by Неизвестный
“Whoa,” Justin said. “What happened?”
Kris felt a flash of contempt at the surprise and shock spread across his face, as if he thought the worst life had to offer was soggy corn flakes.
“I was attacked by a man outside the AWARE shelter,” Kris said, retying the bandanna.
“You were attacked? How come?” Justin asked.
Kris let him figure out for himself why women were attacked by men.
“You’re OK?” Stewart asked quietly.
“Yeah, it was nothing.”
“Did you call the police?” Justin asked.
“No,” she said tensing, knowing he wouldn’t leave it alone.
“But they might be able to find the—”
“Stuff it. I can take care of myself,” Kris said.
Justin straightened in his chair and plucked at his coat pocket.
Stewart stood. “Would you like some tea?”
“Sure,” Kris said and followed him into the kitchen. Justin trailed them and propped himself against the refrigerator at the kitchen’s entrance; there wasn’t enough room for three. Stewart put a pot of water on the stove.
“Only two cups,” he said, taking them out of the cupboard. The wrinkles around his eyes multiplied when he smiled. “Not much company makes it up my stairs.”
“Barrett said you came down last May.”
Stewart wiped the counter top and stuck a loose fork and knife into a drawer. Kris noticed that a seam in the back of his shirt had been hand stitched with a different color thread.
“The interior was getting too cold for me. My joints get sore.” He flexed his fingers.
“Why didn’t you go Outside?” Any sane person would.
Stewart moved the rag over the counter again. “Nowhere to go.”
“But Juneau? All it does is rain.”
“It’s warmer.” He squinted into the steam rising out of the pot, checking for a boil. Kris sensed a struggle in the old man. “I can’t leave Alaska—there’s the Permanent Fund, the Longevity Bonus, and old folks don’t pay taxes here.”
“I write your Bonus check then.” Justin said from the refrigerator. They looked at him. “I maintain the Longevity Bonus computer system.”
“What’s that?” Kris asked.
“A state program that gives every Alaskan over sixty-five two hundred-fifty dollars a month; three thousand a year.”
Kris wasn’t interested. “Did you know my mother was here when you came down?” she asked Stewart.
“No, that was a surprise. We’d gone separate ways. I, ah, she got into other things,” Stewart said vaguely. But Kris could guess what they were and let it drop.
“Did you see her much here?”
“Sometimes we’d pass on the street and say hi.” Kris didn’t push. He seemed awkward talking about Evie and she guessed he was uncomfortable talking in front of Justin. She didn’t need to have Justin listening to any of this either. The pot boiled. Stewart poured water into the cups and dropped in tea bags.
“I didn’t know people still drank Lipton’s,” Justin said.
Stewart handed each a cup and they moved back into the other room while he put a log in the stove and fiddled with the damper.
“Where’d you run your trap lines?” Justin asked.
“Upper Alatna. Mostly in the eastern drainages.” Stewart’s eyes crinkled up. Kris tapped a finger against her cup. Justin was taking over again. But she let him run on; there was a comforting sturdiness about Stewart that quieted her and she watched him as he talked. The tracery of wrinkles around his eyes and the creases in his cheeks and forehead smoothed out and vanished into his bald scalp, which was stretched tightly over his skull. It seemed odd that the face could look so lived in and the rest of his head so deserted. A fleeting awareness of a vulnerability or hurt passed through her as she watched him, but vanished when she tried to focus in on it.
“Good fox and marten, wolf and lynx sometimes; muskrat always.” Stewart was saying.
“Did you run dogs?” Justin was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, teacup clasped in both hands. He was lanky and angular, like he’d never filled out when he became a man. Kris guessed he was around thirty; faint lines were beginning to show in his forehead and she could see the blood vessel that bulged over older men’s temples.
“I had a team until nineteen eighty or so, then switched to a Skidoo. I kept my lead dog, Kobuk, and sold the rest. Kobuk’s gone now.”
“Why’d you switch to a snow machine?”
“Don’t have to feed it so much fish.”
“Yeah, but you got to haul in all that fuel, and they’re noisy and they stink.”
“A dog yard gets pretty ripe on a warm day and you’ve got to be real partial to dog poop to work them.”
Dog poop? Kris looked into her cup; she didn’t like the tea, it needed sugar.
“But there’s no romance to a snow machine.”
“Romance?” Stewart’s brow wrinkled. “I’m just trying to get a job done. Skidoos are easier than dogs.”
Kris let them talk. Justin was like a dog worrying a rag with his questions, but she couldn’t tell whether he was bothering Stewart. When men were together, she had trouble knowing what they wanted; when they were with women, it was obvious. Kris had grown up watching Evie and her men. Pushed into the darkness, hiding against a wall or under blankets on a sofa that smelled of stale beer, she’d watch her mother. Evie glowed, as if only she reflected the lamplight. Men leaned toward her; the other women at the table sunk into the shadows, the whiskey beginning to bypass them—the bottle short-cutting back to Evie. “Suck, Evie.” Her head cocked back, her lips opened and slid over the glass neck, the neck entered, her tongue darted into its throat teasing the whiskey into her mouth. Laughter, a groan. She swallowed, exhaled, passed the bottle on. Later, a hand emerged from the darkness and worked the buttons of her shirt, slipped a finger into her bra; slipped it around the cup. Her breast fell out; quivered. Evie looked down at herself. “Oh my,” she said, the nipple hard and erect.
Kris was certain Stewart had never been there; that he’d never circled Evie in the shadows, playing cowboy and Indian sex. He’d said they’d been friends, but Evie never had friends—not with men, and Kris couldn’t see where Stewart could have fit in.
She watched him. Behind the clouds, the sun must have set; the light coming through the window was weak and his face was becoming less distinct. He was telling Justin how to blacken traps and boil off odors using a dye made of peat and spruce bark. What did Justin care, he’d never trap, there wasn’t enough edge to him to get him out of an office and into the bush.
Justin interrupted Stewart and Stewart glanced at her, smiling fleetingly. He was getting tired of Justin too.
“We better be going,” she said. She’d come back without Justin to find out what she needed to know.
Stewart rose and walked them to the door.
“When was the last time you were up there?” Justin asked, unwilling to quit. Kris opened the door and stepped into the entry. Old cans of paint, cans of nails, and tools were neatly stacked on shelves or hung from nails pounded into the wall.
“The winter after the Koyukuk flooded Allakaket. Whenever that was,” Stewart said.
“The cabin is still there?”
“Kindling by the stove.”
Kris reached her hand past Justin, and Stewart took it.
“Come back,” he said.
__________
“Did you see his boots by the door?” Justin asked, following her down the stairs. It was lighter out of the house, but still dusk. The drizzle had quit; Kris pulled off her poncho and wadded it into a pocket.
“They had crepe soles,” he said. “Which makes sense, since he found her. But it’s funny there weren’t any other prints around.”
Kris kept her eyes on the steps in front of her.
“And did you buy that story about his joints?”
“That they hurt?”
“
That he came down here because they hurt. If you’ve got arthritis, you want to be somewhere hot and dry. Moving to a rain forest doesn’t make any sense. If he had to stay in Alaska, Homer’d be a better spot than here. It’s a lot drier and about as warm.”
Kris stepped off the stairs onto the start of Third Street, which sloped steeply downhill from the bottom of the stairs to Franklin before leveling out.
“We should call him on that,” Justin said, coming up alongside her.
Loose stones rolled under Kris’s shoes. She skidded and Justin caught her arm; she pulled it free.
“Can I buy you a drink?” He asked when they got to the bottom of the hill.
“OK.” Dinner would be better. That morning, after everybody’d left the kitchen, she lifted some bread and peanut butter someone had left in a cabinet, but she hadn’t eaten anything since.
They turned left onto Franklin, passing the Baranof Hotel and some tourist shops that were lit but empty. The downtown sidewalks had overhead covers to keep off the rain and snow, and signs hung from them, naming each shop. They walked along a level stretch until they came to the Alaska Hotel.
Justin held the door for her. Black and white photos of sailing ships tied up in front of Juneau and of miners working mules hung on the wall, stained glass lampshades covered the lights, and a crimson rug lay in the short passageway into the bar. There were no pool tables, Miller signs, or moose antlers nailed to the wall.
“You drink beer?” he asked when the waitress arrived. “Try an Amber; it’s made here.”
“I want a Bud.” She had started drinking beer a few years ago to prove—to herself, to Evie?—that she could handle the alcohol.
Justin ordered the Amber and leaned forward on his elbows, hunching his shoulders. Kris had to look up at him. His face was open, soft like he’d never had to fight for much. There were still bits of twig or dirt tangled in his hair and in one ear, an earring hole had healed up leaving a pinprick scar. He didn’t look too bad and his nose was small enough for an Anglo.
“So how come you stowed away on trucks to get to L.A.?”
“I wanted out.”
“Of Alaska? You were born here?”
“Fairbanks.”
“I used to wish I was born in Alaska instead of some white bread American suburb. But then I realized if I’d grown up here, Alaska’d be normal. When I was a teenager, Alaska was the last frontier, a wilderness where life was real. If I’d been born here, Alaska’d be just another place. I’d probably be living in L.A. now.”
“L.A.’s OK. Less chance of frostbite.”
“Hard to have a good adventure though.”
The waitress put their drinks on the table.
“Adventure,” she said. It sounded like something you had when you were used to regular meals. Kris counted the change the waitress handed back to him.
“Coming to Alaska, canoeing the Yukon, climbing in the Alaska Range, rafting, mushing. Homesteading in the bush.”
“You’ve done that?” Why go out of your way to be cold and wet when you could live in a place where the sun always shone and a couple of bucks would take you anywhere you needed to go?
“I came to Alaska,” Justin said.
“Anybody can buy a plane ticket.”
“You got to get yourself ready. Put the gear together; find people to do it with. Other things come up. It’s hard to leave the job,” Justin said.
“You just go and do it,” Kris said.
“It’s not that easy.”
“Why not?”
Justin watched her sip her beer. “For me, it’s just not. Seems like I get so far and then stop, can’t go any farther,” he said.
Kris backed off; she wasn’t interested in a heart-to-heart. His easy admission of weakness startled her. Do that on the street and someone would take immediate advantage of it.
“As soon as I got up here, I got a job with the state running the Longevity Bonus computers. It was good money—too good to leave.”
“Good money?” she asked. Kris would take home maybe nineteen thousand that year.
“More than I’m worth.”
Kris let her eyes wander to the people sitting at the other tables. The after-work crowd was starting to filter in. There was no background music, just the noise of people talking, chairs scraping against the floor and jackets and raincoats being unzipped. The room and bar had been redone to look turn of the century Alaskan—fancy woodwork, mirrors, and stained glass. Disneyworld.
“Huh?” she said.
“I said what do you do in L.A.?”
“Dispatch short-haul rigs, for a delivery company owned by some Mexicans.”
“Mexicans?”
“Most are legal.”
“Do you speak Spanish?”
“No.”
“Do you like it?”
“I do it. They pay me. They leave me alone.”
The waitress came by and asked if they wanted another round. Kris nodded, as long as Justin was paying. “You got any peanuts or anything?” she called after her.
“Did you get this job when you got down to L.A.?”
“No, I lived on the street.”
Justin’s eyes got serious and she could tell he was going to worm the story out of her. To head him off, she told it her way.
“I lived on the street. Sometimes in shelters. I sold dope, shoplifted, stole from drunks, and fenced stuff. But I wasn’t anybody’s whore, people left me alone. Then I got caught lifting a bra out of Target and they prosecuted. I had some coke on me I’d forgotten about and I spent four months in the can. When I was in there, these women started coming around and talking to me. I blew them off, but when I got out, they caught up with me, cleaned me up, and got me this job. I’ve been there maybe four years now.”
“That sounds really rough.” His voice softened.
“You get by,” she said. She had fought those women hard; no way she wanted to come off the streets. She got what she needed there and was good at it. And she never would have left, if Mariah hadn’t wrapped her arms around her one day, crushing her against her chest, and whispered harshly in her ear that the reason why Kris didn’t want off the street was because she was scared, because she secretly didn’t believe that she was good enough to make it, because she was frightened that the real world would reject her, would throw her back into the street. Like it had often enough, Kris had said to herself. But at some level, she knew that Mariah was right and Kris had let herself be pushed into the job.
Now she could see how carefully Mariah and the other Sisters had planned it, placing her in a company run by Mexicans, outsiders, people who, like her, lived on the edge of society, although not quite as far. She and they had an enemy in common and for Kris it was the unspoken basis of a camaraderie that had allowed her to slip sideways into the world of work, regular meals, and a bed of her own.
“So were these women religious or something?”
“Dykes.”
“What?”
“Lesbians. Save Our Sisters. They worked with girls living on the street. Trying to get them fixed up. They were good people. The first ones to go out of their way for me without wanting something back.”
“Hey, I don’t want anything from you,” Justin said.
“Bullshit.” Everybody wanted something. She wanted dinner.
“No, seriously.”
“When was the last time you got laid?”
Justin laughed uncomfortably. “You think I bought you a drink because I want to have sex with you?”
Kris snorted.
Justin pushed back against his chair, lifting it on its back legs, and studied her. Kris stared back. Finally, he came down and planted his elbows on the table. “I’ll tell you why I bought you the drink,” he said. “You’ve got something interesting going on and I want to be part of the action.”
Bullshit. If she had a face full of zits he’d be in front of his computer right now making good money.
“And I can help you ou
t,” he said. “I know Juneau, I have a car, money, and an apartment. The hostel will only let you stay three nights.
“You’re Nancy Drew.” He grinned.
“Who?” Kris asked. His smile looked condescending.
“Famous detective.”
Kris glared at him. Was he making fun of her? Did he think she and Evie walked out of the TV or something? “This isn’t some damn game,” she said.
“Calm down,” he said.
“Get a life.” Kris drained her glass. “I’m out of here.” So much for dinner. She stood, pulling her jacket off the back of the chair and headed for the door, shrugging into it as she went. It was raining again. The city lights danced in the black puddles of water as the raindrops rippled their surfaces. She turned up the street toward the hostel, walking fast. A car crept by with kids staring out the window looking for something to do; a bunch of shaggy drunks were knotted in a doorway across the street by the Liquor Cache.
Justin caught up with her when the street started to climb the hill. After a few steps, she turned on him. “What the hell are you following me for? Hanging around me isn’t going to do you any damn good.”
Justin stood looking down at her, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his raincoat. As he watched her, his expression slid from defensive to calculating. “Maybe,” he said, “because I want to have sex with you.”
Before she could explode, he laughed and, taking her arm, said, “Lighten up. I’ll buy you dinner.
Friday, November 13
The lower limbs of the spruce had been lopped off, leaving behind knobs that leaked sap like gray pustules. Ben Stewart moved quietly, unobtrusively, in under the tree and out of the rain. A hundred feet across the yellow grass a small group gathered around a muddy hole in the earth; a neat pile of dirt had been left at one end. Over the hole was a casket. Plain, brown, short. Ben couldn’t see it well from where he stood, but the rainwater, collecting from the light drizzle, beaded on a better finish than he’d expected on a pauper’s coffin.
A movement off to the side caught his eye. From the parking lot, a tall man strode briskly across the grass. He shimmered as he walked and when he neared the hole, Ben saw that he had a clear plastic slicker over his black robes. Tucked out of the rain in one of the sleeves was a small book.