Frozen Sun

by Stan Jones

  “OK,” she said.

  He opened his eyes. “What?”

  “OK, let’s go.” She leaned over and kissed him, harder than he had ever been kissed before. Then she opened the little bottle, touched her fingers to the mouth, and dabbed the sides of her neck. “Put this thing in Reverse and let’s go. It’s the one right next to Park.” She pointed at the gearshift lever and giggled.

  He obeyed, backed out onto Beach Street and started south, through the fog, toward his place. “I thought you’d be furious. Or depressed. Or something. Anything but this.”

  She looked at him, a little seriousness rippling over the gaiety in her eyes and lips, but not much seriousness. “This is the first time you ever told me you wanted anything from me, Nathan. At least I’m on the list somewhere, and I’m here and Grace Palmer’s down in the Aleutians and maybe she’ll be in jail pretty soon and in about an hour you won’t even be able to remember her name.”

  She touched the bottle a second time, pulled out the neck of the yellow T-shirt, and reached inside. Dizzily, he realized she was putting lavender between her breasts. She giggled again and put her hand on his thigh, very high on his thigh, and he thought to himself they were both in the grip of some dementia. Perhaps he had caught it from Grace Palmer and passed it on to Lucy, but probably it couldn’t hurt to enjoy it for one night. In fact, it would probably be some kind of crime against nature or destiny or dumb luck not to enjoy it, because he was pretty sure that God or Satan or whoever had cooked this up would never again, not if he lived to be a hundred, send him another night like this, or bring him within view of another face lit up like the face of Lucy Generous.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Much to his surprise, whatever he had created by opening up to Lucy about Grace Palmer lasted long past that amazing night.

  In fact, it went on and on. Without planning it or even realizing it at first, he slid into a pretty good summer with Lucy Generous.

  It was sweetened, he thought, by a shared but unvoiced sense that they existed, the relationship existed, in the calm before a storm that might or might not break, depending on how the Grace Palmer thing, the many Grace Palmer things, worked out.

  For Grace Palmer was always a spectral presence at the edge of his consciousness, in the shadows of the relationship with Lucy, except at its most intense and intimate moments. He came to think of this as their grace period, his and Lucy’s, though he never said the phrase to her. It was a time that might have no greater life expectancy than the white-headed tundra cotton now blowing on the rolling prairie around Chukchi.

  Not that he had withdrawn from his official relationship with Grace Palmer. He determined that the state presently had no one in Chukchi who was qualified to interview a possible victim of child sexual abuse. The nearest such person was in the district office of the Division of Family and Youth Services in Nome. The caseworker in question was a kind of circuit rider whose next visit to Chukchi was in three weeks. Active asked them to attempt to schedule a visit with Nita Iktillik, care of Jason Palmer, and left it at that.

  One day an e-mail came from Dennis Johnson, saying that Homicide had decided to send two investigators to Dutch Harbor to interview Grace Palmer about the death of Angie Ramos. The two investigators had been mightily unimpressed, Dennis reported, by Active’s failure to Mirandize the subject, a procedural lapse redeemed only by Active’s equally complete failure to get anything useful out of her, leading the senior of the two APD investigators to summarize Active’s efforts in the case with the phrase, “Typical Trooper hot-shot, his dick got so hard when he looked at this beauty queen, it sucked all the blood out of his brain.”

  A week later, another e-mail from Dennis reported that the APD investigators hadn’t gotten any more out of Grace Palmer than he had but at least it was all useable because they had taken the trouble to Mirandize her.

  Homicide still hadn’t decided if they had a case, Dennis said, because of the missing dispatch logs from the night of Angie Ramos’ death. If the case ever went to trial, the missing logs, coupled with Grace Palmer’s claim to have left Angie only after help was on the way, would open a hole in the case from which any decent defense attorney could surely mine a large trove of reasonable doubt. So, on the advice of the district attorney’s office, APD was turning itself inside out and upside down to find the missing logs, an effort that had already produced a red-faced screaming match between the police chief and the director of the records section in a heavily trafficked hallway at APD headquarters.

  And, oh, yes, Dennis added. Grace Palmer had asked the APD investigators to pass along a message: Fuck you, Nathan.

  Active sighed and closed the email. At least Grace Palmer was no longer his problem. The Anchorage cops would or wouldn’t charge her with Angie Ramos’ murder. Their choice, their problem.

  The Division of Family and Youth Services would or wouldn’t interview Nita Iktillik, would or wouldn’t take her away from Jason Palmer, would or wouldn’t send the file back to the Troopers and the Chukchi DA for possible prosecution of Jason Palmer. Not Nathan Active’s problem, not now, not for a while, maybe not ever.

  And so he drifted through the early part of the summer with a relatively clear conscience, a relatively untroubled sense of pleasure and leisure. It was as though he and Lucy Generous were by themselves on a raft on a big lazy river, and the river would go on forever.

  One day it all gathered itself together in what he recognized, even as it was unfolding, a perfect day, a singularity that, like the magic night after he told Lucy the Grace Palmer story, would probably not recur if he lived to be a hundred.

  They swam up out of sleep late on a Saturday morning, still wrapped around each other from the night before and had sex, or made love as Lucy insisted on calling it, before they were fully awake.

  Then she showered while he drowsed off again, then he showered while she made breakfast—poached eggs, muffins and, as it was summer and prices even in Chukchi were not completely impossible, fresh cantaloupe.

  They ate together almost wordlessly, then set out in the Suburban to pick Pauline Generous’ fish net. Nowadays it was really Pauline’s in name only, Lucy told him, because Pauline was getting too old to handle the skiff and work the net herself. She was even getting too old to help Lucy much, so now Lucy usually did it herself. That really made the skiff and fish net hers, Lucy told him, but it was not something she needed to discuss with Pauline, or ever planned to.

  “So you pick it all by yourself?” he asked as they bounced south through town, heading for the little beach past the airport where Pauline’s net was anchored. He was forever being surprised by the things Lucy could do, such as the time he went to pick her up at Pauline’s and found her taking apart the old lady’s water heater. “The element just burned out,” she had said. “I’m putting this new one in.” And she had done it all by herself as he watched. She let him help only at the end, having him hold the access panel in place while she reattached it with screws at the four corners.

  “Yes, I pick it all by myself.” Lucy said with a smug look. “All Inupiat women love to fish, which you’d know if you weren’t such a naluaqmiiyaaq.”

  Naluaqmiiyaaq was what Lucy and just about everyone else in Chukchi called him whenever he betrayed his ignorance of the Inupiat culture. Not because he was a half-breed, but because of the other definition—”almost a white man.”

  “Well, I’m trying to learn,” he said.

  “Lucky you’ve got a patient teacher. Now turn here.”

  She pointed at a rutted, sandy track leading through the Chukchi city dump toward the water’s edge.

  He followed her directions to a little stretch of beach where a line leading out to the shoreward end of Pauline’s net was tied to a steel rod driven into the gravel just above the water line. A few yards out, Pauline’s skiff bobbed at anchor, a rope running from the stern to another beach anchor to keep the nose into the waves curling in on the west wind.

  Lucy
pulled two pairs of hip waders out of the Suburban and tossed one to him. “See that boat out there?” she asked with what he thought was excessive sarcasm. “Put these on and wade out to that boat and climb in and sit still till I get there.”

  He was looking dubiously from the waders to the skiff when she supplemented her instructions. “Go in over the transom or you’ll tip it.” He looked blank and she said, “It’s the part across the back, where the motor is,” and shook her head.

  He tried putting on the waders like Lucy did, standing on one leg while pulling the waders over the other, but found he had to sit on a driftwood log to get it done.

  Then he waded out to the boat and heaved himself over the stern, collecting only a little cold, salty Chukchi Sea water in his boots in the process. He crawled to the front seat and watched as Lucy pulled from the Suburban the big square white plastic tub they had collected at Pauline’s and dropped it where the boat’s stern line was anchored to the beach.

  She unhitched the line, picked up the tub, and waded out to the boat, somehow coiling the stern line with one hand while she carried the tub with the other. At the boat, she tossed in tub and line, and stood for a moment gauging, as he now saw he should have done, the boat’s motion in the chop. Then she gave a little leaping turn and was sitting on the boat’s rear seat, legs dangling over the transom without, he was sure, a drop of sea water in her waders.

  She tucked the rope under her seat, positioned the tub between the two seats, and checked the fuel level in a red tank beside the tub.

  “Looks good,” she said, and began pulling on the starter cord of the Johnson outboard. The engine didn’t start and she finally ran out of breath and sat panting.

  “Maybe you could try,” she said.

  He moved back and sat beside her and pulled twice on the cord, also without result.

  “Shit,” she said. It was the first time he had ever heard her say that. Maybe being on a fishing boat brought it out in her. She did something to the side of the engine, had him pull it twice, did something else to the engine, and had him pull once more. This time the Johnson burbled to life, coughing a little at first and sending up blue smoke from the exhaust port below the waterline before it steadied up. “You’ve got the magic touch,” she said.

  “What was it?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. It just does that sometimes.”

  “Really?” he said, suspicion dawning.

  “No, it really does that.” She grinned at him and winked. “Sometimes. And sometimes it doesn’t.”

  He moved back to the front seat. She dropped the Johnson into gear, twisted the throttle, and moved the skiff forward a few feet so he could pull up the front anchor. Then she steered toward the line of floats that marked the top of Pauline’s gillnet, hanging like a spider’s web across the path of the migrating chum salmon as they made their way along the beach toward the mouth of the Katonak River, a few miles north of Chukchi.

  She followed the line of floats out to where its seaward end was anchored and cut the engine. In the sudden silence, the slap of the waves against the aluminum skiff seemed loud as she handed him a gaff hook and told him to work the net up over the nose of the boat, then come sit beside her on the rear seat.

  He did as he was told and began to see how this was going to work. She pulled the net back till it was almost in their laps and kicked the tub ahead till it rested against the front seat. The steady west wind began to push the boat toward shore, the net sliding across their knees and over the sides of the boat. The first two wriggling silver chum salmon came up and she showed him how to untangle their gills from the net so they could be tossed into the tub.

  And so began a magical hour in the middle of a perfect day. The two of them almost literally on a raft, sliding towards shore on the choppy blue-green water, the slap-slap of the waves on the boat, the shrieks of two hopeful seagulls wheeling overhead, the heat of the sun cutting the chill of the west wind and vice versa, the creak of the net sliding over the boat, the salmon flopping in the tub, the look of joy on Lucy’s face that made him think of what she said about Inupiat women loving to fish, her little jokes and cries of mock horror at some of the things the net brought up, especially a hideous, huge-mouthed, goggle-eyed fish she called an Irish Lord.

  “Imagine being an Irish lady and waking up next to that,” she said with a giggle as she threw it back in.

  She went back to work on the net and the chum salmon kept crawling up out of the sea in the mesh of the net until the skiff reached the shoreward end of the line of floats, where the anchor rope started that ran in to the steel rod on the beach.

  “Not bad,” she said as he slipped the net over the nose of the boat. She stood counting, tapping her finger in the air as the boat drifted toward shore on the chop. “Seventeen, not bad for a naluaqmiiyaaq and a dispatcher, ah? About a hundred pounds, maybe.”

  “Not bad,” he said, thinking not so much of the fish as of the day itself, and the last hour.

  After that, they dropped off a dozen chum at Pauline’s. The old lady grumbled about the salmon being too few and too small, and complained of how Eskimo girls today didn’t know anything about fishing.

  Lucy just grinned as she laid the chums out on a plywood cutting table beside Pauline’s cabin and helped the old lady behead, gut, and split the first salmon, score the two halves, and hang it tail-up on the fish rack made of spruce poles.

  Before long Pauline was grinning also and the two were chattering in Inupiaq and giggling. Once Pauline asked a question with Active’s name in it. Then they looked at him and giggled together and he realized the conversation was more than just a couple of Inupiat women sharing a passion for fish.

  He smiled and walked off a little distance so they could gossip safe from male ears. The fog bank that usually came with the west wind was building offshore, a gray-white belt swelling along the horizon as he watched. In a few hours Chukchi would be shrouded in it, but before then he and Lucy would be at his place, one of the chum baking as they did what Lucy liked to do while dinner cooked.

  He heard Pauline’s gruff old voice from behind him. “I’ll cut the rest of them. You and Nathan go now.”

  So Lucy rinsed her hands under a faucet on the wall of Pauline’s cabin and they climbed into the Suburban.

  “We’ve got five chum left back there.” He jerked a thumb toward the tub in the rear. “Do I really need that many?”

  “You’re only getting two. One for dinner and one for your freezer. We’re taking the other three to your mom.”

  “What?” Normally it was his mother who brought food to him. Lucy’s plan to take fish to Martha was, he sensed, the latest move or countermove in the incomprehensible chess game between the two women.

  “Not me.” He shook his head. “I’m not taking any fish to Martha. Leroy probably already got some.”

  “Nope,” Lucy said with a smug look. “He didn’t. I checked his site and he doesn’t have his net out yet.”

  Active didn’t say anything, or start the Suburban.

  “All right, chicken, you can wait in the car while I take them up to the door.” She slapped his knee. “Now let’s go!”

  He shook his head and started the Suburban and drove down Beach Street toward the side road to Martha and Leroy’s place, the still-unrepaired right rear shock absorber adding its “clunk” to the bangs, rattles, and squeaks from the old vehicle as it bounced over the potholes.

  When they reached the house, he stayed in his seat and watched as Lucy opened the Suburban’s cargo doors, found a piece of rope in the junk on the floor, and threaded it through the gills and jaws of three of the salmon—the three biggest ones, it appeared to him.

  Lucy walked to the house with the fish dangling from one hand, opened the outer door and vanished into the kunnichuk.

  As he waited for the explosion, he studied the house and was mildly cheered to see there weren’t as many vehicles out front as usual. Leroy’s Ford Ranger was absent, meaning h
e was probably at work, or perhaps up the Katonak River with one of his hunting and fishing buddies.

  Leroy was a solid guy, in Active’s opinion, a good catch for a former wild child like his mother. He delivered stove oil for the local Chevron dealer, spent more time out in the country than a lot of Inupiat, and kept the house so spruced up and painted that it almost looked like a little chunk of Anchorage had been dropped down on Chukchi spit.

  Not only was Leroy’s truck missing, but only one four-wheeler was parked by the door. The question was, did it belong to Martha or Sonny, the half-brother Martha and Leroy had produced two years after they married. If Sonny was there, that was one thing. But, if Martha was home … he shuddered and turned on Kay-Chuck, where a hymn was playing.

  Lucy emerged in about three minutes, not merely uninjured, but beaming.

  “Well?”

  Lucy’s grin got even bigger. “She wasn’t even there. Your stepbrother Sonny was the only one home. I just told him to put them in the sink and tell Martha I dropped them off.”

  The grin became a giggle and even he had to chuckle at the thought of Martha’s reaction when she returned home and found food from Lucy Generous in her kitchen. It would be funny, as long as he wasn’t around to take any of the shrapnel that would surely fly.

  Back at his place, Lucy tossed one of the two remaining chums into the sink and wrapped the other one whole. With a little folding and bending, she crammed it into the freezer compartment of his refrigerator. Then she went to work on the one in the sink. He offered to help, but she glared at him. “No way. No Inupiat woman would ever let a man cut fish.”

  So he leaned against a counter and watched as she readied the fish for baking, slid it into the oven, and slammed the door with a bang.

  “There,” she said with an air of triumph. “We’ve got forty-five minutes. Follow me, you.”

  She seized his belt and dragged him toward the bedroom.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “We smell like salmon. Shouldn’t we shower first?”