“Take your clothes off.”
She stood up. “Make me.”
He came around the desk at her and she kicked the chair out of the way before they fell on it. There wasn’t time to get to her house, there wasn’t time even to make it to the couch. He ripped her shirt open, buttons flying everywhere, and pulled her jeans down her legs, where they caught on the one shoe she hadn’t been able to get off in time. He didn’t kiss her or caress her, he pulled her legs apart and plunged in. She gasped and arched up, digging her nails into his bucking, heaving back. He bellowed out his pleasure and relief and collapsed on top of her, almost insensible.
They lay together, speechless, for a time. He stirred at last. “Christ.” He raised his head. “May I come in?”
Her laugh was a bare thread of sound. “Depends. Who wants in, my man or the old crank who’s been hanging out in my bar for the last month?”
“Both, I think.” He propped himself on an elbow and smoothed the long strands of thick white hair back from her face. “I’m sorry.”
She gave her hips an experimental flex. “You going to make it up to me?”
He laughed, burying his face in her hair. “You bet.”
They dozed a little, impervious to the fact that they were half-dressed, on the floor, and that one of the wheels of the desk chair had rolled over a lock of Bill’s hair.
“I told her,” he said after a while.
“Finally got up the nerve?”
“Finally got enough beer in me.”
She hesitated. “Moses?”
“What?”
“Are you sure?”
He nuzzled her breast. “I wish I wasn’t.”
So did she. “What do you think she’ll do?”
“Get a lobotomy.”
“Seriously.”
He sighed and rolled to his back, swearing when he cracked his head on the couch. “I don’t know. Up to her. I’ve prepared her as much as I can. I’ve delivered the bad news. She didn’t believe it, but she’s been told.”
She rolled toward him, winced, and pulled her hair free from the caster. “Will it be as bad for her as it is for you?”
He shook his head. “No way to tell. Mine came to me young. They say my mother had them before me, but I don’t remember her. And I haven’t asked a lot of questions.”
She knew why. Half the Bay thought he was God. The other half thought he was the devil. Bill had seen people turn away, step aside, retreat when they saw Moses coming, even though he never gave advice unsolicited. Everybody was afraid he might, though, and that this time it would be something they couldn’t ignore.
“Man.” He raised his head. “This is just pitiful. Lying under the desk, clothes half-off.”
“I was ravished,” she said primly.
He laughed, a wholehearted, rollicking sound that few had heard. “Yeah, right, that’s why you didn’t have any panties on underneath them jeans.”
“What are you saying, sir?”
“I’m saying, ma’am, that I was honey-trapped. I didn’t have a chance.” He pulled her to her feet. “I’m hungry. Feed me.”
They raided the kitchen, half-naked and giggling like a couple of kids, and brought their spoils back to the office and curled up on the couch. They fed each other olives green and black and pickles sweet and dill and pieces of cheddar cheese, washed down with enormous drafts of ice-cold beer. When they were done she licked his fingers clean, which led to other, more interesting places. This time it was long and slow and oh so sweet.
“This is all wrong, you know,” she said drowsily, a little later.
“What is?” he said, facedown, body limp.
“We’re too old to be enjoying sex.”
“Who says?”
She ran one fingernail from his nape to the cleft of his buttocks, and was rewarded by a responsive groan. “Everyone under fifty.”
“Everyone under fifty is wrong.”
She smiled, closing her eyes and snuggling in for the duration. “They sure are.”
The next morning as she was getting dressed and he was hindering her, he saw the gold coin on the desk. “What’s that?”
“Remember that arm, and the coin that fell out of its hand?”
“Oh.” He picked it up and looked at it, couldn’t read the writing, and looked for the half glasses that had sidetracked him earlier. “Twenty dollars. And Lady Liberty in all her glory.” He looked at her over the tops of the glasses. “This is gold.”
“It looks like it, and it’s heavy enough.”
“Where did Liam say it came from, again?”
“John and Teddy found a wreck up near Bear Glacier, and tripped over the arm.”
“They brought it back with them? Why?”
“Who knows why John and Teddy do anything?”
“Good question.” He squinted at the coin. “I always was lousy at Roman numerals. What’s MDCDXXI?”
“Beats the hell out of me. I’m strictly an Arabic-numbers kinda gal, myself.”
“Up on Bear Glacier, huh?”
“Yeah.” She took the coin and tossed it into the drawer. “You owe me breakfast.”
“I owe you breakfast? You seduced me with those glasses of yours.”
“You ravished me,” she said. It was her story and she was sticking to it. They argued all the way to the Harbor Café, which they found packed full of fishermen, a morose group in stained Carhartt’s and dirty white fishermen’s caps pulled down low to hide their lack of hairlines. The air was thick with the smells of coffee, bacon and cigarette smoke. Bill and Moses sat and ordered enormous breakfasts, their digestive systems having long given up any attempt to dictate diet. It came and they ate heartily.
Replete, Bill stretched her arms, her breasts straining at the fabric of her shirt, to the rapt appreciation of the fisherman sitting at the next table. Moses gave him a hard-eyed look, and the fisherman reddened, grinned and shrugged, as if to say,Who wouldn’t? He was maybe thirty-five.
“You’re a vamp,” Moses said out loud.
She did her best to look completely innocent. She hadn’t missed Marvin Engeland’s admiration, or Moses’ reaction to it. She still had it, and she’d use it however long it lasted. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Aw, what the hell, he’s too old for you, anyway; he wouldn’t be able to keep up.”
They staggered, laughing, out of the café together, in time to bump into the four remaining Tompkinses coming out of the building next door. It was a two-story, prefabricated building, housing the offices of the local State Farm representative, the Newenham Telephone Cooperative, Mario E. Kaufman, Attorney-at-Law, Great Land Cable Television, the U.S. Parks Service, and Vanessa Belanger, CPA. Betsy’s eyes were red but her head was high. Stan and Jerry were solemn. Karen looked at Moses, then back at Bill, one eyebrow going up, one corner of her mouth curving into a knowing smile.
It took a moment for Bill to remember about Lydia. “I was so sorry to hear about your mother,” she said to Betsy, the eldest.
Betsy inclined her head. “Thank you.”
“I didn’t know her outside of the book club, but what I saw I liked a great deal.”
Betsy smiled. “We’re getting that a lot.”
The Tompkinses had always been a clannish bunch, not given to associating much with outsiders, but Bill had been a member of Lydia’s book club, the Literary Ladies. It had been a going concern for almost thirteen years, and they’d stuck together through births, deaths, marriages and divorces. There was Bill and Lydia and Alta Peterson the innkeeper and Mamie Hagemeister the police clerk and Charlene Taylor the fish-and-game trooper and Sharon Ilutsik the hairdresser and Lola Gamechuk the cannery worker. They ranged in age from twenty-three to seventy-four. Some of them were married; some weren’t. Some of them were mothers; some weren’t. For one Saturday evening every month, they met to eat and talk about the book they had all read the month before, and the one thing they all had in common was the love of reading
. “I know you’re going to miss her,” Bill said out loud.
Betsy nodded again, maintaining her dignity, and they climbed into her Toyota 4Runner and drove off.
“That is the weirdest damn bunch I’ve ever met, and that’s saying some,” Bill said.
“She was a beauty,” Moses said. “It didn’t translate into her kids, though. Even that Karen, little and cute as she is. She’s just too damn hungry, and it shows.”
“Who was a beauty?”
“Lydia. In high school, she was the girl everybody most wanted to.”
“You, too?”
“Me, one,” he said, and gave her a blatant pinch on the ass. “Let’s go back to the bar.”
“I have to; I have to get ready to open up.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No hanky-panky,” she said sternly. “I have to work.”
He grinned, the grin that from one angle fitted him with a halo and from another with horns and a tail. “Who, me?” But when they got back to the bar, he disappeared into the office and let her go to work, pulling the stools off the bar and the chairs off the tables, firing up the grill, emptying out the dishwasher. It was Dottie’s half day, and Bill would be serving the lunch hour alone. She didn’t begrudge Laura Nanalook’s new start in Anchorage, but she’d been looking for a decent barmaid to replace her ever since. A few had come and almost immediately gone again. In the meantime, she picked up the slack. It was getting so she positively liked putting on that damn black robe and sitting in judgment of her fellow Newenhammers.
She gave the bar a last swipe and stood back, admiring its gleam. The tables in the booth and on the floor were spotless, the ketchup and mustard and A.1. bottles full, the salt and pepper shakers topped off. She had enough clean cutlery and dishes to feed an army.
It had been a rocky start, all those years ago. She had gotten on one plane after another until she had run out of cash. The bar had had a Help Wanted sign in the window, and she went to work that night. Two years later it was hers, along with a big, fat mortgage she’d paid off early. Newenham had been a boomtown in those days, boats so thick on the water you could walk across the bay and never get your feet wet. Hundreds of boats and billions of fish and no end of buyers from Japan, a country hungry for fresh fish. And in her bar hundreds of fishermen, ready to step up with a fistful of twenties and ring the bell behind the bar. Those had been some wild and very profitable years.
Now there were fish farms from Scotland to British Columbia to Chile, and the North Pacific was being systematically fished out by processors with nets a mile, two miles long, ripping up the bottom of the ocean and every living thing with it, regardless of size or sex. The king crab had been the first casualty, then the herring, then the salmon. Now the fishermen were fighting over rights to fish the pollock, whose own population was already so low the Steller sea lion herds that fed on them were starving themselves out of existence. The fishermen’s associations vowed and declared that the pollock population had nothing to do with the sea lions, but hell, it was perfectly clear to anybody whose livelihood wasn’t on the line.
She wondered what was going to happen next. Alaska existed because of the exploitation of her natural resources: fish, oil, gas. What if she ran out? What happened then? And what happened to towns like Newenham, Togiak, Kodiak, Dutch Harbor, built on fish, whose continued existence depended wholly on the fishing industry?
Stan Tompkins was a fisherman-Lydia’s son, or one of them. Jerry was pretty much a waste of time, sad when you thought how far he’d fallen from the start he had been given, but Stanley Jr. was a capable and prosperous man. She wondered what he thought of what was happening in the bay.
Lydia hadn’t talked much about her children, although they had had some pretty raunchy discussions about sex, the seven of them. Sharon Ilutsik had blushed a lot on those occasions, Bill remembered, and Lydia would be inspired to more and better stories on the strength of those blushes. “You’re a dirty old woman,” Bill had told her once.
“And you aren’t?” Lydia had retorted. “You and Moses kind of set the bar pretty high.” Which, of course, had made Sharon blush more and the rest of them laugh harder.
The clock ticked up to ten and she unlocked the front door. The usual suspects were hanging around outside, waiting, and she stood back out of the way. Never get in between anyone and their first drink of the day. She could have opened up at eight and the same people would have been waiting. She got Chris Coursey a Miller without being asked, and took orders for a Salty Dog, a screwdriver, and a Bloody Mary, this last for Jim Earl, who looked like he needed it badly.
Eric Mollberg shuffled in and sat down on his usual stool. She brought him a bottle of Oly, and he shocked her by refusing it and asking for a diet Coke instead. She poured it for him, making a heroic effort to keep the inevitable commentary to herself. She remembered the arm flying out of the bag, the hand opening, the finger extending, the tip of it almost touching Eric’s nose, Eric’s eyes bulging with horror, and felt a laugh bubbling up inside her. To hide it, she went in the back to check on Moses.
He was sitting in front of her computer, frowning at the screen, and from the glow cast on his face he might actually be operating it. She couldn’t believe he even knew where the on button was. When she went around to see what he was doing, she suffered another shock. He was on the Internet, and had by some miracle known only to the angels managed to get on Google. “What,” she said faintly, “are you doing?”
“Doing a Net search, what’s it look like?” he said, raising his head to look through the half glasses perched on his nose.
Her half glasses, she saw, which happened to be fluorescent pink with white tiger stripes and rhinestones winking from the corners. “I always want to rip your clothes off when you wear those things,” she said.
He grinned. “I know the feeling.” He tapped the gold coin, sitting on the desk next to the keyboard. “This thing might be valuable.”
“How valuable?”
“Well, now, that depends. This coin is a double eagle, a twenty-dollar gold piece.”
“So it’s worth at least, I don’t know, twenty dollars?”
Moses gave her a disapproving look and she subsided, for the moment. Those glasses did make him look awfully cute.
“They were the largest regular-issue gold coins ever made by the United States.”
“What’s a regular-issue coin?”
“I don’t know, exactly. I think it means like nickels and dimes and quarters are today.”
“Not commemorative.”
“I think so. Anyway, there were two basic designs. The first one was the Liberty Head, with Lady Liberty facing left on one side with the date and an eagle with sun rays and stars on the other side. The reverse,” he said, sitting up with an expectant look.
Knowing her duty, she looked suitably impressed.
“It was made from 1849 to 1907.”
She looked at their coin. “Did we figure out what the date was on this coin?”
“Nineteen twenty-one.”
“So not a Liberty Head.”
“The other design is called the St. Gaudens type, named after the guy who designed it. Lady Liberty is back, only she’s in full figure and standing, again on the dated side, and a flying eagle on the reverse.”
“And it was made-”
“From 1907 to 1933. And there’s something called a mint mark that is supposed to be right below the date.”
Bill squinted, but Moses had her glasses and she couldn’t see anything more than some indecipherable squiggles. “I’ll take your word for it.”
“Twenty-dollar gold pieces,” Moses went on in a professorial tone, “are the most commonly found gold coins today because people hoarded them when they were made. Each coin contains about an ounce of gold, and the price of the coin depends on the price of gold bullion. Gold is soft, so the coins that actually saw the inside of somebody’s pocket are pretty beat up. They can be worth anywhere between thr
ee hundred and four hundred dollars.” He sat back and said proudly, “This one’s in pretty good shape, so far as I can tell, so I figure it’s high-end.”
“Wow.” Bill looked at the coin with more respect. “I wonder whose it was?”
“Who belonged on the other end of that arm, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
He shrugged and pulled off her glasses. “You’d be amazed the kinds of things people haul around in their pants. I know a guy carries a big blue glass marble around-I mean it’s two inches in diameter. Says it’s his good-luck piece. Every time I see it I’m glad for him that it hasn’t broken. Ouch.” He winced at the thought of what kind of damage a broken marble in the pocket might do. “I know a woman carries an ivory carving of a sea otter everywhere she goes, changes pockets only when she changes her pants. It’s her, I don’t know, totem, I guess.”
“Like a good-luck charm?”
“Could be.”
“And you’re thinking this gold coin was a good-luck charm, too?”
He looked at the coin. “If it was meant to bring good luck to its owner, and the owner was attached to that arm, it sure failed of its purpose.”
“No kidding.” Because he seemed more contemplative than driven, she said, “You got a feeling about this?”
He thought about it before he replied. “No,” he said, seeming a little surprised by his own answer. “I think I’m just interested.” He slanted a glance up at her. “I’m allowed to be interested without its requiring me to prophesy, ain’t I?”
“You is.” Somebody shouted for beer on the other side of the door. “Don’t hurt the computer,” she said over her shoulder, and shut the door on his oath.
The customers had doubled in number and she took her first three burger orders. As she served the third she became aware of a conversation going on in a booth in the back, featuring Evan Gray. One of her minor frustrations was that Moccasin Man was as adept at getting out of jail as he was at getting into it in the first place.
“It’s true,” he was saying to the rapt audience gathered around him. “They were smuggling gold into the Asian theater, gold for the resistance forces fighting with the Allies. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth. Maybe even millions.”
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