by Breakup(lit)
"Most of the problem," Bobby said, "is that Kay and Wayne have master's
degrees and Joe and Cheryl dropped out of high school."
"Yeah," Dinah said, "the Kreugers actually read books, can you imagine?"
"Dreadful," Mrs. Baker said, very much the dowager duchess.
"Deplorable," Mr. Baker said, eyelids closing and opening again in a
long, slow blink, like an owl.
"And of course," Bobby said, "the Jeppsens are your ordinary, everyday
born-again Christian fanatics, who think the Bible is the only book
necessary. They home-schooled Petey," he added, "so they could keep him
away from all those ungodly teachers at Niniltna High."
"And you see how well it took," Bernie pointed out, but then
111 Bernie, the local basketball coach, always resented any reduction in
the available talent pool for his team, and Petey was almost five foot ten.
"It used to be funny," Dinah said with a sigh.
"Not anymore," Kate said, rubbing gingerly at the sore spot on her head.
"Absolutely not," Mrs. Baker said, even more stately than before.
"Indutipably-inbutibaply-nope," said Mr. Baker.
Displaying a fine, if fraying sense of discretion for which Kate loved
them all dearly, the hippie, the hillbilly and the cheechako let this
pass. "Then winter before last," Dinah said, "Bonnie Jeppsen, Joe's
sister, got the postmaster's job instead of Kay."
"The latest installment in the saga," Bobby took up the tale, "is the
access road between the two homesteads. The Kreugers are higher up the
hill than the Jeppsens, and somehow the Jeppsens got to thinking that
the access road crossed their land and the Kreugers ought to hive to go
around. But since the Kreugers going around would entail them going
across Park land, Dan O'Brian naturally took a somewhat different view
of the situation."
"I'll just bet he did," Kate said appreciatively. This part of the story
was new to her.
Bernie added, "Of course, mostly they hate each other's guts because the
Kreugers grow better tomatoes in their greenhouse than the Jeppsens do."
People in the Alaskan Bush have been shot for refusing offers for
Boardwalk. "Breakup," Kate said, as if that explained everything, and
perhaps it did.
"Breakup," Bobby repeated, without affection. "What the hell is it with
breakup? We make it all the way through winter without going totally
insane and it's finally spring and we're gaining daylight and the kings
will be up the creek any minute and now we got to start shooting at each
other?"
"It's because people make it through the winter that they lose it during
spring," Kate said.
I'll
112 They looked at her askance. "Sure, Shugak, that makes just a whole
bunch of sense," Bobby said, and rolled his eyes.
"Think about it," Kate insisted. "The winter's long and hard and cold
and dark, but people can get through it by looking forward to
spring-hell, sometimes spring is all they've got. It's so cold their
water freezes, it's dark most of the day, maybe their spouse is sleeping
around, maybe the kids are acting out, maybe they're broke, but they
know spring is on its way, so they tough it out through the cold and the
dark, knowing better times are coming." She drained her glass and set it
down with a decisive snap. "And then spring comes, and their wives are
still screwing around on them, and their kids are still shits and
they're still broke. It's spring and nothing's changed, and something
snaps."
"I would prefer that it did not snap in my vicinity," Bobby said with
dignity, "thank you very much."
"Mine either," Bernie agreed.
"Nor nine niether," Mrs. Baker said.
"I'll too on it, pass," Mr. Baker said.
Dinah looked at the Bakers, a considering expression supplanting the
dreamy one in her eye. "You know, Kate, I think you'd best come to
dinner, and bring the Bakers with you. Caribou ribs and onions." She
looked at Kate and waggled her eyebrows. "And Bobby's lemon meringue
pie." She looked back at the Bakers. "And aspirin. And coffee."
Click! went a shutter, and they looked up to find the lady tourist from
Pennsylvania and her husband peering at them over the top of their
camera. "I hope you don't mind?" she said. "It's just that you all look
so-" she hesitated, and then said with a rush, "-so Alaskan."
The two of them beamed.
Mr. Baker belched.
"Come to think of it," Dinah said, "maybe you all should just stay the
night."
113
They reached the turnoff to Bobby and Dinah's, inches from a clean
getaway, just as Mandy and Chick came barreling down the road on Chick's
four-wheeler.
"Whoop!" said Mr. Baker, and rolled down the window to wave madly at his
only child. He would have fallen out if Kate hadn't grabbed his belt and
hauled him back in at the same time she jammed on the brakes.
Miraculously, they were still working.
The four-wheeler slid to a halt just off the truck's starboard bow,
squaring at the edge of the pickup's headlights like a malignant toad.
It wasn't possible to make out facial expressions in the evening gloom,
but Kate received the distinct impression that Chick was forcibly
holding Mandy in the driver's seat.
Sitting very erect between Kate and Mr. Baker and always the critic,
Mrs. Baker said, "She's supposed to be a musher. Where's
114 her dogs?" Her severity was marred by a loud hiccup, brought on by a
particularly large pothole five miles back.
"That's gy mirl!" Mr. Baker whooped exuberantly. He leaned across Mrs.
Baker to inquire of Kate, "Did I you tell what a great musher is she?"
"Yes, you did," Kate said. Not a religious person, she was at this point
heard to call on a higher power for assistance. She wasn't picky, she'd
take anything. An earthquake would be good, something somewhere around 6
on the Richter scale, and the sooner the better. Unfortunately, the
higher power appeared to have retired for the night. Somebody had to
make the first move, so Kate shifted into second and turned to follow
the blue Chevy's taillights down the one-lane game trail that passed for
the access road to Bobby's homestead.
The toad fell in behind her.
The three vehicles rumbled across the plank bridge spanning Squaw Candy
Creek and pulled up into a neat row in front of the big A-frame.
Everyone filed inside, and Kate delivered Mr. and Mrs. Baker into the
wrathful arms of their child and bent her head against the coming storm.
It was not long in breaking. Mr. and Mrs. Baker sat at the kitchen
table, meekly drinking down mugs of hot black coffee, and Chick, Bobby
and Dinah hovered around the eye of the hurricane, trying for Kate's
sake not to laugh out
loud.
"I send them off for a lousy little sight-seeing tour of the Park, and
you almost get them eaten by a bear, involved in a plane crash and shot
by Cindy Bingley?" Mandy flung out a hand in her parents' direction.
Mrs. Baker gave her a low five, and giggled into her coffee mug when
Mandy's head
swiveled around to stare incredulously.
Bobby abruptly wheeled his chair in a 180 and made for the console in
the center of the room at flank speed. Chick hightailed it after him.
Dinah stayed within earshot, pretending to assemble the ingredients
for,dinner. "And then, on top of everything else,
115 you have the gall to take them out to Bernie's and get them stinking
drunk?"
"She didn't get us drunk," Mrs. Baker said, sitting up straight in her
chair, suddenly very dignified.
"Nah," Mr. Baker said with an expansive wave of his hand, unfortunately
the one that held his coffee cup, and launched a spray of hot black
liquid across the kitchen floor. "We wanted the trough. She just drink
us to the led."
Mrs. Baker thought this so exquisitely amusing that she abandoned any
attempt at dignity and positively guffawed. Mr. Baker chose that moment
to erupt into poetry, and not just any poetry, either, but Vachel
Lindsay going "boomalay boomalay boomalay BOOM!"
There was an outburst of snickering from the console, quickly
suppressed. Dinah grabbed a sponge and bent down to mop up the spilled
coffee, effectively hiding her face.
Mandy shifted her glare from Kate to Dinah.
"BEAT an empty BARrel with the HANdle of a BROOM!" Mr. Baker surged to
his feet. "Be CAREful what you DO," he declaimed, forefinger raised
admonishingly, "or Mumbo-JUMBO, God of the CONGO, Mumbo-JUMBO will
HOO-DOO YOU!"
Dinner was served an hour later in an atmosphere redolent of caribou and
restrained wrath. Dinah kept up a steady flow of mild gossip concerning
various Park rats. Becky Jorgensen had passed away quietly in August,
never having left the Alaska Psychiatric Institute where she had been
resident since Roger McAniff had killed her husband and eight others in
a one-day massacre two years before. Breakups really were
better-than-average hard on the Alaskan Bush, they all agreed. After his
fifth bad fishing season in Prince William Sound following the RPetCo
Anchorage spill, Ethan Int-Hout, Abel's second son, was thinking of
moving his family from Cordova back to his father's homestead and opening
116 a bed-and-breakfast for fly-in customers. This naturally led to a
debate on the merits and demerits of finishing the road from Ahtna to
Cordova, a road in construction limbo since the Alaska Earthquake of
1964, which 9.2-on-the-Richter-scale event had taken out an essential
bridge across the Kanuyaq River fifty miles north of Cordova. Kate,
appalled at the thought of a paved, maintained road connected to the
Richardson Highway passing within three quarters of a mile of her
homestead, was adamantly against. Jack Morgan, she remembered, delighted
at the thought of a paved, maintained road connected to the Richardson
Highway passing within three quarters of a mile of her homestead, was as
adamantly for. Bobby pointed out that with the Prudhoe Bay oil field in
decline and salmon stocks around the state in chaos, tourism was a
lucrative, low-impact industry that ought to be given its chance.
"Low-impact?" Kate said, bristling.
Dinah hastily changed the subject, reporting that probate had finally
gone through on the Gette homestead and a distant cousin from
Plainville, Illinois, had inherited. No news yet on what he was going to
do with it. There was yet another rumor that the Fish and Game, bowing
to pressure from sports-fishing interests, was going to limit the red
catch on the Kanuyaq, a potential disaster for the many subsistence
families with fish camps along its banks. Rumor also had it that the
Fish and Game was thinking of limiting the commercial catch at the mouth
of the Kanuyaq as well. These two rumors had given rise to a third, that
subsistence as well as commercial fishermen were arming for Armageddon,
so that the fish hawks in the area were prudently avoiding any low
flyovers.
Conversation inevitably came around to the morning's bear attack. "Guy
was lucky," Bobby said. "Bear could have taken him out, too. You figure
he ran?"
"Wouldn't you?" Kate shot a glance across the table at Mr. and Mrs.
Baker. Food, drink and the accumulated events of the day had rendered
them oblivious. They sat unheeding, shoulders slumped, eyelids at
half-mast, dozing with their heads propped in their hands.
117 "Weird situation," Bobby said, ignoring the Bakers' potentially
delicate sensibilities.
"Why weird?"
"Why didn't they have a gun? It's spring, for crissake, the bears are
up, everybody knows that."
Kate licked her fork and put it down. "Bobby, how often have we had this
conversation? Every time some transcendentalist type reads too much
Rousseau and hikes out into the wilderness to become the neo-noble
savage and starves to death, you get up in arms. Carol Stewart was in
the wrong place at the wrong time. It isn't a pleasant way to die,
certainly. But it isn't all that uncommon, either. There are a lot of
bears in Alaska, and occasionally one eats somebody, usually somebody
who has broken the rules of human-ursine cohabitation. And therefore,"
she added, "somebody whose loss can only benefit the gene pool. People
are dumb, is all, even the experienced ones. Maybe especially the
experienced ones." The memory of her own close encounter by the creek
the day before lent an extra fervor to her words, and made Bobby give
her a curious look. "What was it somebody said, you can't go broke
underestimating the intelligence of the American people?"
"Human-ursine cohabitation?" Bobby said.
"So I have a vocabulary," Kate said. "Sue me."
After dinner Chick pretended an injury to the four-wheeler that needed
immediate attention requiring assistance and dragged Mandy outside.
Since Mr. and Mrs. Baker had passed out end to end on the long couch,
oblivious of any future malign influence Kate might exert, she went.
Bobby kicked back in front of his ham radio, shooting the breeze with
King Hussein of Jordan, a regular correspondent and another avid ham.
He looked sublimely at home, and he should have, because he'd built the
house to order when he came into the Park the same year as Dan O'Brian.
It was one big square room without any dividing walls or doors, except
to the bathroom, and no rugs, to accommodate his chair. The center was
taken up by a pillar of electronic equipment reaching high into the
peaked roof. A table buried in
118 more electronic equipment encircled the pillar, from which Bobby
talked to ham radio operators from all over the globe, took Park weather
readings for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and
broadcast his pirate radio station whenever he was in the mood. The rest
of the house was arranged around the pillar; a king-size bed in the
northwest corner, the kitchen in the northeast corner, the bathroom
between. The living area of the house took up the south side east to
west, a sprawling expanse featuring two armchairs and a ten-foot couch
placed strategically in front of a huge stone fireplace flanked by
triple-glazed picture windows framing a picture-postcard view, Squaw
Candy Creek in the foreground and the Quilak Mountains in the background.
As Kate and Dinah were clearing the table, a third voice interrupted
Bobby's conversation with the ruler of the sovereign state of Jordan.
Bobby listened, replied and said, "Gotta go, King, I got visitors. Been
nice talking to you."
King Hussein's deep, precise voice gave a courteous signoff. The
interrupt was KL7CC in Anchorage, with a telephone patch from Jack
Morgan. "Well, hey, Jack. How are you?"
In Anchorage, Jack leaned back and propped his feet on a thick pile of