Impasse

by Royce Scott Buckingham

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “I’d rather you did.”

  “Umm, it means ‘piece of shit.’ Sorry.”

  The man laughed. “That’s okay. You can make up for it with your tip. I’ll grab your bags.”

  The man snatched up the duffel and flung it over the side of the truck into the bed with an ominous crunch. When he went for the backpack, Stuart leaped in front of him and grabbed it protectively.

  “I can get this one.”

  “Suit yourself. Hop in.”

  Stu rode with the pack on his lap. It was heavy, and as soon as they hit the rougher roads, it began to crush his testicles at every pothole.

  “I’m going to a private airstrip east of town,” Stu announced. “Yukon Air Tours.”

  “I know it. Bush pilot. You going to fish or hunt?”

  “Presumably,” Stu said.

  “You get up here much?”

  Stu thought it best not to seem too green or naive. He hadn’t asked the price of the fare and wondered if it might change depending upon his answer. “No, but I’m a personal friend of Reginald Dugan, who employs a pilot at Yukon on an annual basis,” he said importantly.

  The man eyed Stu. “Reggie. I’ve heard of him.”

  “Really? It must be a small community.”

  “Smaller than you think. And bigger.”

  “Is that cab-driver philosophy?”

  “Naw. It’s census statistics. The state’s forty-seventh in population and first in size. We’re low-density here. Did you know we bought all this from the Russkies for two cents per acre?”

  “Seward’s Folly.”

  “Aha! So you’re an educated man. Or else you like trivia.”

  “I was a history major.”

  “Really? What kind of job does that get a guy?”

  “None. I had to go to school all over again after I got my undergraduate degree.”

  “For what?”

  “Law.”

  “Oh.…”

  That was all the man said. Stu didn’t expect more, not aloud anyway. The unsaid conclusion of the sentence was usually, So you’re probably a bit of an asshole, huh? He didn’t blame people who thought so. A lot of lawyers were.

  “How far out of town is the airstrip?”

  “Thirty miles, give or take.”

  “Do you enjoy living up here?”

  “Yeah. People say it’s what America used to be. I like that, so I say it too.”

  The remainder of the thirty miles was mostly quiet with scattered small talk. Stuart never asked the man’s name, and the guy didn’t offer. The river town melted away quickly, replaced by long miles of scattered driveways with homes in the distance. When they finally turned at a dirt road and completed the last ball-smashing half-mile of the journey, any fare that meant stopping seemed perfectly reasonable. When the trip came to a merciful end, Stu tipped 20 percent and hurried out to retrieve his duffel bag himself. The man leaned out of the window.

  “Good luck to you.”

  “Thanks. Do you have a card or anything so I can call you when my week in paradise is up?”

  The man fished around in his pocket and came up with a bowling coupon, upon which he wrote a phone number. “That’s my direct line,” he said, handing over the piece of paper. He patted his cell phone. “Anytime you need a POS, just give me a call.” With that, he winked and drove away, leaving Stu standing in the middle of a dirt driveway.

  YUKON AIR TOURS was carved into a rough-cut sign of solid wood. The sign hung overhead, dangling from chains on the gate he’d driven through when he’d arrived with his nameless driver. Not fancy, but quaint in its way. The business itself appeared to be located in a one-story ranch-style home. Not so first class. Stu slung a bag over each shoulder and staggered to the front door under their weight, where he rapped with a heavy knocker in the shape of a salmon against the metal receiving plate. The metallic boom echoed inside and rang sharply outside. The weather was what Stu’s father used to call “crisp.” The bite of fall was tangible, but the temperature was not yet uncomfortably cold.

  No one came to the door. Stu rapped again, annoyed; he’d called ahead to provide his approximate arrival time. But when the clang of the steel salmon died away, a woodsy silence fell over the forested property again. Stu looked around. He shared the porch with a life-size pair of carved wood bear cubs in playful poses at either end of a handmade wooden bench.

  Sure, easy for you to frolic, Stu thought. Wood bears didn’t have demanding clients likely to call to complain that they were goofing around in the forest all week and neglecting their cases.

  Stu put his bags down, squeezed past the bears, and was beginning to peek through windows when he heard the unmistakable sound of a chainsaw firing up. It was loud and nearby, in back of the house if his ears were correct. He walked around. The house sat on a slope that fell away until it met a lake about one hundred yards downhill. Between the two were several dozen trees. The chainsaw roared steadily now, and Stu spotted its operator. The man stood facing one of the trees with the gas-powered tool cocked to his shoulder while he studied his victim, a simple pine with no branches below ten feet.

  Stu started down the hill toward him. Shouting would have done no good, considering the awful din the saw made. The man seemed to be taking a long time to decide where to make the first cut. The walk was pleasant, though. In fact, the smell of forest and sight of the lake might have been soothing, had it not been for the noise. Stu ambled along, trying to enjoy it. Halfway down, however, he noticed the first face.

  He jumped. The bearded man stared at him from a nearby tree. Not from behind the tree, but from the tree itself. Indeed, the shadowy face was the tree. The man’s face had been carved directly into the wood, his wild, bushy hair flowing up the bark, while his long beard ran down the trunk almost to the ground. It was a reasonable likeness of a wrinkled elderly male, but something in the expression was just a bit off—the open mouth that was a black hole without teeth, or perhaps the empty eyes that were dark brown orbs with no whites. He looked, Stu thought, like a crazy soulless transient.

  Old Man Winter on a bad day. Or the Unabomber.

  Stu glanced about. There were more, dozens more, all of them variations of the same grotesque face, with deep gashes forming their wrinkles and unruly hair. The misshapen visages glared at him from trees all around. Some tried to smile, but with their dark mouths they could only manage leering grins. Stu suddenly wanted to be away from the old men, but there was no way out of the forest of faces except through it.

  Downhill, the chainsaw roared and bit into wood, its pitch dropping an octave as it spat sawdust. Oddly, a strange man wielding a chainsaw seemed less creepy than the gawking trees, and so Stu hurried through them toward the lake.

  The man was wearing leather gloves and large sound-dampening headphones. Stu gave him a wide berth in case he was startled and wheeled around with the whirring saw. As soon as Stu stepped into his line of sight, the man killed the engine.

  “Oh! Hiya!” he said loudly, overcompensating for the headphones.

  “Hiya,” Stu parroted.

  Chainsaw Man removed his headphones. “You must be Stark.”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m Ivan.” He grabbed Stu’s hand and pumped it vigorously, swinging the chainsaw with his other arm. “I was just working the wood here while I was waiting for you to show up.”

  “You did all these faces?”

  “Ay-yuh. Like ’em?”

  “They’re lifelike and inhuman at the same time.”

  “I know. Great, huh? I sell them, if you want me to cut one loose for ya. Most people want a bear cub, though. Don’t know why. I sell those, too, by the way. You ready for liftoff?”

  Stu nodded. “Are you on the staff of Yukon Tours?”

  “Ay-yuh.” He laughed. “I am the staff. Right this way, dude.” Ivan started toward the house.

  “How far is the private airstrip?”

  Ivan pointed bac
k over his shoulder at the lake. “Floatplane.”

  Stu sighed. The lake. Of course.

  Up at the house, they gathered Stu’s bags, then Ivan started back toward the lake.

  “Isn’t there any prep work?” Stu asked. “Filing a flight plan?”

  “Nope. We get in, we take off. I used to have a checklist, if that’s what you mean. But I got it all memorized now, and she’s gassed up and ready to go.”

  “I think I’m supposed to get a gun,” Stu added.

  “Ay-yuh. Right.”

  Ivan invited Stu into the house, which looked more like a dorm room. Empty pizza boxes and beer cans littered the kitchen table, and a computer with a naked-lady screensaver sat on a small desk in the living room. Ivan threw open a closet door near the back door, and the smell of marijuana rolled out. It was an unmistakable scent Stu associated more with the Bristol County sheriff’s evidence room than college parties. At least five rifles leaned against the wall inside. Two handguns had been tossed haphazardly on the upper shelf. Ivan selected one of the rifles and rummaged through boxes on the shelf for the correct caliber of ammunition. When he turned back to Stu, he took a long sad look at the gun, seemingly reluctant to hand it over.

  “You sure you don’t just want some bear spray?” Ivan asked.

  “I’m supposed to hunt. I don’t think I can hunt with a can of spray.” Not too bright, this one, Stu thought.

  “True.” Still, he hesitated.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll bring it back in a week. Odds are, I won’t even fire it.”

  “A-course.” Ivan smiled and handed it over. “Browning thirty-aught-six. Keep it pointed at the ground or at the sky and you’ll be all right. Unless a bear comes at ya. Then point it at the bear.”

  They loaded Stu’s gear into the plane, a yellow Piper Super Cub with a fading black lighting bolt down the side, a cracked passenger window, and a dent in its left wingtip. A dark exhaust stain fanned out from the nose cone, and green mold had a foothold in the seams of the pontoons. Given the craft’s obvious age, Stu hoped it was well maintained. He walked around the dock, examining it. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but it made him feel better to do a rudimentary examination. He imagined that the small plane had once looked like a bright buttercup perched atop its white pontoons, but age and the elements had turned it into a dingy old school bus for two. The short bus. The fuselage was not much wider than the seats, which were stacked one behind the other.

  It seemed that the first test of his manhood would be to board the tiny, rickety-looking thing, and when he couldn’t procrastinate any longer, Stu took a deep breath, ducked his head, and squeezed in behind Ivan. He didn’t notice that Ivan himself smelled strongly of weed until they were closed in the small space together.

  Great.

  “The overhead wings are overhead,” Ivan explained as he checked instruments and started the engine. “So you get a good view, because they’re not in the way when you look down.”

  Wow, this guy’s an engineering genius. “I hear some pilots make amateur modification to their planes. Is yours modified at all?”

  “Nah. Well, I did cut out the baggage compartment to give it more space toward the back a bit. And it’s got the bigger twenty-four-gallon gas tanks. But that’s it. Oh, and I threw on an extra ten-gallon outboard I got off a wrecked cub. And the battery mount is forward a touch to help with takeoff in tight spots. Do you know planes?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do you ask?”

  “Just the curious type.”

  “You seem like the nervous type to me. No need to get all jumpy. Just relax and enjoy the ride, bud. This is what I do. You’re a lawyer, huh? Once you know your stuff, you just walk into the courtroom and go at it, right?” Ivan didn’t wait for an answer, but simply taxied noisily out onto the lake and turned the Cub to start their takeoff run.

  It was probably true that Ivan knew as much about planes as Stu did about law. Problem was, Stu had crashed. And burned. It could happen to the best of them, and Ivan clearly wasn’t the best of anything. Stu’s co-workers had called his titanic failure bad luck, but it was overconfidence. He’d taken too much risk. He’d asked for the unwinnable case. Anyone would have lost, he’d told himself a thousand times.

  But I was the one who did.

  “I won’t be nervous if you keep it simple,” Stu yelled over the engine. “I don’t need any treetop sightseeing, and don’t bother buzzing herds of reindeer.”

  “Caribou, dude.”

  “Whatever. No need to bother them.”

  Ivan shrugged. “Sure thing. You’re the client.”

  Stu allowed himself a smirk. That’s a switch.

  Ivan punched it. “Here we go!”

  CHAPTER 10

  The Cub buzzed along above the treetops. Fairbanks and the outlying homes associated with the riverside city quickly dwindled as they flew north, and the wilderness took over. Swaths of trees followed snaking streambeds near town, but soon merged into a solid green expanse dotted by occasional circles of bright blue water. From the Cub, the ground looked like brilliant sapphires sewn into a green tapestry. Ivan chattered incessantly from the pilot’s seat, talk-shouting over the engine.

  “Did you know there are over three million lakes in Alaska?”

  “Wow. I did not know that,” Stu yelled back. How do we find the right one? he wondered.

  The view was indeed spectacular, and the land was as vast and beautiful as advertised, but it was difficult for him to get used to the fact that the Piper Super Cub’s motor sounded like an oversize lawn mower engine.

  “It’s amazing how well these little planes fly, considering how flimsy they are,” Stu said.

  “Not flimsy, dude. Light. The best bush pilots can land a Cub in only twenty feet on an uphill slope, and take off in just about as little.”

  “I read that airplane fatalities are twenty times more common here than the rate nationwide.”

  “Yep,” Ivan agreed.

  That was all Stu’s pilot had to say on the matter. There was no argument or justification. He seemed almost proud of the grim statistic, as though mangling oneself in a heap of metal on a cold glacier was as romantic an end as a man could meet, the inevitable result of the age-old battle pitting man against the elements coupled with the more modern struggle of man against machine.

  Or just man against reason, Stu thought. “Are we still heading north?” he asked.

  “A little east now.”

  “How far to go?”

  “An hour.”

  “We’re way out here, huh?”

  “I’ve been farther.”

  “This cabin, is it on the lake?”

  Ivan hesitated. “Close to the lake. I’ll drop you on the near side. It’s a short hike.”

  An hour later a small mountain loomed, and Ivan yanked the Cub up and over it, treating Stu to an unwelcome moment of vertigo and then a sweeping view of the small lake on the other side. Once they’d cleared the peak, the Cub dropped suddenly and zeroed in on the water. Ivan took it down at a steep angle that made Stu grab ahold of the seat, and then leveled out and slowed for their water landing. Stu had only ridden on commercial jets, and so traveling less than the speed of a car during the landing was an odd sensation. The pontoons skipped, then caught in the water with a slight jerk, and the Cub quickly drifted to a stop. Ivan rotated the nose toward shore, and they putted into the shallows.

  “Hop out here.”

  “In the water?”

  “It’s rocky, dude. I don’t want to beat up the pontoons. Wade in. Hold your bags overhead. I’ll be here a few minutes while you get packed up. I gotta do my halftime inspection.”

  Ivan did a halfhearted round of checks outside the plane, but mostly waited while Stu loaded a bag atop each shoulder and slung the .30-06 over his back. Then Stu lowered himself from the pontoon into the lake. The water crept up to his testicles, which had only recently recovered from the beating they’d taken in the truck
. They’d had a hard day.

  “Cold!”

  Ivan stared at Stu with a genuinely sympathetic look.

  “See you in a week,” Stu called. “Already looking forward to it.”

  Ivan frowned. “Good luck.”

  And then Ivan was back in the cockpit and puttering out onto the lake for takeoff. The shore wasn’t far, but by the time Stu struggled over the slippery stones on the lakebed to dry land, the Cub was disappearing over the mountain peak.

  No turning back now.

  The lake sat in a natural bowl. Stu began searching for a path up the slope, because up was the only direction to go. The thing about finding the path up the mountain, however, was that there was no path up the mountain. The sheer cliff of crumbling dirt directly in front of him was not an option. Beside the cliff, a rockslide had created a field of boulders he might be able to scramble over. Not promising either, considering he was carrying two heavy bags. Farther along, a steep area crowded with underbrush seemed the best choice. So long as there wasn’t poison oak or ivy or horrible thistles, he could push his way through in a half an hour or so, he thought. He hitched his bags onto his shoulders and started up.

  Two hours later he stood at the top of the ridge, gasping for breath and overlooking the lake. The view was spectacular, almost better than from the plane because he’d earned it. The air was the cleanest he’d ever breathed, and the waning sun cast long, amazing shadows of the fir and pine trees down the opposite slope. The quiet was broken only by the occasional distant titter of a squirrel or the chortling of some variety of warbler. Stu scanned the entire ridge, turning his head a full 180 degrees to take it all in, and he took a deep breath, filling his nostrils with pristine air. He felt more alive than he had in years. It was everything Clay had promised, with one exception. There was no cabin.

  “What the hell?”

  CHAPTER 11

  It must be tucked in the trees, Stu thought. No problem.

  He circled for an hour, taking short forays from the stony ridge into the forest, checking the direction of the sun each time he emerged. The distant and strangely pale circle of light remained stubbornly and directly across the lake from him, descending steadily due west. I’m on the east side. This is the right spot. No doubt. But Ivan wasn’t the swiftest fish in the school. He could have made a mistake. Again Stu scanned the slope across the lake for a clearing. Perhaps Ivan the pot-smoking, wood-carving idiot pilot had dropped him on the wrong side. Then a more horrifying thought occurred to him. What if he dropped me on the wrong lake?