“I’ll make you some eggs,” I said. “Haven’t eaten myself.”
“Great, no problem,” the son of a bitch responded cheerfully.
I didn’t know what was going on with him: this need to get moving, was it the secret of his success, that he would reach a limit of self-pity and then just get up and shake it off like a dog climbing up out of the gravel pit? Two days brooding and drinking, then up and move?
I fixed us each a trio of eggs and poured the coffee.
“Don’t have another if you’re going to drive,” I said.
“Good point,” he said, and shoved my last bottle of beer unopened into the pocket of his coveralls.
“Better yet, why don’t you just fall back on that couch and wait until tomorrow? Maybe I’ll take away your keys,” I said. “Friends don’t let friends and all that stuff.”
“Gus, I slept all day and now I’m ready to move. I don’t tend to wait on things.”
“I seen you wait lots of times. You’re a very patient man.”
“Just the same, Gus. I’m in the frame of mind. Truthfully this is a tedious job. I want to get it over with.”
As he ate he did seem calmer, seemed to be setting aside that restlessness. His mind was made up. What did I know about the complications of moving heavy equipment?
I did know he played wild cards, though, from time to time. I didn’t feel this particular binge was over yet. I had to get up at five myself to deliver the paper, but maybe dogsitting Tad for a bit longer was my fate tonight. Let me try one more time, come around again from a new angle.
“Look, I don’t care what you do,” I said.
“Oh yeah?”
Now I could see that he didn’t care a lot, either. He had to get moving and nothing else mattered. Well, maybe this is how Tad made his fortune. When it’s time, it’s time.
“Hang on, maybe I’ll come along,” I said as a stalling tactic, and then began to make a slow job of doing the dishes. Tad went outside and brought his lowboy truck to life and checked his tie-downs.
“You going to come along?” he said.
“Let me see. I have coveralls like that. Let me try to find them.” I went out and rummaged in my truck and found them stuffed behind the driver’s seat, insurance in case of a breakdown at frigid temperatures. The zipper struggled to close. Such a young guy to put on weight, I observed of myself as if from across the room, as the cloth strained over my belly. Tad grinned.
“There you go, Gus! All right. Great. You’ll like this.”
“You said it was a tedious job.”
“Did I? Yeah, but I’m warming to it. A great night, a beautiful machine, the streets of my town practically empty, laid out like a…Like a what, Gus, you’re the writer, you tell me. Things are looking up.”
Either do this, I realized, or lie awake for five hours thinking about Gayle and how little I had to offer. Do this or put up with those demons that come in the night with their questions. What are you going to say, how are you going to live. In the daytime I can handle it. Even jet-lagged from roaming Fairbanks all night I’ll be okay. Look after this guy one more time.
“Come on,” he said, and climbed up into the rig. I still hesitated. The snow had stopped and the clouds were ripping apart, lit in ragged patches by the stars and the moon. Here and there the snow flung back light from the fresh crystals at the tops of the drifts. Bankrupt publisher goes for ride across town, abandons self-flagellation for once. The immediacy of this offer: just keep talking to Tad, keep him awake and in his own lane, and let tomorrow take care of its own problems. Sufficient unto the day won out, for once. Tad leaned over from the driver’s seat and opened the passenger door.
“What do you say?” he yelled, or something like it; I could hardly hear him for the debate in my head and the rumbling of the engine.
“Oh Christ, all right,” I shouted back. “Hold on!” I climbed up into the cab.
He made a series of expert little turns to get the lowboy pointed down Bad Molly. I remembered with some comfort his reputation as an able operator—there’s a bubble between his eyes, someone told me once, meaning that Tad had a gift for keeping a machine level and balanced. He took pride in his skills. If you had to haul a Cat through Fairbanks at midnight, he was a safe bet.
Below University Hill, the bank thermometer sign heralded two degrees below zero.
“Getting warmer!” Tad said cheerfully. “We can get some work done now.”
“What work?”
“Cat’ll start up nice enough.”
“You said you didn’t need to move it tonight.”
“Well, we might want to.” He had the beer out of his pocket then and took a hand off the wheel to open it.
“Christ, Tad, none of that.”
“Gus, look around you.”
Not a headlight in view. Intersection deserted as we waited politely behind the red light.
“Just the same, give me that,” I said.
“My rig, my Cat, the streets of my town before me, all it wants is a beer,” said Tad.
I took it from him and drank it myself, looking nervously around, haunted by the words open container; I could almost see them printed below my name in the police blotter. A few sips did taste good, but there was too much of it. Up high like this, I had a good view. No state troopers were coming at us down the open road, and our three city cops were probably across town tonight, down in the flats where there’s trouble to spare. I felt more and more in control. And something else—confounding. That’s how I felt. As if I was confounding all expectations. I’m supposed to be home assessing my new life, walking the line; instead, my uncontrollable spirit is wandering the night. To hell with prudence and brooding.
The beer and the adventure put some distance between me and that nagging business about the unsolved death of Cathy Carew, but I remembered it as we crossed the Wendell Street Bridge and I looked downriver, toward the street where Gayle and I had walked, a little over a day earlier.
“Evidence,” I said. “Is it from lack of evidence, or lack of interest they can’t solve these cases? You hear different stories.”
“Sorry, what?”
“Why don’t these death and disappearance cases get solved?”
“Good question. Alibis? A completely muddied trail? Like you said, no interest?”
“Cathy Carew’s boyfriend, according to Gayle, was this notorious character from the Yukon Territory. One night the cops in Whitehorse—or was it Edmonton?—picked him up drunk, drove out of town, and dropped him off ten miles out of town, ten miles from the nearest house: a drunk guy in a thin jacket and tennis shoes. Forty below zero. He made it back.”
“I’ve heard of that sort of thing. The midnight taxi ride.”
“Here in Fairbanks?”
“No, I don’t think they do that here—do you?”
“Never heard of it happening.” We were driving along the river now, past the steam baths, closed and dark. The streets were empty. A ghostly chain-link fence around a First Avenue construction project loomed out at us, so thickly frosted with rime and fresh snow both—dirty rime gray with car exhaust, snow piled over that—it was almost unrecognizable, like part of an abandoned movie set. All the temporary construction, abandoned for lack of funding and cold weather both, covered with snow, disoriented me. Walking here with Gayle a day earlier I hadn’t felt lost. It was different looking through the truck window. I felt detached, confused.
Then Tad was driving down First Avenue, and he slowed as we came up toward the statue. He stopped the truck, turned off the ignition, killed the lights.
“I need a second,” he said, and rubbed his eyes, dug at them as if to excavate his own fatigue. “Confusing around here. Too much junk.”
“Want me to drive?”
“Maybe. Let’s give it a second.”
“What are we doing here?”
“Just looking. Doesn’t it get to you that nobody voted for that thing?”
Floodlights around its
base lit up the Unknown First Family. With no one to admire their heroism, they still reared up, pointlessly huge. They weren’t even snowcapped. The floodlights must be warm.
“Like I said, no one even voted for it. I didn’t. Did you? Did you vote for any of this?”
“People gave money.”
“That’s not a vote. What about the people that didn’t give money? Do their votes count? Gave money! Is that how we vote around here?”
“Sounds to me like you give a shit, Tad.”
“No, I’m just angry. It’s different. But we could cast our vote right now.”
“How so?”
“Civil disobedience, man. Don’t you read at all? Peaceful protest. No one gets hurt.”
“You mean knock them down? Into the river?”
“Look at the position I’m in. I’ve got a big, ugly statue, a D7 Cat, a clear dark night, an empty street. When will I ever be this close again?”
“Close to what, Tad?”
“I don’t know. Making a difference. Taking care of something. Taking a chance, for once.” He opened the truck door and jumped down. I followed him.
“Twenty minutes,” he said. “I’d need twenty minutes, absolute minimum. But let me take a closer look.”
We walked over to the statue and stared at the low, thick concrete base, paved with the split stones from Pedro Dome.
“What about this moat?” I said. “How does the Cat get across this?”
“Damn,” he said, “I forgot about this part.” The empty basin of the fountain made a gap of several feet between the outer ring and the statue itself. “Cat’ll rise up and fall right in. It’s like they anticipated me.”
“And what’s more,” I said, “you won’t use that machine again. Maybe you could do some damage to this obscenity in front of us, but you’d ruin your machine for good. Be like throwing it away.”
“It’s insured.”
“Against what?”
“Oh…accidents. You know, I didn’t pay a hell of a lot for it. It’s an old one I bought cheapish from a guy who—well, who salvaged it, let’s say, after the pipeline was finished. Alyeska abandoned a few of these machines in the late seventies. Too much trouble to bring them out of the tundra. This one is salvage. Good machine, for all that. It might survive. The blade, no, the blade won’t survive.”
“So what about this moat?”
“No go. Guess it’s a fantasy after all.”
I was briefly dismayed and relieved at once, as if I hadn’t been completely sure that we were joking.
“Good while it lasted,” I said.
“A fantasy,” Tad went on, “that we could neatly dislodge this thing and drive it straight into the river. Over the edge. A nice slow crack opens in the ice, the family sinks into the frigid black water. I could almost see it happening.”
“Almost be worth it, too,” I said. “No one gets hurt. I like that part. No one gets hurt.”
“That would work in our favor. But we’d have destruction of public property. Criminal offense. But then again, isn’t this a public common, this space?”
“Yeah?”
“I mean it’s yours and mine, our space. What the fuck is this doing here on our riverbank? I’m not a lawyer, but hell, destruction of public property—isn’t that what we’re looking at right now?”
“Well, Tad. You took out the trees downstream without much of a second thought. Left a clear-cut behind.”
“Maybe I’ve wised up a little,” he said. “Maybe I was a complete jackass back then.”
We studied our intended victims a bit longer.
“We’re not going to get it into the river. In fact, I see now that we will have to take out the outer ring,” Tad said thoughtfully. “The statue weighs a few tons, and that’s no problem. But I wonder what this outer ring of stones weighs. Put them together…we’ll be lucky to get the statue to keel over. Face forward at that.”
“If you could fill up this moat with snow,” I said, “a good bridge of snow that you could ride right up to the statue. But that would take time.”
“Oh, yeah. Time we don’t have. No, we have to do it the hard way. You’re right—it could be the last job for this Cat.”
I looked up at the Family. Each person locked inside a great, deep parka hood—isolated even from each other. There was nothing inspiring or insightful or even artistic about them—they weren’t riding a horse, or hitching up a team of dogs, nothing. Come to think of it, most Alaskan subsistence activities might not be that heroic a thing to observe—tying traps, hanging fish to dry, scraping skins. Picking berries. It’s hard work and the heroism’s in doing it day after day, no matter what the conditions. But a statue of someone really showing off, say fending off a grizzly, would have been laughable. So the sculptor opted to have them doing nothing.
“Well,” I said, “it’s been fun.” I meant, it’s been fun talking like this.
“Yeah,” he said, and we both turned and headed back to the truck. I climbed in and he didn’t, not right away. I briefly entertained a vague pity for his crude manners and physical limitations, and then suddenly the cab in which I was sitting began to vibrate. I heard behind my head the unmistakable sound of a powerful engine coming to life. It seemed that Tad was not going to climb in beside me. Instead he had climbed up onto his trailer and started the Cat.
Oh Christ.
I jumped out of the cab and ran around the truck in a panic. He gave me a wave from the cab, a signal. There was no point in shouting above the noise. I jumped up and down, shook my head, drew a finger across my throat, waved my arms like railroad crossing gates. “No, no,” I cried. “Read my lips! No!”
He worked some controls. The machine started to reverse down the trailer. I could run behind it, put myself in harm’s way—he wouldn’t run me over. But I didn’t want to. Boy, did I ever not want to. Up close the thing was scary. I fell back in astonishment as he backed right off the trailer, onto the street. The machine stopped, and I made a gesture as if to climb up into the cab. He stood up, leaned out the door, reached out an arm.
“Want to see?” he yelled. I could climb up in there and fight him for the controls, and when he knocked me down, as he easily would, then I could grab his knees on my way down and pull him off his feet. If we were both horizontal I wouldn’t be at a disadvantage. I had a semester of wrestling in high school. I could do something!
I stepped up onto the treads and grabbed the rail on the door; his hand shot out and pulled me in.
“If we’re both in jail, who’s going to tell the story?” I screamed at him.
“There’s always lawyers,” he yelled back. “Hang on, it bounces some.”
Before I could lunge at him he sat down in the driver’s seat, gestured at a hunk of metal for me to sit on, and started working levers. In front of us the blade rose in the air about a foot. I watched his left hand on the gearshift. He moved it from Reverse to Drive, to first gear, and we crawled up the sidewalk. He went forward a few feet, jockeyed a bit until the blade was facing dead-on to the statue, about thirty feet away; then he slammed his foot down on the decelerator and stopped.
Could he have been planning this all along, since the night of the poetry reading?
“You want to get off now,” he yelled.
“Hell no!”
“Jump down!”
“What for?”
“I’m going to open the throttle and drop the blade. We’re both going to get down.”
“After it’s moving?”
“That’s how they work, Gus, we only have twenty minutes, let’s not blow it!”
It’s hard to deal with complex emotions over the noise of a D7 Cat. It seemed as unreal an experience as I’d ever known, all of it, from the rusting yellow controls to the terrifying power of the thing, Tad’s hands resting so easy on throttle and gears, the thirty feet separating us from the Unknown First Family—it seemed unbelievable, but it was real: the only thing separating me from the solidity of it all was my own
inexperience, my own virginity. My own hand doing the deed. For my own sake. I was in it now. For my own sake, see it through.
“You got to get down!” Tad yelled. “Just step out on the treads and jump.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll follow you when she’s underway.”
“No!”
“Shit, Gus!” His foot came up and he yanked the gearshift into third, pulled back on the throttle; the Cat moved forward. A nice steady speed. He stood up and edged to the door, reached over and lowered the blade. Then his hand gripped my arm and steadied me as I stood up to follow him. I could barely take my eyes off the target.
“We’re going to jump off,” he said. “Follow me. Wake up, Gus. Now!”
He jumped onto the tread and then hurled himself forward, onto the snow-covered ground. I followed after with the adrenaline of angels rushing through me. I crashed to the ground and didn’t feel a thing, scrambled on all fours away from the moving Cat, got to my feet.
We turned and watched the blade hit the outer rim of bronze plaques and Pedro Dome granite at full throttle. And keep going.
I stopped watching for cops. As the huge stone ring began to crack and crumble, the Cat moved by inches toward the towering statue. All it has to do is connect. Go, go, I begged silently. The blade filled up with stone and debris, the treads began to grind forward again, and the machine’s load at last touched and then began to grind itself into the base of the statue. By this time I had stepped backward up onto the lawn of the convention and visitors bureau, next door to the park. I heard sirens, above the terrific noise of the machine and the grinding rock. I guess by the time the first two policemen arrived, Tad and I were standing up on the lawn like two slack-jawed spectators, and the two cops joined us. We all four stared as the Cat shoved itself relentlessly forward and the stone base of the thing began to cave. The Family slowly tipped forward, slowly fell into the metal roof of the cab. Four tons of bronze slowly, utterly flattened the roof, but the machine moved forward just the same, inch by inch, up over the rubble, a load of debris the size of a car spilling from its blade.
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