Plan B for the Middle Class

by Ron Carlson

  Inside the trailer, Julie’s three students plucked at violin strings tuning their instruments. She introduced them to Burns: Tara, Mercy, and Calvin, native kids all about twelve. They sat serious and straight-backed in the living room for the lesson while Julie began leading them through the half hour’s exercises. Calvin’s eyes kept going sideways to Burns, and Burns could see they were all self-conscious, so he stood and started for his room. Julie stopped and came to him. “Can I get you anything?”

  “No, thank you,” he said. Taking off his coat had made him impossibly tired. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  As he climbed into bed he could hear the sliding harmonies of the four violins rise and fall. Alec had started the violin when he was six, the year Helen had taken him and gone back to Ohio, and years later when Alec finished Juilliard, he had gone to Alaska to teach. Burns had never contacted his son when he was studying in New York. In those days guilt had slowed everything Burns did. He had moved his practice to Connecticut by then, and three times Burns had taken the train into the city and walked by the music school, slowing enough to hear the strains of piano or French horn from a window. And then as if scolded by the music, he hurried away. He couldn’t cross the street and go in. Now Burns cringed at his cowardice.

  Under the heavy blankets in his room, as the wind moaned over the trailer, Burns listened to the violins. He’d eaten his chocolate and was tired to his bones. He could feel the structure moving in the weight of the gusts. It was like being aboard ship.

  Later he had heard voices, their timbre, something almost angry, and then he felt the door shut, and the rushing quiet took him again.

  Burns woke in the bright morning and heard the white wind. He was disappointed as he wiped at the frost on the inside of his window to see the storm outside, but there was something else: all this weather. He liked this odd place, big on the earth and full of weather. He’d had the same feeling on certain days sailing off St. Johns: the ocean could be a big, unknowable thing there, indifferent to anybody’s plans.

  Julie had left him a map on the table, a pencil grid of the village with arrows to the sheriff’s office and his phone number. At the bottom it said, “I’ll be back at five—and then I’d better take you to the hospital party, so everyone can meet the mystery man. It’s at seven. J.” Beside it was a large sweet roll, which Burns wolfed down with a mug of the cold powdered milk from the fridge. Standing there in his pajamas in the kitchen drinking the thick, cold milk, Burns grinned. He felt like a kid. He was grinning. Powdered milk was better than he had imagined.

  Outside, marching sidelong into the killer wind, Burns felt the cold only in his exposed forehead and then not as cold, but as a constriction, a tight band of pain. He walked with his head turned for protection into his parka hood, and the drivers of the snow machines who roared past also drove with their heads turned. It made him stop and move aside several times. He saw several more mittens in the snow, but didn’t pick them up. The day, the world, was all wind, even the rustle of his coat was lost in the gale.

  The sheriff’s office was two long blocks past the Tahoe in a small complex of state and federal buildings, one-story brick cottages linked by covered walkways. The sheriff was waiting for him, but after they shook hands, Burns had to sit down for a moment and rub his forehead while the aching subsided. He’d sat behind his own desk just like this, rubbing his head, unable to talk to some client as a low wave of nausea rinsed through. In those days, while he tried to poison himself with it, drinking pernicious amounts of gin every night, his clients never knew, his business never quivered. When he went down, they didn’t find him for a week, and when Helen came to the hospital, she simply said to stop it, that she was fine and would be, but that killing himself would make it worse for everyone. “You’ve broken me,” she said. “I’m taking the baby and going home.” And that was that. He was two weeks in the hospital, having almost lost toes to frostbite, and when he came out, he moved the office to New Canaan, dropped everything but probate, and knew—essentially—and this had nothing to do with the drinking—that his life was over. Helen had already taken Alec back to Ohio, where her mother had lived, and a few years later she married Charley, an attorney in Chagrin Falls.

  The sheriff’s name was Lloyd Right, a man all in khaki, whom Burns liked right away. “Mr. Burns,” he said, taking Burns’s coat and pointing out the easy chair, “now tell me exactly the objectives of your visit to the frozen north.”

  He nodded through the tale, his jaw in his fist, and then when Burns finished, Lloyd Right stood and went to the three-drawer file in the corner and pulled out a folder. “It doesn’t appear as if Glen Batton or anybody else is going to be able to lift you out there.” Right went back to his desk and sat down, placing the folder squarely in front of him. “This weather has been tight for a week, and it’s a pity, not that there’s much to see, but I understand too well the importance of just being at the scene.” Right dialed the phone and then hung up. It rang and he picked up and said, “Jerry, bring us two coffees.” He looked at Burns. “You want some coffee, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “Anyway, Julie told me about you and about Alec’s mother. These things are always bad. What I can do for you is tell you what I know, let you read the file. It was an accident, you can tell his mother that. We don’t have any photos. But Julie had been by his place and she can describe it to you. You could tell the family that you went out there, that—”

  “No, I couldn’t,” Burns said. “I couldn’t do that. You understand. I am the family. I could tell Alec’s mother I was here and saw this file and that I spoke to you.”

  The deputy came in with the coffee, setting the two mugs on the sheriff’s desk and backing out. While the office door was open, another officer came in, the cold on him like an odor, a rifle in his hand. “Lloyd, they’ve seen the stray out at the foothills. You coming?”

  “Take Bob. Call me in half an hour,” Right said. When the men had left, the sheriff sipped his coffee. “We’ve got one goddam stray left, and he’s a smart one. What a lone dog can do to a staked team. You don’t want to see it. Some of our teams are worth thousands; two teams are going down for the Iditarod next month. Do they hear about the Iditarod in Connecticut, Mr. Burns?”

  “They do,” Burns said. “You don’t think I can get out to Kolvik?”

  “I don’t. It’s too bad. I’ve been to the site. Alec lived about two miles from the village, south, in the low hills. The cabin had been totally consumed.” The sheriff stood and came around his metal desk, sitting on the edge of the short bookshelf near Burns. “You know, even before he left here, something had happened to Alec,” he said. “He had a breakdown or something. This is not in the report. But he began acting strange. You can ask Julie about it. We were sorry about it here. What he had done for the music program in the high school in two years was wonderful, and when he dropped out and moved out there sixty miles, well, everybody felt bad. But we see this kind of thing here. A guy moves out and then further out and moves, if he can, to what he sees as the end of the road, the edge, and either he lives there or he doesn’t, but he doesn’t come back.”

  Lloyd Right went back and sat behind his desk, working his closed eyes with his fingers for a moment. He went on, “You figure it. He was a fine musician. So, he moves out to Kolvik and starts a trapline. It was just above the cabin in a draw. That’s where they found the body. It was a classic case of freezing to death, I mean, he’d taken off his clothes and they were scattered around. It’s very common, Mr. Burns, and I would think it’s important that you know this was an accident, not suicide. He misjudged the time and was out too long.” Lloyd Right stood again and drained his coffee. “We found the dog out there with him. Julie has her.”

  On the way home, Burns felt his mouth dry with hunger and he went into the small Co-op and bought a bag of chocolate bars. Outside a man had fallen on the steps and Burns and a woman helped the man climb back up. Burns took the back
street to Julie’s, the wind now pushing him along the pathway. There were fewer close calls with snow machines here, and he ate the candy and walked slowly, his hands thrust deeply into his parka pockets. Then a strange thing happened that scared him so badly he involuntarily ducked and nearly fell. At first Burns thought something had hit him, but then he saw the light change, a sunflash that settled on the village for a second dropping thick blue shadows on the sides of things. It was painfully bright. The sun was out. In the sky Burns could see the contours of individual clouds. Stay there, he thought. Just stay there.

  The party that night was held in the hospital recreation room, a small square room lined with blue vinyl couches. The hospital was obviously an old wooden military building that had been superficially redone. There was a new checkerboard linoleum floor, but wooden-framed windows lined each wall. Julie took Burns by the arm and they went around to everybody in the room, thirty or so people: Julie’s head nurse, Karen; Lloyd Right and his wife; both deputies; several nurses and two doctors (both women); Glen Batton; the high school principal and his wife; a dozen teachers there; the school board members whom Burns recognized from his flight; a social counselor named Victor (the only Inuit at the party); some guys from the National Guard; and part of the airport staff. Burns wasn’t very comfortable. He’d slept all afternoon and his feet hurt and his face felt swollen. But he was keen, too, because the weather had changed—there was talk of a clearing. Jets were coming in from Nome tomorrow.

  He stood by the buffet table and ate strips of the salty ham while he filled a small paper plate with deviled eggs. He felt a bit foolish, but he could not move away from the buffet table, eating handfuls of the chips and dip and mixed nuts, nodding at people with his mouth full, smiling, absolutely out of control. When one of the airport personnel came up and said, “So, you’re not a cop,” Burns just smiled at him too and shook his head, popping another of the tangy eggs into his mouth.

  There was a slide show. One of the nurses had been in the Grand Canyon the past summer and showed slides of her river trip. They were good slides, not professional, but full of steep purple rock and shadow. Burns stood behind the couches during the presentation, eating carrot sticks and drinking 7UP, and the Grand Canyon on the hospital wall, the foaming brown river, the two huge yellow rafts, and the travelers in their bikinis and sunglasses all gave him a kind of spin and he finally stopped eating and sat down.

  “You’re from Connecticut,” a woman next to him said. It was Karen, the chief nurse. In the near-dark he saw that she was about his age, a brunette with an aquiline nose, like a pretty schoolteacher.

  “Yes, I am,” he said. The slide changed and everybody laughed: four naked people holding hands ran toward the river.

  “Which one is you, Leslie?” Glen Batton said.

  “Dream on, Glen,” the projectionist said.

  The woman next to Burns, Karen, whispered, “Before we were transferred, we lived in New London for ten years.”

  Lake Mead appeared as a blue plate under a pale sky. It was the first slide that had a horizontal theme and then the lights clicked on and there was applause. “This year,” Leslie said to the group, “we’re going to the Everglades and the Keys.”

  Glen Batton, who had been sitting with Julie, said, “Well, keep your clothes on around the alligators, Leslie.”

  “That wasn’t me.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Julie said. “He’s been in Alaska too long.”

  People were standing up and moving the couches against the walls now, and suddenly the lights went down and a tape began to play a Beatles song that Burns knew, but didn’t know the name of, and three couples began to dance. Burns went to the window and holding his hand against the pane, he saw the stars.

  “The weather’s clearing for a spell.” One of the deputies had come up to him.

  Burns looked at the man. “Did you find that dog?”

  “Not today, but we will.”

  “How often do you have to do this.”

  “Not twice a year. Usually just spring. A lot of dogs are let loose. It’s a bad deal.”

  “Come here,” a man said from behind him, taking his arm. It was the counselor, the Inuit, Victor. “I’ll show you something.” He led Burns past Karen and down the hallway and out the side door into the cold. “Check this.” The man pointed over the roof where Burns saw a finger of yellow light run up the sky and fade followed by two pale pink ones that shifted like something seen through a depth of water.

  “I’ve never seen them before,” Burns said to the man. His breath rose as white mist.

  The man smiled. “Alec hadn’t either,” he said. “I’m sorry for what happened. He was related to you?”

  “He was my son.” Now a greenish white washed up the sky and flared in sections as if cooling.

  “He was too smart for this place,” the man said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What would keep him here? All the white guys with their dog teams? Alec was a genius, right? He must be what a genius is.”

  “Possibly,” Burns said. The cold had gone through him and become a pressure in his neck. Now the pink was back, shooting like a crazy beacon into the black.

  “You’re staying with Julie?”

  “Yes,” Burns answered, and alerted by something in Victor’s voice he added, “Why?”

  “Nothing,” Victor said, looking up, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. “I could never figure them. Alec and her.”

  “I see,” Burns said. For a moment the sky was black. “She’s so …” Burns opened the sentence hoping the other man would finish it. He wanted this information.

  “I don’t know. I shouldn’t talk. You’ll see that not much up here is what it seems, but they didn’t fit. She’s too sociable. Maybe that’s what I mean.”

  Suddenly a canopy of blue light came up the sky and then shredded and disappeared.

  Someone took Burns’s arm and he felt a body next to him. “Aren’t you freezing?” Karen said. She shivered against him, hugging his arm with both hands. “It’s twenty below.” Burns put his arm out and around the woman.

  “Do you know what happened to him?” he said to Victor.

  “I don’t. I took him hunting once, his first year here, before he moved out. He was good people. I never saw somebody so swept away by this place. He loved it all. He was an intense guy all around.”

  Karen shifted her position, running her arms around Burns’s middle and burying her head in his shoulder. “It’s cold!” she said, laughing. The night continued to convulse above them, a huge panorama revolving across the horizon. The sharp dry cold sized Burns’s skin, his face. The food and the slides were all gone. He was awake.

  “What’s the weather tomorrow, Victor? Could a person fly somewhere?”

  “We’ll get one day,” Victor said. “Tomorrow you could fly anywhere you want.”

  Inside, Karen kept his arm, the cold now real in the warm room. Most of the people at the party were dancing, and Burns saw Glen Batton and Julie moving slowly to the music, another song he knew but couldn’t identify. He didn’t know the name of five songs in the world. It was a wonder to him; he didn’t know any songs.

  Karen asked him if he wanted to dance and he smiled and said he had to go. She led him back to the coats, which were in the dark entry hall. She handed him his parka, and the way she looked at him, frankly, without any real pity, led him to do something he hadn’t done in ten years. He leaned to her and put his free hand around her back and kissed her. She embraced him fully, but without anything frantic, and the dark of the hall and the smell of the coats made him feel like a boy again and now too he was full of resolve about tomorrow as he held her there, lifting her against him. He liked feeling her body and she shifted twice against him, moving so their legs were interwoven, and he heard her moan in the shifting coats, and he did not let go. Then he heard his name. Glen was saying his name.

  “Excuse me,” Glen said, coming down the dark hal
lway. They had disengaged by the time he spoke again. “Julie asked me to tell you that I’m willing to take you out to Kolvik tomorrow.” Glen was looking at Karen. “The weather’s supposed to clear.”

  “I appreciate that,” Burns said. “Are you sure?”

  “The weather is going to be splendid.” Julie had come up behind him. She saw Burns putting on his coat. “Where are you going?”

  “I thought I’d get some rest. Deviled eggs, the Grand Canyon, the northern lights … this is a lot for an old man.”

  “He’d never seen the lights before,” Karen said, squeezing Burns’s arm.

  “Here,” Julie said, taking his arm from Karen. “I’ll go with you.”

  “No, please,” he said. “I know the way. Please. Stay.”

  Julie retrieved her coat and pushed Glen back to the party. Karen stood around until she saw that Julie was serious about leaving, and then she took both of Burns’s hands and reached up and kissed him quickly, drifting back to the party herself. As he opened the door for Julie and pushed out into the white night, Burns saw Batton watching them.

  The night was now still, the first stillness Burns had felt in Alaska, and he felt the weight of the profound chill, the northern sky fringed with erratic blooming light. “Her husband ran the armory here,” Julie said. “He was killed loading freight two years ago.”