by Breakup(lit)
"Come to that, there's a bed with my name on it you're welcome to, when
you've a mind to it." He waggled his eyebrows suggestively.
The attempt to commit lechery was tempered with too much humor to take
offense. It always was, but today found her wondering what Dan would do
if she took him up on his offer. The thought of his probable reaction
made her laugh out loud and she waved him off with a shooing gesture. He
mounted Billy Mike's four-wheeler with a swagger, pressed the starter
and was off in a roar of sound.
It faded just in time for her to hear a truck grind to a halt at her
trailhead, a quarter of a mile through the woods. She heard Dan shout
something, and a voice she recognized shout back. All amusement gone,
Kate swore out loud.
John Stewman, writing something on his clipboard, looked around- "Like
Grand Central Station around here today."
Mutt took off up the trail to investigate, and returned shortly with
three people in tow. One was Amanda Winthrop Baker, known to friends as
Mandy, to mushing fans as the Brahmin Bullet and to the couple behind
her as Amanda dear.
"Amanda dear," the woman said, "do you have to walk quite so fast?"
"Yes," the man said, "your mother isn't used to-what did you
41 call it?-bushwhacking. Try to keep it down to just under a gallop, if
you don't mind."
Only a friend who called her Mandy would have noticed the look of quiet
desperation that gleamed in her eyes. Only a friend who called her Mandy
would not have remarked on it. Kate, a very good friend, bade a mental
goodbye to any prospect of peace this day and with true nobility-because
she'd been listening to Mandy's stories of her parents for years-stepped
once more into the breach, holding out a hand and saying heartily, "Hi,
Mandy. And these must be your parents. Nice to meet you, folks, I've
heard a lot about you."
She didn't add what she'd heard. With the innate wisdom of all parents
everywhere, they didn't ask.
Mandy's parents huddled as close together as they could get without
actually sitting in each other's lap, not because there wasn't room on
the one undamaged arm of Kate's couch to spread out, but because they
were mesmerized by the unwavering yellow eyes of the 140-pound
half-husky, half-wolf lying in the middle of the floor. The expression
on their thin-boned, aristocratic East Coast faces was identical, and if
each hair of the immaculately groomed, distinguished white caps on both
their heads wasn't standing straight up, it was only because their fear
of letting down the side exceeded their fear of being ripped to shreds
by a wild animal.
Medusa had nothing on Mutt, Kate decided, and declined to reassure the
Bakers for the third time that since she had introduced them as friends
they had nothing to fear.
Mandy was staring, fascinated, out the kitchen window at the lump of
gray metal reposing in the yard. She'd finally noticed the shambles of
Kate's homestead, and had been sufficiently jolted from her
self-absorption to demand details. "Jesus, Kate. Forty feet north and
you'd have been bear bait."
"I am aware of that, Mandy," Kate said testily. She turned to the
parents. "Would you like something to drink? Some tea?
42 Lemon Zinger? Although I haven't managed a spring run for supplies
yet, so I'm out of anything to put in it."
"Thank you," Mr. Baker said, still hypnotized by Mutt's eyes.
"That would be lovely," Mrs. Baker said, just as mechanically. Mutt
stretched and let out a little whuff of a groan. Mrs. Baker inched
closer to her husband. Mutt rolled a yellow eye in Kate's direction.
Kate bit her lip and turned to pump up a kettle of water.
Mrs. Baker said, "Amanda dear, we appear to have imposed upon Ms. Shugak
at a rather unfortunate time. Perhaps we should just-"
Mandy aimed a broad, insincere smile in the general direction of the
couch. "Just a moment, Mother. Kate, take a look at this." Mandy grabbed
Kate's arm and crowded her toward the window.
Kate peered through the shards of shattered glass. The go team was going
about its business. The jet engine was still there. Her truck was still
flattened. She gave up the hopeful notion that Mandy had made it all go
away and said, "What?"
Mandy dropped her voice. "My folks want to see the mine. Can you take them?"
Kate stared at her friend as if she'd lost her mind. "What?"
"I told the folks about the copper mining the Astors and the Camegies
did up here around the turn of the century, and they want to take a look."
Kate took a deep, steadying breath. "Then I suggest you take them
yourself. For crying out loud, Mandy-"
"Shhh!" Mr. and Mrs. Baker stirred restively. Mutt opened one eye, and
they stilled.
"I just had a jet engine flatten my homestead and you want me to take
the afternoon off?"
"What is there for you to do until they get all that crap hauled out of
here? They're driving Chick nuts, Kate," Mandy whispered.
"Chick," Kate said, spacing her words with precision, "is a grown man."
"Oh, all right, they're driving me nuts, too. Just get them out of my
house for a little while, please?"
43 "How long have they been here?" Kate demanded.
"Thirty-eight hours," Mandy said. She checked her watch. "And forty
minutes."
"Not even two days?" In spite of herself, Kate's shoulders shook.
"Jesus, Mandy, get a grip." She waved a hand toward the window.
"Besides, what used to be my transportation is buried beneath four tons
of scrap metal. And it's breakup, I've got a thousand things to do."
"Like what?"
"Like finish my income taxes."
Momentarily diverted, Mandy said, "You left it to the last minute again
this year?"
Kate bristled. "You got a problem with that?"
"No, it's just that last year you swore-" At Kate's expression Mandy
floundered. "It's just that you're usually such a planner, Shugak, I'd
think-" She looked at Kate again and steered the conversation back to
where she wanted it in the first place. "You can use my truck to ferry
them up to the mine, and drop me off at my trailhead on the way."
Kate's expression did not noticeably soften, and Mandy dropped her voice
a persuasive octave. "Look, if you could just show them around the
place, tell them some of the good old stories. Shove them off the edge
of the glacier. Just kidding," she added quickly when Kate's brows rose.
"Ha. Ha ha ha. Seriously, Kate. If you could just get them off our backs
for three or four hours, I'd sacrifice a goat in your honor. Please, Kate."
Kate put her hands on her hips and demanded, "Did you hear a word I said?"
Mandy glanced over at her parents and lowered her voice further to a
whisper, as if she thought that if she did her parents couldn't hear
every word she said in a twenty-five-foot-square cabin. "They actually
think I'm going to come home. Can you believe it? It's like they're
deaf, Kate! When am I coming home, Amanda dear, Dad says, and I say, I
am home, Dad. Next fall, perhaps? he
says, and I say, I am home, Dad.
There's this man at home, Amanda
44 dear, Mother says, he's a Cabot and so suitable, and I say, I'm not
getting married, Mother, and I'm sure as hell not coming home to get
married, and Mother says, He's so charming, Amanda dear, you'll adore
him. You'd think I was some kind of witless little deb, fresh from her
coming-out party!"
Her voice, having risen over the last words, stopped abruptly as Mandy
waged an obvious battle for self-control. Kate looked at her, at the
weathered skin that made her look older than Kate, though she was two
years younger, at the neatly trimmed cap of thick brown hair, the deeply
set gray eyes surrounded by wrinkles that came from years of squinting
into an Arctic sun from the back of a dopsled She was mostly muscle and
bone, and she was dressed in a fashion to wring her mother's heart, or
much as Kate was, in plaid flannel shirt, jeans and tennis shoes. She
didn't look much like a Boston Brahmin debutante, and in fact she wasn't
one, but only because she had made her escape the instant she was of
legal age.
Mandy had been born in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on Valentine's Day
thirty-two years before. The day after her birth her father, a banker
who inherited one fortune from a Carnegie forebear and made a second
lending overpriced money to Israel and Argentina, put her name down for
Vassar, eighteen years hence. That same day her mother, a great-niece of
Henry Cabot Lodge, began making plans for her daughter's coming-out
party, also eighteen years hence. The interim was taken up with piano
and ballroom dance and French lessons, instruction at a private,
exclusive girls' school and private, exclusive parties given in private,
exclusive homes to which children of only the most private, exclusive
families were invited.
Somewhere along the line the Bakers must have slipped up in their
indoctrination. No one knew it better than Mandy, who during childhood
and adolescence was able to conceal her deplorable preference for . .
Bean over Halston (who had been dressing Mrs. Baker since her coming
out), Robert Service over Robert Lowell (a second cousin once removed)
and hiking the Appalachian Trail over sailing off Cape Cod (Mr. Baker
maintained a
45 sloop in Newport), but the day she turned twenty-one and came into
her trust fund she came out of the closet. "I'm moving to Alaska," she
announced at breakfast.
Their maid Carlotta nearly dropped the bowl of muesli she was handing
around.
Her father laughed comfortably from behind his paper. "Don't be silly,
Amanda dear, you're graduating from Vassar next year."
"I'm moving to Alaska instead," she said, and her mother said, "What do
you think of this shade of taffeta for your ball gown, Amanda dear? Too
pink?"
"I don't know and I don't care, Mother," Mandy said. "I won't be wearing
it. I'll be in Alaska."
"It is too pink," her mother decided. "I'll have to ask Roy for more
swatches."
"Whatever, Mother, but you'd better get it sized to fit you, because
I'll be in Alaska when they strike up the first waltz."
Carlotta, who had been with them since before Mandy was born and who at
that point knew her rather better than her parents did, burst into
tears, threw her apron over her head and ran from the room. Mandy went
upstairs to pack.
They trailed after her all the way to Logan International Airport, she
in a Yellow Cab and they in the Bentley, driven by Carlotta's husband,
Alfonso (a Bentley because Mrs. Baker said that Rolls-Royces were
getting positively common when bourgeois entrepreneurs like Donald Trump
drove around in one). They protested her decision in louder and louder
voices right up to the time the hatch on the jet shut in their faces.
Mandy changed planes in Seattle and arrived in Anchorage on a cold,
snowy day in March. She transferred her trust fund to an account at a
local bank, found a real estate agent with a pilot's license and began
flying into remote properties in the Bush. It took her two months to
find exactly what she wanted. When she did find it, an abandoned lodge
on Silver Bottom Creek and 130 acres, she bought it, along with three
nearly feral dogs, without haggling. She knew from the real estate
agent's face that she'd overpaid. "I
46 don't care," she told Kate. "At least for the first time in my life
that damn trust fund is being used for something besides bachelor bait."
It took her the whole first summer just to clean up the mess the
previous owners had left and take inventory, her first winter included a
record snowfall that caved in a corner of the roof, and she learned the
hard way how not to attract the attention of hungry grizzlies. But she
did survive, which was more than most wannabe frontiersmen could say.
And out in the Great Alone, with a silence she almost could hear, she
was truly and deeply content for the first time in her life.
The following year, attending the World Championship Sled Dog Races
during Anchorage's Fur Rendezvous, she met Chick Noyukpuk, also known as
the Billiken Bullet, a two-time world champion dogsled racer and
part-time drunk. The attraction was instantaneous and mutual, and she
brought him back to the homestead with her. When he'd sobered up he made
friends with her huskies, half-wild half-wolf creatures that slunk
around the lodge and would approach close enough to snatch food from her
hand and no closer. Two were females and came into heat almost
immediately, followed by two litters, one of five and the other of
seven. Chick had them in traces before they were three months old. He
found an old sled in the pile of debris behind the cabin, mended it and
hitched up the team. Mandy, skinning her first beaver in the front yard,
paused to watch them parade back and forth, the short, stocky man with
the black hair and the big grin kicking off behind a tiny forest of
dangling tongues and plumed tails. "Hey," she said finally, laying down
her knife. "Let me try that."
Eventually she became the fourth woman to win the Iditarod and the third
to win the Yukon Quest. They traded off the team, Chick racing the dogs
one year, she the next, and the newspapers started calling her the
Brahmin Bullet. When they weren't racing they came home and oversaw
their breeding and training program, trapped mink and beaver, hunted
moose, caribou and black-tailed deer, dip-netted salmon out of the creek
and did a little desultory
47 gold panning, more out of the wish to maintain an Alaskan tradition
than out of any real desire to strike it rich. It was a good life. She
didn't ask for more.
Except, perhaps, Kate thought, to be left alone by her parents, and for
perhaps the first time in her life realized that being the only child of
deceased parents wasn't necessarily all bad. "Look, Mandy, make Chick
give your parents the tour. He's mushed over every inch of the Park, he
probably knows it better than I do."
"Kate," Mandy hissed, desperate now, "thes
e are people whose closest
approach to a Native American has been a benefit revival of Nanook of
the North at the Boston Museum of Art. Mother asked Chick if he did rain
dances."
"What did Chick say?" Kate couldn't resist asking.
"Only if there was a forest fire that needed putting out. It's not
funny, Kate!"
Kate, choking, whispered back, "Mandy, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm
an Aleut. What makes you think they'll take to me any better than they
did (?hick?"
"You haven't had carnal knowledge of their one and only daughter," Mandy
said grimly. She brightened at a new thought. "I'll pay you."
"Good," Kate said, surrendering with a sigh to the unconcealed panic in