Frozen Sun

by Stan Jones

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The main course at the Triangle cafeteria had been fried chicken, judging from the smell of the place and the remains on the Marlboro girl’s plate when Active showed up at seven the next night.

  Judging also from the remains, the Marlboro girl still didn’t have much of an appetite. A chicken breast had maybe two bites out of it, as did a green salad, and that was it. A biscuit, a puddle of creamed corn, some kind of reddish purple cobbler dessert, all were untouched.

  But one thing was different, he noticed as he looked around the cafeteria. There was no sign of Wendy. He noticed something else as he said hello and slid into the chair across from Grace. She was done up.

  Lipstick, something on the cheeks, something around the eyes, not a lot of makeup but with her skin she didn’t need a lot. No smell of the slimeline tonight, just the hint of some perfume he couldn’t name, something floral, he thought.

  And the hair was not under the purple cap but free, looking glossy and brushed, if somewhat short.

  Very short, in fact, barely longer than his own. It reminded him of … what? Otter fur, that was it. The trappers around Chukchi caught river otters and the women used the fur to trim parka ruffs. Dense, sleek brown-black fur that looked exactly like Grace Palmer’s hair. He wanted to brush his palm over it until he realized it was about the same length as Wendy’s hair.

  She looked up and smiled for a moment, her eyes widening, the whites briefly flashing silver. Then she was serious again. “You bring the cigarettes?”

  He pushed them across the table to her, then pulled off his windbreaker and laid it on the chair beside him as she lit a Marlboro. She inhaled, closed her eyes, opened them, and spoke through a cloud of smoke. “What did you do?”

  The first swerve of the evening and the conversation not even started. He thought about the question, but came up dry. “About what?”

  “About the day.”

  He thought some more and still didn’t get it. “Sorry, what day?”

  “This day. If I’m the reason you’re in Dutch Harbor, what did you do all day today?”

  “Oh, I see. Not much really. Slept in, read, watched CNN, made some calls.” He shrugged.

  “What?”

  He started to repeat his answer, then decided she didn’t mean she hadn’t heard. “What … what?”

  “What did you read?”

  He smiled. “A computer manual, believe it or not. I have to go back to Chukchi and teach the other people in the office how to use Windows.”

  “I hate Windows.” She had been twirling a fork in the creamed corn. Now she jabbed it into the chicken breast and mopped that through the corn. “Fucking Bill Gates.”

  “Yeah, a lot of people in the Troopers prefer Macintosh, too, but…”

  “Macintosh is worse. I like Linux.”

  He had to stop and think things over again. Linux was an operating system for geeks in computer labs and server farms. Based on his few encounters with it, he was of the opinion it had been written by Martians and would never be successfully adapted for use by earthlings. Was Grace Palmer saying she - -

  “You actually understand Linux?”

  She dragged on the Marlboro and gave him her cool gaze, the one that seemed to say he didn’t measure up. “Whom?”

  He was about to say, “You - - do you really understand Linux?” when he realized this was another swerve and now she wasn’t talking about computers. He threw up his hands in surrender. “Whom what?” Then he smiled because it sounded so ridiculous, and shook his head. “What are you asking?”

  Again the cool gaze. “Whom did you call?”

  He looked away from the gaze. “Oh, just some people up in Chukchi. You know, checking in.”

  “A woman?”

  “She was out. I left a message.” Telling himself, naturally she’s going to be out if you call Dispatch on her lunch hour, you know that.

  And thinking farther into Grace Palmer’s question, was Lucy Generous a woman? He thought of her as a girl, he realized that now. Here he was, within sight of thirty and dating—no, sleeping with, there was far more sleeping with than dating—someone he thought of as a girl.

  Maybe a girl was a girl until she had a child, was that what he thought? But what if she never did? He felt depressed at the thought of a sixty-year old girl. Still, if she was never a mother perhaps she was never a woman.

  No, that wasn’t right. Not with Grace Palmer there across the table, looking as if she were made of diamond or tungsten, something beautiful and indestructible. Childless but definitely a woman. Would Lucy, could any girl, become this kind of woman without going through what Grace Palmer had gone through on Four Street? How many girls would survive it?

  She seemed physically healthy—aglow, actually. She had definitely recovered her looks, and he marveled at the constitution that had not only survived Four Street but seemed to thrive on the slimeline while her co-workers looked like the inmates of a homeless shelter.

  But what about her mental state? She was smart, had to be smart if she could memorize bingo cards by the dozen, make music from telephone numbers, even understand Linux. But there was that opaque, nervous brightness, the jittery zig-zags in the conversation, the aura of a shattered psyche held together by the force of an extraordinary intellect and will.

  He pushed it all into the back of his mind and looked at her again. Whatever her condition, Grace Palmer was not a girl. Every trace of girlhood had been burned out of her long ago.

  “Hey, you over there,” she said. “What’s her name? Maybe I know her.”

  He shook his head. Apparently she had already asked the question once, while he was thinking. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Grace Palmer dropped her gaze to her hands with a little smile, eyes flashing again. “OK. I’m saving for college.”

  He backed his way through their conversation, trying to connect this latest detour with anything either of them had said tonight.

  She put the cool, appraising gaze on him again, and apparently took pity.

  “That was your last question last night, the one I wouldn’t answer.” Her voice had a hint of laughter behind it. “What was I saving for? Well, the answer is college.”

  It occurred to him that the swerves were perhaps not evidence of a damaged psyche, but a tactic, a stunt. Like memorizing forty-eight cards at Aurora Bingo.

  “You’re going back to the university as a dead person?”

  “No, I’ve applied for readmission under my own name. I’ll work the summer here, then go back in the fall, pay restitution for the windows I broke, and register as Grace Palmer again.”

  “What’s your major?”

  “Pre-law.”

  “You want to be a lawyer?”

  “Or a social worker if I can’t hack law school.” She drew on the Marlboro, eyes closed.

  “You know, the police records in Anchorage don’t mention any call from a motorist about you and Angie that night.”

  She didn’t bother opening her eyes. “So?”

  “Well, normally the dispatchers log everything.”

  Now she looked up at him. “Maybe they forgot or they were busy or something. Or maybe the guy couldn’t get through. Does it matter?”

  He shrugged. If she was lying about it, she was doing a good job. Acting exactly like she would act if she was telling the truth.

  She shifted her weight on the chair. “You want to get out of here, walk around or something?”

  He glanced out the window. “It’s still raining sideways.”

  She shrugged. “I’ve got rain gear. Everybody here does. Don’t you?”

  He nodded. She put out the Marlboro. They stood and he followed her down the hall, noticing for the first time a tiny waist and flaring hips and realizing that he had not previously thought of any part of Grace Palmer except her face. Then, a whiff of the perfume again. Something old-fashioned, he thought—lavender? Had Grace Palmer, the Dutch Harbor slimeliner, the one-time window
-smashing, eye-jabbing Amazing Grace of Four Street, put on lavender? For him?

  She stopped four rooms away from his own, put her key into the lock, and pushed open the door. She entered and pulled a slicker from the back of a chair and turned to face him. “Would you like to stay?”

  He started, then told himself she couldn’t mean that. “No, I don’t mind if we walk. It’s all right.”

  She nodded, came out of the room, and locked the door. “I meant for the night. Which room is yours?”

  He said “Number thirteen” before it dawned on him what she had said. He turned and stared at her, but she was watching the numbers on the doors, looking for thirteen.

  He stopped and caught her arm. She flinched violently and he released her, but she stopped beside him. “For the night? With you?” His throat was so tight the words came out in a hoarse whisper.

  She looked up at him and he caught the scent again. Definitely lavender. “I don’t know,” she said. “Would you like to?”

  “What about … what about Wendy?”

  “Wendy moved out today. I asked her to. To complete my recovery.”

  He was having trouble with his breathing, so he broke their gaze and looked away. “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Me, too,” she said. “I know this isn’t how normal people do it but I’m not sure I can learn. Here’s your door.”

  He got the anorak and they walked out into the gray spray of the long Aleutian evening. It was gloomy under the overcast, but the late summer sunset and real darkness were still hours away.

  He started for Captains Bay Road, but she stopped him and pointed back of the bunkhouse, at the hills burying their heads in the scud. “There’s a trail that leads up there. I go that way a lot.”

  He followed her along the bunkhouse wall to the back of the gravel pad of the Triangle Seafood complex, then on a path through the dripping knee-high grass that made up most of the island’s ground cover.

  The path was narrow, especially after it started up the hillside, so they had to walk single-file, making conversation impossible. He was alone, or almost so, with the pattering of rain on his hood, the swishing of their clothing through the brush, and his thoughts. Where was Grace Palmer taking him, or where would she if he went along? What about spending the night?

  Unthinkable if he was on a case, but this wasn’t quite a case, not even close, really. Yet it still felt unthinkable, but in a different way. It would be like having sex with someone unconscious, or even with a corpse. Someone long past the capacity for informed consent.

  As they climbed, the clouds scudding overhead got closer and closer. He began to sweat from the exertion and wondered if she planned to hike right up into the mist. But, no, they came to a kind of shelf where the hillside leveled off for a few yards. She stopped and sat on a lichen-covered boulder at one end of the little ledge and patted the spot beside her. “This is my place.”

  He took the spot and looked back the way they had come. The Triangle complex, Captains Bay Road, a few hundred yards of the bay itself, then everything was lost in rain. The wind was blowing uphill, towards them, but their rock was a little distance back from the edge of the bench, so they were shielded from the full force of it.

  “You flinched when I touched your arm back there.”

  She touched the place, suggesting she remembered, but said “Where?”

  “In the bunkhouse. Right after you invited me to spend the night.” His whole face was wet from the climb in the rain, but only the water in his eyebrows bothered him. He ran a finger along them and flipped the moisture away. She hadn’t answered, so he said, “Sort of invited me.”

  She pulled a branch from a plant beside the boulder and plucked off a leaf, rolling it between thumb and forefinger.

  “That’s why I’m going to law school.” She put the crushed leaf to her nose and sniffed, then tossed it away and pulled up a different kind of plant, this one with tiny green berries.

  He was silent, thinking this over, so long that she added, “I can’t have a man touch me unless I’m drunk.” She looked at him expectantly.

  “Law sch - - I’m sorry, I just can’t connect the dots here. Law school, your fear of intimacy …”

  “You were looking at my hair before. You know why it’s like this?”

  He had, he realized guiltily, been thinking perhaps it was because she had been sick with something from Four Street, something she might still have. “No,” he said, and shook his head.

  “When I quit drinking and turned myself into Angie and some of my looks came back and men, normal men, started hitting on me again, I found I couldn’t handle it. I’d either start swearing at them like a crazy person or I’d have a panic attack and freeze up completely. Once I passed out in the Anchorage public library when a guy, a perfectly decent guy, asked for my phone number.”

  She gave him the expectant look again and he shrugged, feeling stupid and inadequate. “Sorry. I still don’t get it.”

  She studied her berry branch for a moment and finally shrugged. “I got myself a crewcut and stopped wearing makeup and started telling guys I preferred women.” She shrugged again. “It was especially helpful down here.”

  She was watching him closely now, for his reaction, he assumed.

  “That would explain Wendy?”

  “I warned you this was going to be the unexpurgated version.”

  “I’m not judging - - .”

  “Well, don’t. My point is, I don’t fear intimacy. I need it like anyone else. And now that I, I’m bringing Grace back to life, I’m letting my hair grow again and … fuck, why do I have to explain anything to you?”

  “You don’t. I already said that.”

  Suddenly her face crumpled and the cool, appraising Grace Palmer of the past two days vanished. The nervous ragged brightness, the toughness, were gone, too, replaced by a look of deep, angry exhaustion. “Goddammit, Nathan, every girl deserves a few years to just be a girl! Crushes, pretty things, proms. You should see the girls in little old Chukchi dress up for the prom, it’s, it’s … ahh, no!” She was crying silently now, tears rolling freely down her cheeks without a sound.

  She wiped her eyes and shook her head and plowed on. “Shit, you’re supposed to grow up and find the right man and be able to enjoy a good fuck, a good backrub, even just a good cuddle, just ordinary goddamn human contact, but I, I, hi, hi.” She cried silently again.

  He reached to put an arm around her shoulders but she sensed it and flinched, so he withdrew it.

  “Look, you don’t have to go on with this.” He was really asking her to stop for his sake, because now he was picking up what was coming but not wanting to hear it yet, wanting time to prepare himself, feeling stupid for not having seen it before, a textbook case, really, but she wasn’t going to stop, not now, he knew that.

  “I’m going to law school and become the meanest ball-busting bitch prosecutor in Alaska and I’m gonna take men that do this to girls and I’m gonna put’em away for life.”

  Now she broke down and sobbed, great, wrenching bottomless sobs in the rain and wind coming up the slope, sobs with something in them that reminded him of Jason Palmer breaking down in front of the mural of Grace Palmer in the hall at Chukchi High.

  Jason Palmer breaking down over the lost daughter on Four Street, Jason Palmer not telling him about the daughter who died slumped over a snowmachine gas tank, Jason Palmer - - .

  Suddenly he was hot inside, the heat rising toward his throat like magma and he had just time to swing away so his back was to Grace Palmer and put his head between his knees before his stomach emptied itself onto the gravely soil.

  As the attack passed in a series of diminishing heaves, he felt a hand, a very small and tentative hand, patting the back of his raincoat. He composed himself and swung back around, facing the bay again, and spoke gently, acid at the back of his throat. “Your father?”

  He was aware of her nodding beside him. “Your sister, too?”

&n
bsp; “Yes, of course.”

  “Her death—was it suicide?”

  “Of course not. She thought huffing would induce a miscarriage. All of us little girls thought it back then.”

  “Miscarriage?” He knew she was about to break down again, but could see no way to avoid the question. “She was … Jason was the father?”

  “Of course.” She spoke rapidly, as if to hurry out the words before she lost the power of speech. “If I hadn’t gone away, he would have had me still, he would have left Jeanie alone, I had a secret compartment where I could put it when it wasn’t happening. I could handle it, I was stronger, I came home that Christmas and I should have stayed there to protect her, or I should have killed the son of a bitch, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t, I, oh, I - -” Now she broke down again, more than before, sobbing and shaking and almost howling. He put an arm around her shoulders again and she shook it off again, seeming angry, then curled into a fetal position and continued to sob, but more quietly, and finally was silent.

  “What did Jason do when the autopsy report came back that she was pregnant?”

  “There wasn’t any autopsy.”

  “No autopsy? Why not?”

  “How would I know? Maybe because the cause of death was obvious?”

  Active stood and walked a few feet off. Could Jason Palmer be prosecuted now, after all this time? He turned back to the girl—as he now found himself thinking of her, at least for the moment— the girl on the rock. “Does anyone else know?”

  “I told my mother.” She was a heap of glistening rain gear on the boulder now. It was hard to know where the voice came from. “She told me I was having nightmares and I should put them out of my mind. I don’t hold it against her, though. She’s a very traditional woman, very devout. How could she believe it of her own husband?”

  He was silent, the question unanswerable.

  “Will you tell her that, that I don’t hold it against her? If you see her before she dies?”

  He nodded. “You sure you don’t want to tell her yourself?”

  She shuddered. “I’m never going back there. Never.”

  “Did you tell anyone else?”

  “My Aunt Agnes. She taught me about the secret compartment. She had some Inupiaq word for it, I forget what. Her uncle did it to her when she was a girl.” The heap of rain gear gave a bitter laugh. “What is it with you men, anyway? You deface the wombs wherein you were bred.”