The bomb fell on Hiroshima in August 1945 and the war in the Pacific was over. He was demobbed in September and he went straight home, by boat to Valdez, by thumb and on foot to Ahtna.
He’d been writing to Mac once a month, although the writing did not come easily to him. Mac’s replies were infrequent and seldom more than a few sentences scribbled on the back of a postcard.
Mac wasn’t in Ahtna when he got there, but he hadn’t really expected him to be.
There was a package waiting for him at the post office. The return address was in an unfamiliar hand. He opened it up and found another box, securely taped, along with Sam’s last four letters to Mac.
The accompanying note read, “Private McCullough died of tuberculosis just before being shipped stateside. He asked me to forward this to you when you got in touch.”
It was signed Sgt. D. Hammett.
Eleven
Her first realization was that she was upside down. Her second was that she was cold. Very cold.
She blinked, recognized the cab of the pickup. She was hanging from the seat belt, and her first instinct was to fumble with the catch to open it. “No,” she said out loud, “don’t do that.”
The sound of her own voice reassured her. Something was still working.
She looked at the dashboard. The engine was off. That was a good thing. She sniffed the air. No gasoline smell. Good again. She squeezed her hands, moved her feet, stretched her spine as much as she was able. The rest of her seemed to be working, too. The good news kept on coming. Although she had a sore spot on the back of her head, where she presumed her skull had come into brief, violent contact with the back window. “My week for running my head into firewood and car windows,” she said.
Although this was good news, too, in a backassward kind of way. Hitting the back of her head this time meant she shouldn’t get another set of shiners. Maybe.
She listened. There was nothing to hear but the wind. The windshield, cracked but still intact, was buried in snow. The driver’s-side window was, another miracle, also still intact. She turned her head to look right.
The passenger window was gone. So was Mutt.
Not a good thing.
She braced one hand against the roof of the cab, released the seat belt with the other, and dropped down in a sort of controlled tumble. Her knee knocked against something prickly, and she felt around until she found it. The pineapple.
She noticed that her hands felt almost numb with cold. Now that she thought about it, her feet weren’t much warmer. Also not a good thing. She reached up to fumble with both hands behind the seat for her emergency kit, which included a flat white metal box twelve by eighteen inches, and her parka. She eeled into her parka and opened the latches on the box.
Taped to the inside of the top was a book light. She clipped the light to one of the visors and turned it on.
She found the hand warmers and stuffed one each into the mittens in the parka’s right hand pocket. She put her back to the open window and removed her boots to stick toe warmers to the bottoms of her socks. She pulled the boots back on, zipped up her parka, and pulled on the mittens. Blessed warmth began to seep into her extremities.
She was aware enough to realize she was light-headed, and that there had to be more aches and pains that would begin to register the moment she stopped moving. She knew enough to stay with the truck, but some reconnaissance was a must. Even if she could have gotten one of the doors open she wouldn’t have dared for fear she wouldn’t be able to get it closed again. Snow was already drifting in through the broken window. She squeezed through it, parka and all, and stood up to get a snootful of snow courtesy of the wind that was blowing fiercely and horizontally over the ground.
She circled the pickup, right hand maintaining contact with the truck bed, leaning into the wind, the snow stinging her face. It was wheels up; no possibility of righting it without a come-along. The tarp over the supplies in the back was bellied out into the snow, but so far as she could tell her knots had held on the lines tying it down. There was a Swiss Army knife with a can opener on it in the parka’s left pocket, another one in the glove compartment, a third in the emergency kit. She wouldn’t starve.
She pulled off a glove and laid a hand on the engine. It was cold, which meant she’d been out for a while. Maybe not, in this wind. She didn’t have a watch, and with the engine off so was the clock on the truck’s dash. She tried to remember when sunrise was this time of year. Seven? Seven thirty?
“Mutt? Mutt!” She circled the truck again, calling. “Mutt! Come here, girl!” There was no response. Two steps away and she couldn’t see the book light through the cab windows. Three steps away and she couldn’t see the truck. She didn’t dare go any farther than that.
She wriggled back inside the cab and took further inventory. There was a moth-eaten olive drab army blanket she hadn’t remembered putting there beneath the seat, and there was a roll of duct tape in the emergency kit. She took the blanket and the tape outside and rigged a cover for the broken window. She crawled back inside and invented a whole new language for popping the bench seat loose so she wouldn’t have to sit on the metal roof all night.
It did come loose, finally, in a shower of candy wrappers and loose screws and bits of gravel she’d tracked into the cab. She beat it clean, pulled the sleeping bag that was the last item of her emergency kit free of its stuff bag, unzipped it, tossed in a couple of the hand warmers, and crawled inside, boots, gloves, parka, and all. It hadn’t been out of the stuff bag in years and it smelled pretty musty, but so far as she could tell the only livestock in it was her.
She wasn’t hungry but she forced herself to eat one of the power bars in the emergency kit, and washed it down with some water. The water was starting to get a little slushy inside its plastic bottle so she put it inside the sleeping bag with her.
She didn’t know how long the book light’s battery would last and she didn’t know how long the storm was going to last, either, so she turned the light off. She checked the blanket. The weight of snow drifting outside was pushing it into the open space left by the broken window but it was big enough that it should hold.
She pulled the hood of the parka over her head and zipped up the sleeping bag as far as it would go and lay there and listened to the wind howl and the trees creak ominously in the gale. She cursed herself for leaving Ahtna when it should have been obvious to any near idiot that a storm was about to hit. When images of Mutt hurt and helpless out there somewhere in that maelstrom threatened to take over, she forced herself to think of something else.
She wondered what the temperature was in LA.
* * *
The memorial at the church had been everything that was dignified and restrained. The graveside service was brief and decorous. Afterward, Jim and his mother were driven in a black stretch limousine to the reception at the club, where the driver, appropriately subdued, deposited them at the front door, where another appropriately subdued functionary whisked them inside.
The room was large, with a wall of windows overlooking the first hole of the golf course in the foreground and the Pacific Ocean in the background. The bar had a line in front of it and one wall was taken up by a banquet table laden with food. Jim stood at the door, watching his mother move slowly across the room, black-silk-clad spine straight, perfectly coiffed head erect, shaking hands, accepting condolences, offering a cool cheek for those brave enough to offer her affection. If you could call it that.
She looked like a one-woman fashion plate right out of the AARP magazine, chic, elegant, and fashionable. To be fair, everyone in attendance was similarly attired, the women in subdued colors with discreet necklines, the men in suits with silk ties in muted patterns, everything fitting in a way you just knew was personally tailored and designed on the most recent dicta from Vogue and GQ.
He snorted beneath his breath. The only fashion season Jim recognized was when Kate switched from jeans in summer to lined jeans in winter. Mostly all
he cared about were the buttons, a fashion statement he’d always liked better than zippers. Zippers were over so fast. With buttons you could take your time.
He stopped looking at clothes and looked at faces instead. It took a while to find them in the crowd, but there were a few people who looked familiar in a twenty-years-ago sort of way. Before approaching them he decided he required some liquid courage and got in line at the bar. The conversations he overheard were exactly what he expected.
“It’s such a shame. He wasn’t that old.” This from a Methuselah who looked a hundred if he was a day.
“I didn’t even know he was ill. Did you?” His companion, a woman who had given up on her figure, was heaping her plate high with shrimp.
“Beverly would never have told anyone anything about anything. She’s pretty reserved.”
“Is that what you’d call it?” A woman his mother’s age who was even thinner and better put together sounded like a cat and looked as if she’d meant to. “I’ve always thought of her as an iceberg, myself.”
“A fine-looking woman,” said the man standing next to her. “He owned the building his law firm occupies, did you say? Even in this market, that’ll fetch a nice chunk of change.”
“She won’t need it, his broker told a friend of my sister’s that James left behind a very healthy portfolio.”
“Really.” Jim could almost hear the calculator clicking between Methuselah’s ears. “Haven’t I heard something about a son?”
Jim and his mother had been early to the church and Jim, quailing at the thought of being polite to that many people and more than a little upset by all the stories about his father he’d never heard being told by people he’d never met, had delayed walking out until almost everyone was gone. His mother had not introduced him to anyone, and few people who’d seen him knew him for who he was. It was a blessing in keeping himself below the radar.
Not so much standing in line for a beer.
They had it on tap, a nice crisp lager, and just looking at it in its tall, frosty glass made him feel a little better. From the corner of his eye he could see his mother looking his way, an unmistakable command in her eye. He took himself off to the terrace.
The breeze was warm and balmy and only faintly tainted by the layer of car exhaust hanging heavily over the greater Los Angeles area. You never smelled car exhaust in the Park unless you’d duct-taped yourself to the rear bumper of somebody’s Ford F-150.
He wondered what the temperature was in Niniltna.
“Hey.”
He turned. It took him a minute, not because he didn’t recognize her but because he couldn’t believe she was there. “Sylvia?”
She smiled. “Here come the Mounties, somebody hide.”
“Sylvia,” he said, and it was the most natural thing in the world to step forward and sweep her up into a bear hug.
She emerged from it laughing and a little flushed. “Long time no see, Chopin. How the hell are you?”
He inspected her from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. She was five seven and a hundred and thirty-five pounds that was mostly muscle, clad today in a short black dress with a scoop neck and three-quarter-length sleeves. She wore modest gold hoops and a thin gold chain with a cross on it, and her heels weren’t so high she couldn’t run in them if she had to. She was tanned, there were laugh lines at the corners of her bright brown eyes, and her hair was an artfully tousled cap of rich dark brown streaked with highlights that looked natural. But then everyone in LA had great hair. Great hair and great teeth. There was probably a law for that, too. “Looking good, Hernandez.”
“Backatcha, Chopin.” Her smile faded. “I’m sorry about your dad.”
“Yeah.” He let her go. “Me, too.” He looked through the glass door and saw an older man dressed in a hand-tailored three-piece suit—one of his father’s partners? Henderson? Harrigan? Haverman, that was it—take one of his mother’s hands in both of his and bend over it in what was nearly a bow. Jim looked back at Sylvia. “She didn’t even tell me he was sick.”
She grimaced but she didn’t say anything. Sylvia Hernandez knew everything she needed to know about Beverly Chopin. “How are you otherwise?” She smiled again. “How’s life up in the frozen north?”
“Good,” he said. “Better than, even.”
“Still with the troopers?”
“Yeah. Sergeant now, with my own post.”
She raised an eyebrow. “On the fast track?”
He shuddered. “No way, no how. They keep trying to promote me. I keep resisting.”
“Tell me about the post.”
He described Niniltna and the Park, cutting himself short when he became aware of the unconscious longing in his voice. “How about you?”
“Like father, like daughter. County sheriff. Detective division.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Homicide?”
She shook her head. “Major crimes.”
“Impressive.”
“Well, I don’t fly to work in my own airplane,” she said.
He grinned. “How’s your dad?”
“Good. Retired. Him and Mom moved up to Shasta. Took a woodworking class and now everybody gets whatnot shelves for Christmas.”
He laughed. “I bet they’re good shelves.”
“Yeah, well.” Sylvia’s smile was sly. “Okay, I’ll ask first. You married?”
“No.” For a moment he hesitated, thinking of how to describe his relationship with Kate. Hell, he couldn’t even describe Kate out of her Alaska context, nobody’d believe it, especially no one in sunny, ultra-civilized southern California. “There is someone, though. And you?”
“Was.”
“Ah. It was his fault, of course. Is he still living?”
She laughed. “So far as I know. He moved away. Most of the men in my life do.”
“Yeah, well.” His smile matched her own in slyness. “You could do a better job of picking ’em.”
She punched his arm with her free hand, hard enough to be felt.
“Police brutality,” he said.
“James.”
They turned to see his mother standing in the doorway. Jim tried not to look as guilty as he felt at laughing out loud at his own father’s memorial reception. And then he got pissed off that his mother would dare to condemn his behavior anywhere, at any time. His jaw set, and he met her glacial stare for glacial stare.
Beverly was first to look away. “I’m glad you could come, Sylvia. My husband always spoke fondly of you.”
That was the first Jim had heard of it.
“Thank you for inviting me, Mrs. Chopin,” Sylvia said.
Beverly had invited Sylvia to the reception? Jim felt the earth move beneath his feet, and it wasn’t the San Andreas fault.
His mother looked at him. “There are some people who would like to renew their acquaintance with you, James.”
Jim downed the rest of his beer. “Later?” he said to Sylvia.
She toasted him with her wine. “Later.”
Twelve
The snow started in Niniltna just as school let out.
“You could stay the night again,” Van said. “You know Annie won’t mind.” A slight, slender girl with glossy brown hair, creamy skin, and wide-set brown eyes, she stood next to him just outside the main door of the school, her face upturned to catch the first flakes on her cheeks.
Who could not have kissed her in that moment? So he did, to a chorus of jeers and cheers from everyone in seventh through twelfth grades erupting out of the doors behind them. He raised his head and grinned down at her. “I know she wouldn’t, but Kate will be back from Ahtna by now. I want to make sure she’s okay. But I’ll give you a ride home.” The privacy of the cab of his pickup, even for a brief time, was an alluring prospect.
They started to walk toward it. “Is she pretty shook up over Old Sam?”
“I think so.” A gust of wind enveloped them in a swirl of snow. “He’s about the last Park rat of his generation, if yo
u don’t count the aunties, and they were pretty close.”
“How were they related, exactly?”
“I think he was her great-uncle, or maybe her great-great-uncle.”
Van worked this out. “He was her grandmother’s uncle?”
“Or maybe her grandmother’s brother? I don’t know, I never asked. Annie probably knows.”
“Annie won’t tell.” He looked at her and she said, “Haven’t you ever noticed? None of the aunties will talk about family in front of the children. Even their own.”
He hunched his shoulders against another gust of wind. “Doesn’t matter how or if they were related by blood. Her father died when she was pretty young. I think Old Sam kind of stepped into the role. He sounded like her dad every time he yelled at her, that’s for sure.”
They climbed into his pickup and spent the next fifteen minutes in an exchange of mutual admiration, before Van pulled back and said, “Okay, that’s enough for now.”
His heart was pounding in his ears and he was breathing as fast as she was, but he let her move to the other side of the seat. It took him a minute to remember where the ignition was. He turned the key and looked at her before putting the engine in gear. “No pressure, Van. When you’re ready.”
She nodded, her hair falling forward to hide her expression.
And sure as hell not in the front seat of his pickup, he thought, and spent the too-short drive to Annie Mike’s wondering where.
* * *
He got home to find the house dark. The snow was piling up fast, and he parked the pickup between the old outhouse and the shop, where he knew from experience there was at least some shelter from drifting. He checked to make sure the snow shovel was next to the door, kicked the snow from his boots, and went inside.
Mindful of the cost of fuel, instead of turning up the thermostat he started a fire in the fireplace, although he veered immediately from the path of rectitude afterward, assembling the ingredients for an enormous sandwich, piling the very small portion of the plate that remained high with potato chips, putting Transporter 3 on the television, and cranking the volume on the remote as far up as it would go. An empty house was not to be wasted.
Though Not Dead Page 13