Breakup

by Dana Stabenow

  John Stewman, writing something on his clipboard, looked around. “Like Grand Central Station around here today.”

  Mutt took off up the trail to investigate, and returned shortly with three people in tow. One was Amanda Winthrop Baker, known to friends as Mandy, to mushing fans as the Brahmin Bullet and to the couple behind her as Amanda dear.

  “Amanda dear,” the woman said, “do you have to walk quite so fast?”

  “Yes,” the man said, “your mother isn’t used to—what did you call it?—bushwhacking. Try to keep it down to just under a gallop, if you don’t mind.”

  Only a friend who called her Mandy would have noticed the look of quiet desperation that gleamed in her eyes. Only a friend who called her Mandy would not have remarked on it. Kate, a very good friend, bade a mental goodbye to any prospect of peace this day and with true nobility—because she’d been listening to Mandy’s stories of her parents for years—stepped once more into the breach, holding out a hand and saying heartily, “Hi, Mandy. And these must be your parents. Nice to meet you, folks, I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  She didn’t add what she’d heard. With the innate wisdom of all parents everywhere, they didn’t ask.

  *

  Mandy’s parents huddled as close together as they could get without actually sitting in each other’s lap, not because there wasn’t room on the one undamaged arm of Kate’s couch to spread out, but because they were mesmerized by the unwavering yellow eyes of the 140-pound half-husky, half-wolf lying in the middle of the floor. The expression on their thin-boned, aristocratic East Coast faces was identical, and if each hair of the immaculately groomed, distinguished white caps on both their heads wasn’t standing straight up, it was only because their fear of letting down the side exceeded their fear of being ripped to shreds by a wild animal.

  Medusa had nothing on Mutt, Kate decided, and declined to reassure the Bakers for the third time that since she had introduced them as friends they had nothing to fear.

  Mandy was staring, fascinated, out the kitchen window at the lump of gray metal reposing in the yard. She’d finally noticed the shambles of Kate’s homestead, and had been sufficiently jolted from her self-absorption to demand details. “Jesus, Kate. Forty feet north and you’d have been bear bait.”

  “I am aware of that, Mandy,” Kate said testily. She turned to the parents. “Would you like something to drink? Some tea? Lemon Zinger? Although I haven’t managed a spring run for supplies yet, so I’m out of anything to put in it.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. Baker said, still hypnotized by Mutt’s eyes.

  “That would be lovely,” Mrs. Baker said, just as mechanically. Mutt stretched and let out a little whuff of a groan. Mrs. Baker inched closer to her husband. Mutt rolled a yellow eye in Kate’s direction. Kate bit her lip and turned to pump up a kettle of water.

  Mrs. Baker said, “Amanda dear, we appear to have imposed upon Ms. Shugak at a rather unfortunate time. Perhaps we should just—”

  Mandy aimed a broad, insincere smile in the general direction of the couch. “Just a moment, Mother. Kate, take a look at this.” Mandy grabbed Kate’s arm and crowded her toward the window.

  Kate peered through the shards of shattered glass. The go team was going about its business. The jet engine was still there. Her truck was still flattened. She gave up the hopeful notion that Mandy had made it all go away and said, “What?”

  Mandy dropped her voice. “My folks want to see the mine. Can you take them?”

  Kate stared at her friend as if she’d lost her mind. “What?”

  “I told the folks about the copper mining the Astors and the Carnegies did up here around the turn of the century, and they want to take a look.”

  Kate took a deep, steadying breath. “Then I suggest you take them yourself. For crying out loud, Mandy—”

  “Shhh!” Mr. and Mrs. Baker stirred restively. Mutt opened one eye, and they stilled.

  “I just had a jet engine flatten my homestead and you want me to take the afternoon off?”

  “What is there for you to do until they get all that crap hauled out of here? They’re driving Chick nuts, Kate,” Mandy whispered.

  “Chick,” Kate said, spacing her words with precision, “is a grown man.”

  “Oh, all right, they’re driving me nuts, too. Just get them out of my house for a little while, please?”

  “How long have they been here?” Kate demanded.

  “Thirty-eight hours,” Mandy said. She checked her watch. “And forty minutes.”

  “Not even two days?” In spite of herself, Kate’s shoulders shook. “Jesus, Mandy, get a grip.” She waved a hand toward the window. “Besides, what used to be my transportation is buried beneath four tons of scrap metal. And it’s breakup, I’ve got a thousand things to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like finish my income taxes.”

  Momentarily diverted, Mandy said, “You left it to the last minute again this year?”

  Kate bristled. “You got a problem with that?”

  “No, it’s just that last year you swore—” At Kate’s expression Mandy floundered. “It’s just that you’re usually such a planner, Shugak, I’d think—” She looked at Kate again and steered the conversation back to where she wanted it in the first place. “You can use my truck to ferry them up to the mine, and drop me off at my trailhead on the way.”

  Kate’s expression did not noticeably soften, and Mandy dropped her voice a persuasive octave. “Look, if you could just show them around the place, tell them some of the good old stories. Shove them off the edge of the glacier. Just kidding,” she added quickly when Kate’s brows rose. “Ha. Ha ha ha. Seriously, Kate. If you could just get them off our backs for three or four hours, I’d sacrifice a goat in your honor. Please, Kate.”

  Kate put her hands on her hips and demanded, “Did you hear a word I said?”

  Mandy glanced over at her parents and lowered her voice further to a whisper, as if she thought that if she did her parents couldn’t hear every word she said in a twenty-five-foot-square cabin. “They actually think I’m going to come home. Can you believe it? It’s like they’re deaf, Kate! When am I coming home, Amanda dear, Dad says, and I say, I am home, Dad. Next fall, perhaps? he says, and I say, I am home, Dad. There’s this man at home, Amanda dear, Mother says, he’s a Cabot and so suitable, and I say, I’m not getting married, Mother, and I’m sure as hell not coming home to get married, and Mother says, He’s so charming, Amanda dear, you’ll adore him. You’d think I was some kind of witless little deb, fresh from her coming-out party!”

  Her voice, having risen over the last words, stopped abruptly as Mandy waged an obvious battle for self-control. Kate looked at her, at the weathered skin that made her look older than Kate, though she was two years younger, at the neatly trimmed cap of thick brown hair, the deeply set gray eyes surrounded by wrinkles that came from years of squinting into an Arctic sun from the back of a dogsled. She was mostly muscle and bone, and she was dressed in a fashion to wring her mother’s heart, or much as Kate was, in plaid flannel shirt, jeans and tennis shoes. She didn’t look much like a Boston Brahmin debutante, and in fact she wasn’t one, but only because she had made her escape the instant she was of legal age.

  Mandy had been born in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on Valentine’s Day thirty-two years before. The day after her birth her father, a banker who inherited one fortune from a Carnegie forebear and made a second lending overpriced money to Israel and Argentina, put her name down for Vassar, eighteen years hence. That same day her mother, a great-niece of Henry Cabot Lodge, began making plans for her daughter’s coming-out party, also eighteen years hence. The interim was taken up with piano and ballroom dance and French lessons, instruction at a private, exclusive girls’ school and private, exclusive parties given in private, exclusive homes to which children of only the most private, exclusive families were invited.

  Somewhere along the line the Bakers must have slipped up in their indoctri
nation. No one knew it better than Mandy, who during childhood and adolescence was able to conceal her deplorable preference for L. L. Bean over Halston (who had been dressing Mrs. Baker since her coming out), Robert Service over Robert Lowell (a second cousin once removed) and hiking the Appalachian Trail over sailing off Cape Cod (Mr. Baker maintained a sloop in Newport), but the day she turned twenty-one and came into her trust fund she came out of the closet. “I’m moving to Alaska,” she announced at breakfast.

  Their maid Carlotta nearly dropped the bowl of muesli she was handing around.

  Her father laughed comfortably from behind his paper. “Don’t be silly, Amanda dear, you’re graduating from Vassar next year.”

  “I’m moving to Alaska instead,” she said, and her mother said, “What do you think of this shade of taffeta for your ball gown, Amanda dear? Too pink?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care, Mother,” Mandy said. “I won’t be wearing it. I’ll be in Alaska.”

  “It is too pink,” her mother decided. “I’ll have to ask Roy for more swatches.”

  “Whatever, Mother, but you’d better get it sized to fit you, because I’ll be in Alaska when they strike up the first waltz.”

  Carlotta, who had been with them since before Mandy was born and who at that point knew her rather better than her parents did, burst into tears, threw her apron over her head and ran from the room. Mandy went upstairs to pack.

  They trailed after her all the way to Logan International Airport, she in a Yellow Cab and they in the Bentley, driven by Carlotta’s husband, Alfonso (a Bentley because Mrs. Baker said that Rolls-Royces were getting positively common when bourgeois entrepreneurs like Donald Trump drove around in one). They protested her decision in louder and louder voices right up to the time the hatch on the jet shut in their faces.

  Mandy changed planes in Seattle and arrived in Anchorage on a cold, snowy day in March. She transferred her trust fund to an account at a local bank, found a real estate agent with a pilot’s license and began flying into remote properties in the Bush. It took her two months to find exactly what she wanted. When she did find it, an abandoned lodge on Silver Bottom Creek and 130 acres, she bought it, along with three nearly feral dogs, without haggling. She knew from the real estate agent’s face that she’d overpaid. “I don’t care,” she told Kate. “At least for the first time in my life that damn trust fund is being used for something besides bachelor bait.” It took her the whole first summer just to clean up the mess the previous owners had left and take inventory, her first winter included a record snowfall that caved in a corner of the roof, and she learned the hard way how not to attract the attention of hungry grizzlies. But she did survive, which was more than most wannabe frontiersmen could say. And out in the Great Alone, with a silence she almost could hear, she was truly and deeply content for the first time in her life.

  The following year, attending the World Championship Sled Dog Races during Anchorage’s Fur Rendezvous, she met Chick Noyukpuk, also known as the Billiken Bullet, a two-time world champion dogsled racer and part-time drunk. The attraction was instantaneous and mutual, and she brought him back to the homestead with her. When he’d sobered up he made friends with her huskies, half-wild, half-wolf creatures that slunk around the lodge and would approach close enough to snatch food from her hand and no closer. Two were females and came into heat almost immediately, followed by two litters, one of five and the other of seven. Chick had them in traces before they were three months old. He found an old sled in the pile of debris behind the cabin, mended it and hitched up the team. Mandy, skinning her first beaver in the front yard, paused to watch them parade back and forth, the short, stocky man with the black hair and the big grin kicking off behind a tiny forest of dangling tongues and plumed tails. “Hey,” she said finally, laying down her knife. “Let me try that.”

  Eventually she became the fourth woman to win the Iditarod and the third to win the Yukon Quest. They traded off the team, Chick racing the dogs one year, she the next, and the newspapers started calling her the Brahmin Bullet. When they weren’t racing they came home and oversaw their breeding and training program, trapped mink and beaver, hunted moose, caribou and black-tailed deer, dip-netted salmon out of the creek and did a little desultory gold panning, more out of the wish to maintain an Alaskan tradition than out of any real desire to strike it rich. It was a good life. She didn’t ask for more.

  Except, perhaps, Kate thought, to be left alone by her parents, and for perhaps the first time in her life realized that being the only child of deceased parents wasn’t necessarily all bad. “Look, Mandy, make Chick give your parents the tour. He’s mushed over every inch of the Park, he probably knows it better than I do.”

  “Kate,” Mandy hissed, desperate now, “these are people whose closest approach to a Native American has been a benefit revival of Nanook of the North at the Boston Museum of Art. Mother asked Chick if he did rain dances.”

  “What did Chick say?” Kate couldn’t resist asking.

  “Only if there was a forest fire that needed putting out. It’s not funny, Kate!”

  Kate, choking, whispered back, “Mandy, in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m an Aleut. What makes you think they’ll take to me any better than they did Chick?”

  “You haven’t had carnal knowledge of their one and only daughter,” Mandy said grimly. She brightened at a new thought. “I’ll pay you.”

  “Good,” Kate said, surrendering with a sigh to the unconcealed panic in her friend’s eyes. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “How much?”

  “One million dollars.”

  “It’s yours.”

  Kate laughed. “Or alternatively, the loan of your truck for a supply run into Ahtna.”

  “You can have the million,” Mandy said earnestly, “just as soon as they die and I inherit.”

  She didn’t add, The sooner the better, but they both thought it. “I’ll settle for the loan of the truck,” Kate said dryly. “I’ll need it anyway if I’m going to ferry your parents around.”

  “It’s yours,” Mandy said, holding up both hands flat out. A done deal. “You can have it. I’ll buy another. No problem. My dividends are up this year from last.” Obviously afraid Kate would change her mind, Mandy dug in her pocket and handed over the keys forthwith.

  Accepting them, Kate wondered if the IRS would call this exchange barter and subject to tax.

  Five

  AN HOUR LATER, she was wondering if there was any insanity in her family.

  To the barely concealed relief of her two guests, Mutt remained behind to keep the fear of God in the go team. Mandy had been dropped off at the top of the trail leading to her lodge, and Kate had driven the twenty-five miles of ice, slush, pothole, washboard and washout to Niniltna in a loquacious bubble of information about Alaska in general, the Park in particular, and the Kanuyaq Copper Mine’s life and death.

  There followed a complete history of the building of the Kanuyaq River and Northwestern Railroad, beginning in 1900 with the probably apocryphal story of two old Ninety-niners prospecting for gold with a couple of hungry pack mules. Casting about for graze, they looked up and saw a green mountain, only to find upon arrival that the mountain was not covered with grass, it was made of copper. They carried the news Outside, and a couple of the robber barons of the time, Carnegie and Mellon, or maybe it was John Jacob Astor, Kate couldn’t remember and by this time didn’t much care—

  “Guggenheim and Morgan,” Mr. Baker said.

  Startled, Kate looked over at him, and then had to grab the steering wheel with both hands when the right front tire lurched into a pothole and Mandy’s brand-new, bright red, four-wheel-drive Ford Ranger XL long-bed Supercab bottomed out. When they regained the horizontal—was the play in the steering wheel just a trifle looser than before?—Mr. Baker said, almost apologetically, “The Guggenheims are cousins.”

  “Oh.”

  “Distant cousins,” Mrs. Baker added in austere reproof,
and Kate wondered how the Guggenheims had managed to offend Mrs. Baker’s delicate sensibilities. In the end, she decided that Mrs. Baker’s beef probably had more to do with money than sex; maybe the Guggenheims had rooked the Bakers on a deal that rooked the shareholders even more. It had to be one or the other; in Kate’s experience, sex and money were the prime motivating factors in every human quarrel. Look at God’s fight with Adam and Eve, and that was probably over sex only because money hadn’t been invented yet.

  Or maybe it was just that she had sex on the brain this spring. She brought herself firmly back into the present and her tour guide duties. Guggenheim and Morgan, then, purchased leases from the federal government, as Alaska was at that time a territory, finished the railroad from Kanuyaq (kanuyaq was Aleut for copper) to Cordova by 1911 and ran raw copper ore down it for twenty-seven years. The ore played out at about the same time the price of copper went into the toilet, and it was abandoned in 1938, except by Park rats searching for useful fixtures such as stoves, iceboxes and toilets, and by the ever heavy hand of time.

  Kate’s voice, a broken husk of sound to begin with as a result of the scar that nearly bisected her throat, a reminder of her former job in the investigator’s office of the Anchorage DA, was just about gone. Mr. and Mrs. Baker had noticed the scar and ignored it, thereby demonstrating how very well they had been brought up. They were a polite and attentive audience, she’d grant them that. Still, the journey seemed interminable. They passed Niniltna without stopping, Kate thinking that Auntie Vi would be good for cocoa and fry bread on the way back and that her passengers would need it then more than they did now. There were only a few homesteads and a few lone cabins on the road between the village and the mine, and the surface had deteriorated conspicuously because of the lack of traffic to pound it into some semblance of shape. Mandy’s pickup bounced and jounced from pothole to pothole, so that riding inside the cab was like riding inside a washing machine on the heavy-duty cycle. Mr. and Mrs. Baker attached hands like limpets to the dash and hung on for dear life.