank turn them down?”
“No.” He shook his head and laughed, not a nice laugh. “No, the bank didn’t turn them down. It would have been better if they had.”
“Uncle! What happened?”
“The bank manager told them she would have to sign the loan because she was the responsible member of the marriage.”
She stared at him, again trying to make out his face in the dark. “Why?”
“She was white.”
“What?”
“She was white, Caucasian, Polish-German-Scotch-Irish-English. A round-eye. A gussuk. Daughter to the BIA teacher couple in Icky. Think they were from Indiana, or some such.”
Wy closed her eyes and bowed her head. “And he was native.”
“Yupik as you and me. More. Myself, I think that was the beginning of the end. Oh, they went out to Seattle, and he came back with his certificate, and he got on the big boats. I imagine most of the big boats had mostly white crews and they weren’t easy on him. He started drinking, and they started fighting. In the middle of all this, she gets pregnant.”
“With me.”
“With you. He ran off, Wy. Maybe he was just following the sterling example set by his own father. Maybe he just couldn’t watch the world be mean to a child of his. I don’t know. One day he was there; the next he was gone.”
“What did my mother do?”
“She had you and farmed you out to your father’s sister. Not the best thing she could have done, in the circumstances.”
Wy remembered what little she could of her first years on earth, and bile rose up in her throat. No. Not the best thing.
“And then she left.”
“Do you know where she is?”
He hunched a shoulder.
“What about my father? Do you know where he is?”
“Your father’s dead, Wy.”
She drew in a sharp breath.
“He quit drinking and eventually moved up to master on the Alaska ferry system. He divorced your mom and remarried. He had three kids by his second wife.”
“I have half brothers and sisters?”
“Yeah.”
“Where are they?”
“Outside somewhere. I don’t know exactly where.”
“Would someone in Icky know?”
“Probably. Whether they’ll tell you…” He shrugged.
The red buoy at the mouth of the river winked on an
d off, on and off. Red right returning. On the very edge of the horizon she thought she could see the lights of a boat, too far away to see if it was coming up the river or passing it by. A meteor streaked across the sky. She took a long, shaky breath. “Thanks for telling me, uncle.”
He grunted.
“Why now?” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me all this when I first moved back to Newenham? You must have known from the beginning who I was, and who my father was. You knew I wanted to know. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Another long silence, during which she got the impression, unusual in the extreme, that Moses was picking out the right words to use. “I hoped I wouldn’t have to,” he said finally.
She stared at him, trying to decipher his expression in the dark. “ ‘Wouldn’t have to’? I don’t understand.”
“Remember last month, when you launched that two-bit kite into a gale-force wind to come after that boy of yours?”
Now she was angry. “Don’t try to change the subject, old man.” And then she added, “And sixty-eight Kilo isn’t a kite.”
“I’m not changing the subject,” he said, his voice flat. “Do you remember?”
“Of course I remember. I nearly wrecked the plane, which would have taken out half my equipment inventory.” And Liam had been with her.
“What made you do it, girl?” He sounded only curious, but she knew him well enough to know that, for Moses, curiosity alone was never a reason to do anything. “Gale-force winds, abrupt temperature changes, snow changing to sleet changing to hail changing to rain. It wasn’t VFR; hell, it wasn’t even good enough to be IFR. It was a National Weather Service wet dream. So what made you do it?”
“I…” She tried to think. “Jim and Jo had figured out that somebody was leaving bodies in a line leading to Old Man Creek. I knew Tim was there. I knew you and Bill and Amelia were there. I didn’t think about it much, I just-”
He was inexorable. “Why did you come, Wy?”
“I guess… I couldn’t not come, Moses.”
There was a brief silence before he sighed and shifted, the rough nap of the army blanket catching at the shoulder of her parka. When he spoke again, his voice, a deep, raspy husk to begin with, sounded like gravel being ground together. “Something tell you to?”
Wy stiffened. “I beg your pardon?”
“Did something tell you to come to Old Man? Call it instinct, intuition, a gut feeling.”
“A voice?” she said.
He was surprised into a snort of laughter. “Yeah. A voice.”
She was almost amused. “I don’t do voices, Moses. That’s your line of work.”
He was silent for a while. “It’s hereditary.”
“What is?”
“Hearing the voices. It’s passed down, generation to generation.”
She felt a pricking at the back of her neck. A flash caught her eye, and she looked up to see another meteor, a second, a third. It seemed to be a long time before she could form her next question, and when it came it was a weak “So?”
“So sometimes it skips a generation or two, according to the stories. Sometimes they just take a while to make themselves heard.”
“Moses-”
“I was the man who ran out on your father, Wy.”
“What?”
“I’m your grandfather. Me, Moses Alakuyak. You, born Wyanet Kukaktlik, to Eleanor Murphy and Doug Kukaktlik, adopted by Mary Anne and Joseph Chouinard. You are my granddaughter. Mine by blood and bone, if not by my presence in your life, up till three years ago.”
The meteors were raining down on them now; every time one painted a streak across the horizon, a second burned into existence before the first’s tail had faded. She said the only thing she could think of saying. “My father’s name was Kukaktlik?”
“I didn’t marry his mother.”
She had wondered about the marital status of her parents. There had been hints here and there, a look from an Ickyite now and then. Icky was a notoriously upright village, and they wouldn’t take kindly to illegitimate children. And she had wondered about the families they had come from. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t already suspected the truth, but last summer Moses himself had refused to answer the direct question.
And now he was volunteering information like there was no tomorrow. “You are my grandfather,” she said, testing the sound of it on the night air. The stars did not alter in their courses. The meteor shower seemed to have tapered off. Everything seemed much as it was before she had said the words out loud.
And yet everything was changed.
“Yes,” he said. “I wasn’t going to tell you.”
“Why?” she said in quick protest. “Why not? You knew I wanted to know who my family was, that one of the reasons I decided to come back to Newenham was to find out.”
He sighed, a sound she had never before heard him make. “I got as drunk as I could before I came out here.”
“Why?”
“Same reason as anybody looking for the courage to do the right thing.”
“Moses, I don’t know what you mean.”
He heaved himself to his feet and stood looking across the river at Bulge, the three-house village on the opposite shore, away to the south at the lights of an approaching boat, anywhere but at her. “I hear voices. It’s a hereditary curse, according to legend. You’re my granddaughter.”
When she got it, she only wondered why it had taken so long. “Are you saying I’m going to start hearing voices?” Her voice scaled up.
“I’m saying I think you already do.”
She searched frantically for something to say in reply to that, and came up empty.
“It’s why I started teaching you tai chi in the first place.”
She blinked, confused. “What? I thought… What are you talking about? You showed up on my doorstep one day and bullied me into horse stance and you wouldn’t leave until I got it right, and then you left me standing in it until I actually fell over! I thought it was some kind of initiation, that you did it to everyone who moves to Newenham, and so I went along with it because I wanted to make friends.”
“I was hoping,” he said, ignoring her interruption, “that if and when they started in on you, the discipline would give you some peace. Be nice if you didn’t have to start boozing it up. Boozing’s hell on the liver, and you’ve got a kid to raise.”
She was on her feet without knowing how she got there. She was so angry she stuttered. “You- I’m- This is bullshit, Moses. This is just total bullshit. Voices. Nobody hears voices; sometimes I think you don’t even hear voices.”
“Yeah, that’s your mother talking through your mouth, girl.”
“Nobody talks through my mouth but me!” She pulled herself together and said tightly, “You know, Moses, you’re going to have to make up your mind. Either the voices are talking or my mom is.”
His voice was quiet and a little sad. “I knew you’d be pissed.”
“Pissed?” She almost lost it, and only by an effort of iron will kept control. “I’m not pissed. You’re just confused, Moses, is all. You said yourself you’ve had too much to drink tonight. I’m grateful to you for telling me about my parents, and…” She softened, touched his shoulder, wary of offering an embrace. “You,” she said. “I have family now.”
“Not a family you can take much pride in,” he muttered.
“Stop that,” she said. “I am proud of you. A lot of people are. Liam cares for you, Bill loves you with everything she’s got, even Tim-”
“They’ll come, Wy. They’ll come when you least expect them, at the most inconvenient, inopportune times.”
“Moses-”
“They’ll come whether you want them to or not. I wish to God- Hell.” He turned and walked away.
“Moses?” she said, coming down the steps after him. “Do you want me to drive you home?”
“I’m fine, girl. Track down that man of yours and take him to that itty-bitty thing you call a bed. He’ll wipe the
voices right out of your mind.”
He disappeared around the corner of the house, and she probably imagined what she heard next.
“At least for a while.”
The boat was closer to the mouth of the river, and she wondered in a detached sort of way where it was going, and why it had left the voyage upriver so late in the year. More meteors fell, but fewer and farther between, until at last they seemed to stop altogether.
Inside, the monitor was still flying through space. She shut the computer down and went to bed.
Liam never did come home.
TEN
Bill was curious about that coin.
She couldn’t say why exactly. She didn’t think it was because it was a gold coin. Maybe it was because she’d never seen any kind of a coin roll out of a dead man’s hand before, but then that had to be a pretty rare experience for everyone privileged enough to witness it.
Diana Prince had left the coin with Bill, in the custody of the local officer of the court. Bill, after a hard day’s work at magistrate’s court, didn’t want to deal with it, and so had left a blistering message on Liam’s phone mail, with as yet no response.
The coin was in a plastic bag inside her desk drawer. She drew it out now and scrabbled around for a pair of reading glasses. Maybe it was the way her eyes, blue and intense and thickly lashed, looked out over the tops of them, measuring, challenging, their expression somewhere between a dare and an invitation. The man standing in the doorway, for one of the few times in his life feeling every one of his years, knew a sudden, excessive need for comfort, for satisfaction, for forgetfulness.
It was a weeknight, and the bar had closed at midnight. He closed the door behind him. When she heard the lock snick home, she looked up. “Well,” she said, and sat back. She knew that look. Her heart skipped a beat. Twenty years, more, and her heart still skipped a beat, her nipples still hardened, the warm rush of feeling began between her thighs. Damned if she’d show it.
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