From the instant she had stepped foot on the Bering tarmac she’d been working flat out; nonstop, hard, back-breaking, strenuous work, work that left her spent and depleted, work that left her too tired to think, too tired to move, too tired to feel, too tired to remember anything beyond the arrival time of the next load and the maximum tonnage and load limits of the plane it was shipping out on. She worked, she ate, she slept briefly for a few hours snatched from the work, and then she got up and did it all over again. There were plenty of birds for Mutt to hunt in every direction, a hot shower not too far away, and if the toilet was an outhouse, at least she didn’t have to haul a honeybucket. Baird, thank god, had it pumped on a weekly basis by the local service.
So far as Baird knew she had no friends or relatives, no life to infringe on her devotion to the task at hand. In four months she had never taken a day off. She rarely left the airport, sending him to the Eagle store with a grocery list when needed, which always included whatever new bestsellers were on the checkout stand, nothing to stimulate her imagination or challenge her intellect, just words on a page to occupy the front of her brain while everything behind lay dormant and detached. She hadn’t dared to bring any poetry with her. She hadn’t listened to music in eleven months.
The old gods were silent as well. Agudar, Calm Water’s Daughter, The Woman Who Keeps The Tides, they no longer spoke to Kate. She didn’t miss them, she told herself. She didn’t even miss Emaa anymore.
Kate was in neutral. The motor was running, but it wasn’t going anywhere. It was just so much as she was capable of, and no more.
There was a tentative knock at the door and she looked up. A short, pudgy man with a tentative expression on his elfin face stood in the doorway, eyebrows raised. “Is a bad time, yes?”
She smiled, glad to be diverted from her increasingly morbid thoughts. There was one other person she knew in Bering besides Baird and the pilots. “Is a bad time, no. Come on in, Yuri. What are you doing up at this hour of the night?”
He came in and sat down across the desk from her. “I have the problem with sleeping,” he said. “I can’t. So I get up and wander around the little town. Everybody is having this same problem, I think, because everybody else is up, too.”
“No. It’s just summertime in Alaska.” And she was struck again by how normal everything was, how ordinarily everyone went about their business, the fishermen setting their nets and pulling in fish, the postal workers distributing mail in the post office, the waitresses bringing coffee to their customers, the gas station dispensing gas, the grocery store selling groceries.
Suddenly she wanted to rip the door off its hinges and scream, “How can anything be normal, how can anything be ordinary, don’t you people get it, Jack is dead!”
“Ekaterina?” Yuri peered at her worriedly through a shock of thick, untidy black hair, ragged around the edges as if hacked off with a knife. Like hers.
“Ekaterina?” he said again, and this time his worried voice brought her back. Her breath was coming rapidly, her heart thudding painfully in her throat, her hands had clenched into fists.
“Something is wrong, yes? A bad time this is.” He half rose from his chair. “I go.”
“You stay.” She summoned up another smile from somewhere, aware that her supply was running low, and with a deliberate effort calmed her breathing and relaxed her hands. Her heartbeat obediently steadied, and slowed to a more normal rate. “Did you want to ship something? Or did you just drop in to say hello?”
He brightened. Fumbling through his pockets, he produced a grimy deck of cards. He looked at her hopefully.
Her smile was more genuine this time. “Snerts?” She rummaged through the desk and came up with her own deck. “Remember, I told you, it’s more fun with three or more people.”
“I don’t care,” he said, clearing a space. “You teach me to beat you.”
“In your dreams,” she said without force.
He stayed for two hours, during which they played six games and drank Diet Coke she fetched from the cooler in the hangar.
“Diet?” He made a face.
“You’re awfully picky, for someone who didn’t used to be able to drink any pop at all.”
His face fell into tragic lines, and Kate was about to apologize when she noticed the twinkle in his eyes. “Just for that, I’m blowing by you with thirteen cards left on the pile.”
“Hah! Just try, you—you American! I leave you in dust!”
It wasn’t the first time he’d made a late-night visit. He was a native of Russia, and worked off one of the processors that put into port a couple of times a week. She’d met him one morning when he came in with a box to ship to Anchorage. He’d explained that the crew of his boat loaded up at home on nesting dolls and saints’ icons with gilt haloes and surplus Red Army watches for resale in Fourth Avenue shops in Anchorage, in order to get around the currency laws, so they’d have a little cash to spend in America. She had found him to be no threat, even amusing, and he had dropped by the next time his boat was in, the first time she’d taught him Snerts. Thereafter it was part of both their routines; when his boat was in, Yuri showing up at the hangar in the early hours of the morning when he knew Kate would be alone and probably not very busy.
He’d made a mild pass at her the third time they’d been alone together. She had refused as kindly as she knew how, using up as much nice as she had energy for because she was glad of his company when three o’clock rolled around and she started thinking about September. The early morning hours were the worst. She’d acquired her new scar at three A.M.
Yuri had taken his refusal with good humor; mostly, she suspected, because he was looking for an easy way into the country and was prepared to put the moves on any likely American female who might be susceptible to a proposal of marriage. That night she had risen to the top of his list. Now she had been eliminated, and they could be friends.
Over the weeks he had told her about himself in little snippets dropped here and there, about his boyhood, about the filthy, freezing, losing war in Afghanistan. He had been invalided out of the Army, no great loss to the Army as he’d been a lousy soldier, and no great loss to him as the Russian Army was no longer able to meet its payroll. He had been unable to find work, and one day had come home to the apartment his family shared with two others to find that his wife was gone, along with their two daughters.
“What did you do?”
He shrugged and put a five of spades on a four of spades a second and a half before she did. The back of his hand was thick with the same black hair that grew from his head with such exuberance. “What I had to. I move out because I have no money for rent, but I find a friend who will let me sleep on his floor and use his bathroom for a few rubles. I speak the English well, no?”
“Yes.”
“My mother insists. Very smart, my mother, she say America will win Cold War and we will all have to speak English. So. I hire as interpreter to American who wishes to sell Coke in Russia.” He regarded his Diet Coke with a proprietary air, drained the can and set it down with a satisfied smacking of his lips. “Before that I drive truck for a while. Before that I buy and sell on black market, a little.”
“Did you ever see your wife or your daughters again?”
“No. I am stuck.” He held up his deck as evidence.
She ran through hers once more, and then, on the count of three, they shifted one card from the top of their decks to the bottoms and began dealing in threes again. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, I am sorry, too. But then I get this job, on this big boat—” he flung out his arms “—and I come to America, and I meet you!” He grinned. “Even if you won’t marry me.”
“Find yourself another way to get into the country, buddy,” she said.
He looked wounded, but not mortally.
She managed to throw the fifth game.
“Hah!” he said, triumphant. “I get better at this Snerts!”
“Hah,” she said in t
urn, “I get revenge next week.”
His happy grin faded. “I don’t know, Ekaterina. Next week we may not come to Bering.”
“Oh.” She was silent for a moment, searching for dismay, and found none. Her smile this time was obviously forced. “Then it was very nice meeting you, Yuri.”
“And for me to meet you, Ekaterina.” He took her hand and bowed over it, a gesture that would have looked ridiculous on anyone but a European with two thousand years of civilization at his back.
Yuri hadn’t been gone for five minutes before everything she had been feeling before he showed up came crashing back in on her.
Jim Chopin, of all people. Chopper Jim, First Sergeant of the Alaska State Troopers, also known with some truth as the Father of the Park. He just had to show up and destroy what fragile peace of mind she had managed to achieve after four months’ effort. He even had the gall to be angry, not just angry but furious, almost violent in his rage. It had roused a brief spurt of answering anger in herself, which had died almost immediately, much to her relief. She didn’t want to feel like that.
She didn’t want to feel.
She thought, without much interest, that she’d never seen Chopper Jim angry before. Certainly he’d never been angry with her. Irritated, amused, intrigued, challenged, impressed by and yes, aroused, but never angry.
He was here under an assumed name. That could only mean one thing, that he was working undercover. Was there something hinky going on at Baird Air? Slowly, reluctantly, engaging gears rusty with disuse, she thought back over the past four months, of the loads of airfreight going in and coming out, of the shippers and the receivers.
It had seemed like a fairly routine operation. The season had started with supplies, groceries, parts and gear coming in, and had progressed to fish going out. There were some special shipments, personal belongings for families moving to or from, a load of liquor for an upriver village that had just voted itself dry to wet for the third time, an unending stream of airplane engines going back and forth to Anchorage for annual inspections. There were the regular shipments of supplies to support those government bureaucracies maintaining a presence in this southwest Alaskan hub; the state courts, the Departments of Corrections, of Public Safety, of Fish and Game. Now and then one of the staties hitched a ride on a pile of freight, not strictly kosher but what the FAA didn’t know wouldn’t hurt Baird Air.
She looked at her left wrist, which sported a large stainless-steel watch with Russian letters on the face, a gift from Yuri that he’d broken out of the first shipment she had expedited for him. Baird had one just like it, only larger. So did each of the four pilots. Jim would probably be offered one if he were on duty the next time Yuri brought in a consignment. Baird Air treated all its customers as if their goods were on fire and the nearest fire hose was at the other end of a plane ride, but the gifts made Yuri feel that his goods would be handled with extra care. “What the hell,” Baird said, admiring his watch, “it ticks.”
No, Kate couldn’t pinpoint anything out of the ordinary in the day-to-day operations of the air taxi. Baird made money hand over fist, but then a lot went out, too, in maintenance, lease payments on the hangar, mortgage payments on the plane, insurance liability and replacement. He shared, too; Kate was pulling in almost five thousand a month and the pilots more than that.
She didn’t want to think about any of this. She didn’t want to wonder why Jim was here, she didn’t want to speculate over what might or might not constitute a case for him, she didn’t want to look at Baird Air’s customers as anything but letters and numbers entered neatly on a manifest form. Baird ran an airfreight service out of a Yukon-Kuskokwim hub, paid her to help him do so, provided her with a bunk and meals and didn’t hassle her about Mutt. She didn’t need to know any more than that.
She wanted Jim to go away.
She decided to tell him so.
But when she went to the bunkhouse for lunch at six A.M., he was gone. From the evidence, he’d showered, changed, napped for a while, and then left. He’d eaten, washing it down with his own coffee.
She hadn’t had anything but Hill’s Brothers in so long. The bag smelled good. The label identified it as Tsunami Blend, from Captain’s Roast in Homer, Alaska. It was ground for cone filter, and Jim had been so obliging as to bring all the fixings with him. She filled the tea kettle from the five-gallon white plastic jerry can beneath the table, and the hot plate brought it to a boil quickly. She put the cone on a mug, a filter into the cone and spooned coffee into the filter with a generous hand. She inhaled the steam rising from the surface. Heaven had to smell like that. Seasoned with a touch of evaporated milk, it tasted ambrosial.
She carried the mug back to the hangar, sat down at the desk and began completing cargo manifests. Mutt woke up and padded in. “Hey, girl,” Kate said, one hand dropping automatically to scratch behind the big ears.
Mutt leaned up against her, long enough for the warmth of her body to penetrate through Kate’s jeans. She’d been doing that a lot lately. Ever since that morning. One hand rubbed absently at the flesh of her right arm. The scar was now only a lump of rough tissue, barely discernable as individual tooth marks.
Her hand dropped. She drained her mug and went back to work.
Mutt went looking for an early morning snack and came back with a tight belly, a satisfied expression on her face and goose down hanging from her chin. The sun shone horizontal rays through the office window, the clear, pale gold of early morning.
Baird showed up at eight with a tray of breakfast burritos, the Cessna landed right after the Here, the phone started to ring and the day began in earnest.
At eight-thirty the pilot of the Herc perched a considerable hip on one corner of the desk and bit into his burrito. “God, but the old man can cook. I swear I’d marry him if he ever took a bath.”
“Can’t you keep the grease off your paperwork, Larry? You know some of this stuff goes to the FAA.”
“Fuck the FAA,” the pilot said amiably. “You’re about to go off duty, aren’t you?”
She didn’t look up. Completing government forms was an art in and of itself; instructions incomprehensible to anyone who spoke English as a first language, tiny spaces totally inadequate to hold the information required. “Not until noon,” she said, as she always did.
“Did I ever happen to mention that I’ve got an apartment in town?”
“At last count? About one hundred and eleven times.” Kate signed Baird’s name and picked up the manifest. Fish, fish and more fish, in from Kwingillingok. Plus a baby carriage. A baby carriage? Oh, right, Mrs. Christianson was sending her daughter’s baby carriage to her daughter, who was due any day now. Baird frequently carried things of a personal nature at minimal or no charge. Said it made people who wanted to ship stuff by air think of him first when the time came. Personally, Kate thought he was just a big softy who fell for every sob story laid on him, and she liked him the better for it.
Larry leaned across the desk and touched the scar on her neck. “Well, then, have I ever told you how sexy that scar is?”
“Nope.”
He dropped his voice. “It is. Very sexy.”
Nothing.
Larry was nothing if not an optimist. “So, I’ve got a bottle of Jameson’s up to the pad, and I was thinking you might like to come on up and help me put some of it away.”
“I don’t drink.”
The pilot stuffed the rest of the burrito into his mouth and leered around it at Kate. “Well then, maybe give me a back rub. I’ve got a bad back, and I’m a little sore from holding that damn Herc up in the air all night.”
Kate sat back and looked at him, really for the first time since they had been introduced. He was as wide as he was short, with thick brown curls, velvety brown eyes and what he was sure was an invincible way with women, a delusion common to many men of the air.
“Listen to me carefully, Larry,” she said. “I would rather spend the rest of my life at a monster truck r
ally.”
He grinned. It was, in fact, a rather charming, slightly lopsided grin that wrinkled the corners of his eyes into engaging creases and displayed an alarming number of very white teeth. “Well then, why don’t we just adjourn to your bunk and fuck?”
It didn’t catch her on the raw the way it had the first ten times he’d said it, but neither did she feel any desire to deal with him as gently as she had Yuri. “Tell me something, Larry.”
It was a variation on her usual response and he had to hide his surprise. “Anything.” Anything that will get you into the sack with me, was what he wasn’t saying but what they both knew he meant. Alaskan summers were long of day and long of duration, and wearing on a transient worker with all the normal hormones. It made for brief, passionate and highly unlikely couplings that went south with the birds.
Kate leaned forward and said earnestly, as if she really needed to know, “You know why men don’t suck their own cocks?”
His jaw dropped.
“Because they can’t.”
She leaned back and watched without interest as his face flushed a dark and unbecoming red. He backed up a step, caught his heel on the coffee table and went sprawling on the couch.
Kate knew a momentary flash of gratitude to that crusty old RPetCo communications operator from whom she had first heard that joke, back when she worked that dope case on the Slope, back when she’d been spending every other week in Anchorage with—she stopped that line of thought with an efficiency all the more ruthless after ten months’ practice.
The pilot’s mouth opened but whatever he was about to say was interrupted by a bray of laughter. They turned to see Baird standing in the doorway, clad in his usual uniform of bib overalls and black rubber boots.
“Give it up, Maciarello,” he said to the pilot, still laughing. “You’re outclassed, outmanned and outgunned. She ain’t interested. I oughtta know.” He gave Kate a friendly leer that somehow was not nearly as smarmy or as offensive as Larry’s.
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