Run Cold

by Ed Ifkovic

  The opening lines:

  On and on, language out of an old Beadle yellow-backed dime novel.

  Jack sat back, tried to reach out his arm belligerently in a fighter’s punch, but his shoulder twisted, and he moaned.

  He shifted in his chair, uncomfortable, and suddenly seemed nothing more than an old, damaged man felled by a piddling stroke, a man who prided himself on a life of roughing it in the unforgiving Bush, now the victim of age and pain. He didn’t like it. Frankly, I didn’t blame him—at seventy-four I understood the inevitable unfairness of life. You spend a lifetime forging an image of yourself—the one you see when you look in your nighttime mirror, the one only you see, the one you demand—and then, in a flash, fate slaps you into frailty. I understood Jack’s confusion better than he’d ever realize.

  “Tell Edna about your life as a prospector,” Sonia prompted.

  Jack began a carefully rehearsed story. “The winter of ’03, cold as hell. Alone in a cabin up in Fox. Ma’am, you ain’t known loneliness until you watch the Arctic night. Loneliness—it eats at you like a nasty worm.” He held my eye, though his eyes suddenly shifted away. “Gold so close you can taste it—but you don’t. You ain’t find it in the Klondike in ’98, at Dawson, but this time...you know you gonna. But you don’t. You pan for gold—your fingers blue from the cold. Then you trap for pelts. That’s the gold, they tell you. Frostbite, a can of beans, a few silver dollars jangling in your pockets.” A faraway look came into his eyes. He shrugged his broken shoulder. “Dreams of fortune. Pouf.” A sly grin. “Makes a man bitter.”

  “We all have dreams when we’re young.”

  He shot me a fierce look, one gnarled finger scratching a scab on his cheek. “You don’t get your dreams, you gotta take what you want.”

  “And if you don’t get it?”

  He twisted his head toward Sonia. “I always got it.”

  I caught my breath. “Even murder?”

  He waited a long time. “Frontier ain’t no place for the weak, the sniveling, the…coward.”

  “And you weren’t a coward?”

  His voice rose, broke. “Nope.”

  “You talk a lot about murder, Jack.” I glanced at Sonia and tapped the interview in The Gold.

  “Lady, sometimes murder is the only game in town—in those eat-dirt bars. You live by your fists, don’t take no crap from anyone. Some asshole pushing up into your chest, I knows it’s them or me. Dog eat dog, and I ain’t gonna be the dog eaten. I like that when I walked into a bar, folks left.” He grinned widely. “Left. A knife and a swagger sends a message.”

  Sonia began, “You told me about a fight over a cache of beaver pelts.”

  “Yep. Almost don’t remember that one. Maybe 1910 or so. So far back. A man raids your goods, you got a right to…”

  “Kill him?” I shot out.

  “Ma’am, you city folks don’t get it.” He wagged a finger at me. “Miner’s justice, they call it. No marshals or sheriffs around villages. You settle your battles with the fellows around you. Two bastards in a bar—and only one leaves. Me!”

  “They found you hiding out in a cabin near Chena,” Sonia chided. “Running from the law in Bristol Bay. You’re still a criminal.”

  He waved a dismissive hand at her. “Ain’t nothing, that nonsense.”

  Sonia turned to me. “Jack worked at a cannery in Bristol Bay last summer. Salmon season, mid-summer. June and July, peak time.” Her eyes twinkled. “You got into a kerfuffle.”

  He squinted at her. “I’m an old man. Nobody talks crap to me and gets away with it.”

  “What happened?” I ate my last bit of mooseburger and pushed away the plate.

  Sonia was grinning as she reached into her satchel, extracted another copy of The Gold. “Local police blotter. Last week.” She pointed. “Down on Cushman, late afternoon. Jack tried to wrestle Jeremy Nunne—his old boss—to the ground.”

  Jack set his mouth in a grim line. “You know, I didn’t know the bastard was up in Fairbanks. I knew they canned his ass…”

  Sonia talked to me. “The reason he’s here is because of”—she pointed—“Jack.”

  The small paragraph in the newspaper mentioned pushing and shoving, an incident that resulted in the police stepping in. No charges pressed.

  “Scared of me, that fool. Me, I’m old but strong.” Awkwardly, he flexed a bicep.

  Sonia explained. “Jeremy is a young guy, nephew of the owner of Alaska Enterprises, which, as you know, Edna, is a powerful conglomerate of industries. Planted there as the new manager, a plum job for a wandering nephew, a man without a clue how to deal with the cannery workers—the Filipinos, Chinese, old sourdoughs like Jack, even the adventurous college students up from Seattle for the summer. He comes up against a man like Jack who hates authority”—Jack was nodding vigorously—“and the result is…chaos.”

  “I closed down the damn place for two days.” Jack’s eyes twinkled. “Stopped production. I slugged the bastard and beat it out of town, while the crazy Filipinos ran for the hills and this Nunne fellow calls the cops. Winter in a cabin in Chena. And then…”

  “A stroke,” I finished.

  He ignored that. “The bastard.”

  “Why were you at the cannery, Jack?” I asked.

  “Hard cash. A month in the summer. Ten hours a day. Brutal. A village called Egegik, down from Nushagak in Bristol Bay. A slimer. The rottenest job.”

  “A slimer?” I echoed.

  “Well, ma’am, the salmon come down the chute and I gut them. You got you a fillet knife and you slit the throat down to the belly. When them suckers are decapitated, you pull out the guts and egg sacs. Messy job, you wear yellow oilskin pants and aprons, and you smell to high heaven.”

  “Sounds horrible,” I told him.

  “Yeah, but it puts silver dollars in your pocket. Of course, the money ain’t last long—pool halls, movies, saloons, beer halls, and the goddamn N.C. store taking the rest.”

  “Tough job.” I nodded at him.

  “Yeah, a tough job, but you gotta make a living, lady.” He sat back. “Some worse. The Chinks. The Filipinos drowning theirselves with their stinky perfume. Short season there, then I head north again for the winter. Trapping.”

  “But this time, one step ahead of the law.” Sonia tapped him on the elbow, and he flinched.

  He pulled in his cheeks. “They put in this green kid, bumbling ass, weak-kneed, college-educated sucker, tries to order me around.” He gloated as his eyes scanned the bar. “I caused such a ruckus, no one knew where to run to.” A triumphant grin. “Spoiled a lot of salmon, I tell you. You got you one month to do the job—can’t afford to lose a day.” A harsh laugh. “Lost two days, ma’am.”

  Sonia was nodding. “Jeremy was transferred to Fairbanks, put in charge of Northern Lights Airways, also owned by Alaska Enterprises.”

  “I didn’t know the sucker was here.”

  Sonia hunched her shoulders. “Hence, the incident in the police blotter.” She tapped the newspaper on the table.

  “I want to get back to the murders,” I said.

  Jack grinned. “My kind of lady. Blood and gore. Only murderers are heroes in stories. Not dumb cannery workers.”

  A skinny young man called over to us, interrupting. Dressed in an airman’s uniform, he was most likely stationed at nearby Ladd Air Force Base. He pointed at Jack as he rocked back in his chair. “You the meanest man in Alaska?” Jack grinned but looked confused. “I read about you,” the airman said. I shot him a withering look, lost on the man who now addressed the other diners in a loud, rumbling voice. “I read about this guy.” Pointing to the waitress, he ordered a boilermaker for Jack. Jack downed the whiskey shot but his fingers trembled on the beer bottle.

  Jack was fading now. His eyes fluttering, he made a wheezing sound, his body drifting down into his s
eat. His gnarled fingers kept opening and closing. Popping his eyes open, he gazed across the room, focused on the bottles of whiskey on the glass shelf above the counter, and quietly echoed his own words to me. “My kind of lady.” But his heart wasn’t in it, and I sensed this talk—feeble though it was—was ending. Sonia, aware, offered to walk him back to the Frontier Home. His hand went to grab the beer bottle but knocked it over. Beer ran over the table and onto the floor. “Christ Almighty, man.”

  At that moment a group of men walked out of a back dining room. Dressed in black business suits under Chesterfield overcoats, two of the men wore fashionable horn-rimmed eyeglasses, all four sporting severe Eisenhower military haircuts, their faces assuming the look of a business meeting happily concluded.

  Idly, I watched them, this new Alaskan dynamic that could be transplanted into a Manhattan cocktail lounge, a look uniform, bland, a tad smug. So I was not aware of the rustling at my table.

  I sat up. “What?”

  Sonia whispered, “Preston Strange.” She nodded toward one of the four men.

  “And he is?”

  “An asshole,” Jack roared.

  I frowned at him. “That doesn’t narrow down my list of souls.”

  Sonia kept her eyes on Jack, though she threw a sidelong glance at the men, all of whom had stopped moving, a rigid frieze planted ten feet away from us. “He runs Alaska Enterprises for his mother, Tessa Strange, the most powerful woman in Alaska. The most powerful business conglomerate in Alaska, including that cannery at Bristol Bay.” To my continued bafflement, she added, “The uncle of Jeremy Nunne.” She drummed the newspaper article. “Nephew Nunne, the victim of the recent assault by this crusty gentleman sitting here with us.”

  “The whole family is losers.” Jack’s benediction as his fingers pointed at Preston Strange. He half-rose from his seat, but Sonia touched him on the shoulder. He sat back down.

  One of the men nudged Preston, who seemed loath to move. Finally, a gruff rumble escaping his throat, he took a step toward us. Though he glowered at Jack, he spoke to Sonia.

  A phony laugh. “Sonia, I’ve often questioned the quality of the people I see you with, but I always assumed it was part of your job to assail lowlife for news for that rag you publish, but…a new low, no?”

  Sonia smiled up at him. “Good to see you too, Preston.”

  He squinted at me, his pale blue eyes steely. “Ah, Edna Ferber, returned to pillage the spoils of Alaska.”

  I stiffened my spine. “You know me, sir?”

  “We all know you, courtesy of Sonia and her vicious father and the tabloid slant of The Gold. Last summer you neglected to introduce yourself to my mother.”

  “I didn’t know a royal audience was proper—or necessary.”

  “My mother is the most powerful woman in Alaska.”

  “Of course, but my visit last year was short.”

  “And under the protective wing of Hank Petrievich. And yet you are here again.”

  “You’re very observant.”

  A hasty glance at Jack, a whistling hiss escaping his throat, he almost whispered, “You’re writing a polemic on Alaska becoming a state.”

  “No, sir, a novel.”

  He cut me off. “Not what I hear.” Another sharp look at Jack.

  Irritated, Sonia broke in. “Alaska Enterprises”—she flicked her head toward Preston—“believes statehood is a mistake.”

  “Be that as it may.” Preston’s voice rose. He looked directly into Sonia’s face. “I find your lunch companions…questionable.”

  “Then perhaps you should leave.” Sonia pointed to the door.

  Furious, Preston leaned into Jack. “You—you’ll never work for Alaska Enterprises again, Jack Mabie. You disrupted production at Bristol Bay—unforgivable—halted production, our shipments to Bellingham delayed—a rabble-rouser, a…a Communist maybe. And then to assault my nephew on the streets of Fairbanks…”

  Jack fumbled with the empty beer bottle, then dropped his fingers into the sticky, spilled beer on the table. He spat out his words. “That namby-pamby ain’t got no business ordering hard-working real men around.”

  “You’ll never…” Preston paused, rattled, his face purple, a vein throbbing in his neck.

  “What? Slime another goddamn salmon. Christ, you can keep your worthless job.”

  Preston stepped closer. “I’ve said my say, old man. You touch him again…”

  “Next time I kill him,” Jack thundered.

  Preston blanched, raised a fist. “You…you heard me.”

  Jack hiccoughed. “Maybe I’ll take you off the planet.” A sickly grin aimed at me. “I bet the applause’ll be heard in the Lower Forty-eight.”

  Preston stepped away, nervous, but turned back. “Sonia, again…you really should rethink your lunch mates.”

  As he moved away, he boldly flicked a finger against Jack’s shoulder. Incensed, Jack attempted to shuffle to his feet, jarring the table, scraping his chair, and sending our plates onto the floor. His hand reached for the beer bottle, but it fell to the floor and broke. Preston stepped back, stumbled, and turned toward the doorway. The three men had lingered in the entrance, watching, but now disappeared. Preston moved away, glancing back at us, his face a mixture of hot anger and hollow fear.

  “You heard me,” he yelled to us.

  Jack sputtered, “I kill men worth more’n your spit.”

  But Preston had moved out of earshot, the door slamming behind him.

  I looked helplessly at Sonia. Her eyes were dark and cloudy. “What in the world?”

  Chapter Two

  The day before, when Sonia picked me up at the airport, her shiny DeSoto humming, I saw a question in her face. “Tomorrow night,” she’d said, “dinner at my parents’ home? Everyone can’t wait to see you again, Edna.” A pause. “We were so surprised to learn that you were coming back.”

  “Not as surprised as I was, I have to admit.”

  I had no business returning in March, the end of a cruel Fairbanks winter. My novel Ice Palace nearly finished, there was no reason to be sitting on a Pan Am DC Clipper, New York to Seattle, then Seattle to Fairbanks. There was simply no reason for me to travel again. Especially north to Alaska.

  Except one. That conversation. Abrupt words that stayed with me, haunted and alarmed me. Reason enough, somehow.

  I didn’t want to think about Ice Palace. It had plagued me, that challenging subject, but…it was nearly over. Yet there I was, winging my ancient body back to Alaska. For what?—the fifth or sixth time in five years? Brutal, forty-below temperatures in Kotzebue, twenty-two hours of hazy endless sunshine in Fairbanks, slipping on Taku glacier ice, Mount McKinley with its late-afternoon rose-tipped summit, a lazy afternoon in the Russian Orthodox Church in Sitka, hearty meals with ebullient businessmen in Juneau. My picture ran in Look, photographed with a Matanuska cabbage the size of a subway car. I’d become fascinated with all of Alaska, so it was all in my novel, from Point Barrow to the Banana Belt. I counted the visits on my fingers. Yes, this was my sixth. All because in the last days of my visit last summer, I’d had a brief, unsettling conversation with a young Indian who’d utterly captivated me. Noah West, Sonia Petrievich’s lover. I’d been taken by his striking looks, his unassuming charm, his diamond-sharp intelligence, his gentleness, and his crisp, honest conversation.

  I’d paid the Athabascan Indians scant attention in my research, focusing on their traditional rivals, the Eskimos. I’d spent time in the Eskimo village of Kotzebue within the Arctic Circle, dining on reindeer steak and shee fish at Rotman’s Hotel. So Eskimos it was, not Athabascans. Or even the Aleuts. My audience knew Eskimos—they lived in igloos, rubbed noses when they kissed, sent ancient parents adrift on ice floes till death did them part, popular stereotypes, all—and few knew the more mysterious, elusive Indians.

  But then this
young lawyer, just returned to Fairbanks from Seattle, led me from the bleak concrete buildings of new Fairbanks on Second Avenue into the hardscrabble alleys of a fringe town, the area around Fourth Avenue beyond The Line, the red-light district where neon signs announced grimy bars and sad eateries. We’d been talking about Alaska as we sat in the lounge of the Nordale, and Noah West had said, “Come with me.”

  Sonia, at his side, nodded her head. “Go with him, Edna.”

  It was the night before I was to fly back to the Lower Forty-eight, so much to do, but sitting there with him, staring into his eyes, I’d sensed something in him. So, meekly, I’d followed him, Sonia waving us off with an enigmatic smile on her pretty face. With a dramatic sweep of his arm, he’d stopped walking and pointed over the rows of crumpled pickups and tethered, squawking dogs, and I saw a whitewashed clapboard shack. Its neon sign said “Mimis,” no apostrophe and the second “m” blacked out. His voice was flat yet laced with passion. “There’s the novel you should be writing, Miss Ferber. That’s the real Alaska.”

  And I’d found myself gazing at a corner of Alaska I’d ignored. Six or seven Indians huddled against the weathered building, all drunk, but worse, deadened. They didn’t move. They congregated there like hunting trophies on a den wall, staring back at the black street with eyes washed free of life. Cigarettes dangled from twitching lips, beer bottles gripped tightly, knees buckled, skinny bodies and heads tilted like broken dolls. “There.”

  Then Noah West walked away, leaving me alone on that sidewalk.

  Stunned, I found my way back to the Nordale Hotel and mechanically packed my bags. That night I couldn’t fall asleep.

  The next day I looked for Noah but learned he’d flown his Piper Cub back to his home in the North.

  Now, less than a year later, I was back in Fairbanks. That image of those lost souls frozen outside Mimi’s in the hours of the midnight sun was etched in my brain like a Kodachrome postcard tacked to the heart.

  I felt I’d lost sight of the real Alaska, the frontier, the heartless icebox in the North, the blank-eyed old-timers still haunted by gold. I’d spent my time in overheated parlors, listening to prosperous old white men with cigars and cocktails, intimate groups that raged about statehood and exports and exploitation and—and these were the characters who populated my novel. I’d forgotten that Alaska was still frontier, rough, untutored, a violent, mysterious world deep below the glossy skin I’d written about. Noah West’s Alaska—no man’s land, maybe—was the dark night of the Alaskan soul.