by Ed Ifkovic
Hank picked up the story. “In Fairbanks Tessa met a bigwig named Herman Bonner, money-bags adventurer, and the two got married. When he died a few years later, Tessa inherited his world of canneries, gold mines, commercial blocks in Fairbanks, you name it. Tessa suddenly became the most powerful woman in Alaska.”
Paul added, “Tessa is mainly a recluse these days. Preston does her quiet bidding. His reach touches everything in Alaska.”
“Which explains today’s lunch. Jack Mabie.”
“Exactly,” Hank said. “Tessa planted her dead husband’s nephew as manager—green, weak, sort of a nincompoop like Preston, though bumbling—and you come up against a wild old-timer like Jack Mabie, a notorious troublemaker.”
Sonia stood and poured herself a whiskey from the sideboard. She didn’t sit back down. Instead, leaning against the sideboard, one arm cupping her elbow, she watched us, a mischievous gleam in her eye.
Her father grinned. “Tell us, Sonia. You got that newshound look in your eyes.”
“The reason I was late to dinner.” A melodramatic pause. “Tessa is on the warpath.”
“Whatever for?” asked Irina. “This time.”
“News from the mukluk telegraph—by way of gossip from the servants, news drifting into the newsroom. Tessa is storming about—or as much as a fat woman can storm about—furious with both Preston and nephew Jeremy, although Jeremy is monumentally scared of Tessa, always bowing as he approaches her. Word got back to her of Preston’s antics with Jack Mabie today at the Model Café—with me, with him, even with Edna here.” Sonia held my eye, amused. “Preston flicking his finger at Jack’s shoulder as seen by a number of diners. You know, Fairbanks is a small village. The bad behavior of the unpopular town squire. This, coupled with Jeremy’s police blotter notice the other day, has sent her into a rage.”
I was baffled. “Such a small moment, no?”
“No.” Hank’s voice was firm.
Paul announced, “People don’t like Preston, Edna. People are waiting for him to…to…”
“Crash land.” Sonia made a ta-da noise.
Irina went on. “And with Jack Mabie in town—and suddenly known to all because of Sonia’s columns—folks are hoping for a ringside seat.”
Paul added, “Who cares about Jack Mabie? His antics happened decades ago.”
Hank watched him. “But Sonia resurrected his evil reputation. Dime novel killer. Notches on his belt. Sonia exaggerates…”
“No,” she protested.
The phone rang, and Hank jumped up. In the hallway his voice was mumbled with an edge. He returned to the table, shaking his head.
“That was Noah. He apologized. He can’t make it. Exhausted from his trip. Edna, he said he’ll see you tomorrow. He’s looking forward to it.”
Sonia joked. “You see why I can’t marry him, dear family. He’ll never be on time for supper.”
I was disappointed. “I’m looking forward to it. Last year he impressed me. He made me look at a different Alaska. Bright, charming…”
“Good-looking,” Irina added.
I laughed. “That, too.”
Sonia was enjoying herself. “I’d slave all day in the kitchen, a frostbitten Betty Crocker baking cake after cake, a pineapple upside-down cake, only to eat alone at midnight.” She winked at me.
Paul muttered, “The noble savage.” But I noticed it wasn’t said nastily or sarcastically. Oddly, there was a hint of reverence in his tone.
“Really, Paul,” his sister admonished, “what a thing to say about Noah. I thought you’d learned years ago that silence is your only talent.”
Paul made a clicking sound with his tongue. “Sonia, I was talking about you.”
Chapter Three
As I stepped into the Nordale lounge with its scratched cherry-red tables and chairs, its walls covered with sentimental paintings of Arctic scenery, I spotted Clint Bullock sitting by himself on a straight-backed chair, legs up on another chair, drowsing before a roaring fire. I waved at him, though he had his eyes closed. Last year the bewhiskered sourdough had trailed after me, in his own words, “like a sun-besotted muskrat looking for a shady nook.” At first I was put off by the old man’s bumbling friendliness. But he was a goldmine of anecdote, this old-timer from the Cleary Creek gold rush days, one of the last of the original ’03 pioneers who made Fairbanks a boomtown. Relaxing with him, I found a decent companion to bum around with, though I was hardly the kind of soul who bummed around—anytime.
With him, I lumbered through Rocky River beds, learning about placer gold, shuffling tin pans of gravel for gold dust. In over a half century, beginning with his shack outside Fox, north of Fairbanks, Clint Bullock had found no fortune. The only treasure he’d ever unearthed was the acorn-sized nugget he wore proudly around his neck. Now in his seventies, a small stooped man with a wrinkled, dried-up face covered with ungainly whiskers, Clint lived alone in a small log cabin in town. In the summer he chopped wood and fished. Occasionally he mined for “colors,” as he called his quest for gold. Through the long icy cold winters he burned wood and dozed in the Nordale lounge. Most nights, huddled there, he talked and drifted off.
“Clint.” I nudged his shoulder.
He opened his eyes and smiled. “Heard you was here,” he mumbled dreamily. “Can’t stay away from me, can you?”
Within minutes the reception clerk placed tea at my elbow, and I nodded my thanks. I looked up into his face. “Mr. Thompson, I’m afraid I’ve encumbered you with a nightly routine.”
He chuckled. “But one that’s my pleasure, Miss Ferber.”
Last night, settled into the Nordale, I’d drifted down into the lounge and requested a cup of tea from the night clerk. For a moment he’d become flustered. Groups of men lingered in the lounge, glasses of whiskey clinking as they toasted one another.
“Tea?” the clerk had asked.
“Yes, without whiskey.” I hesitated. “With cream.”
None was available, I’d learned, but he kindly brewed me a cup on a hot plate in the back room behind the reception desk, delivered it to me with a small pitcher of cream from an icebox in a back kitchen. Now, unfortunately, it would be a nightly ritual for him, though he insisted it was no big deal.
“Mr. Thomson…”
“Teddy,” he interrupted. “Please.”
A fiftyish man with a pale, drawn face, a web of wrinkles around his small gray eyes, balding, a thick chest in a tight hotel uniform, he did not strike me as a Teddy. But then neither did Teddy Roosevelt, whom I knew years back. The roustabout rough rider with riding crop and safari hat. The original teddy bear.
“Teddy,” I said as he backed away.
Clint was talking. “Lots happening since you departed us, Edna.” He tugged at his bulky overalls, fidgeting with a loose buckle. The elbows of his shirt were worn, quarter-sized holes revealing pale skin.
“You mean besides the pall of utter winter darkness?”
“That’s right.” He cleared his throat noisily and blew his nose into a faded handkerchief he extracted from a shirt pocket. “You was here in June, twenty-two hours of hazy sunlight. Baseball at midnight. Girls half naked in the sun.”
Shaking my head, I made believe I was shivering. “I’d forgotten how cold it could get here.”
“Ain’t nothing in March. Zero at night is a time to get outside, live on the creeks. It still ain’t like my days trapping up in Eagle one long winter when the temperature never rose above fifty below, seemed.”
I stared into his face. “Clint, what do you mean things have changed?”
He leaned in, confidential. “People can taste statehood, you know. We’re that close, really. Sonia Petrievich done a series of fire-and-brimstone articles in The Gold that riled a few folks, mainly the salmon-canning folks from down in Seattle and San Francisco.
He reached into his b
reast pocket, extracted a briarwood pipe. Within seconds the pungent aroma of cheap tobacco filled the corner of the room. Clint waved the pipe at me, making a point, a grin on his face. “Only subject in town—until Sonia done that article on Jack Mabie.”
“Did you know him up north?”
He shook his head. “Couple sightings way back when. I drifted up to Fort Yukon now and then. I headed north as a trapper and guide, tried to settle down in a wilderness cabin outside of Venetie. I was married to an Indian gal for two or three years, maybe, after the First World War. She died in childbirth in a blizzard like you never seen before, that beautiful girl from Circle City, near Fort Yukon.”
“I’m so sorry, Clint.”
“Just a step you take in life. Good. Bad. All steps.”
“But Jack made a name for himself, right?”
“Stories shared around a campfire, you know. Wild tales of bad men. Jack Mabie was one of many. Mean son of a bitch, tell you the truth. He scared folks. Wiry, looking for a fight. The meanest man…”
“So he says.”
“No, it’s the truth. These days he’s an old geezer like the rest of us, but back in the Bush he was a man most folks stepped around like when you spot a grizzly mama on the trail.”
I sipped the hot tea—refreshing, a hint of some wild herb, rich like old moss. I smiled at Teddy, leaning over the reception desk.
I drew my tongue into my cheek. “Jack is savoring his outlaw reputation these days. I expect he’ll get mash notes from dance hall girls.”
“Because of Sonia’s article. She romanticized him.”
“You don’t like that?”
“He’s a murderer.”
“He always escaped the hangman’s noose.”
“No matter.” Clint’s voice got louder, harsh. “He ruined lives. Yeah, he killed some bad guys, lots of them—he boasted about it—but with his temper, Christ, he murdered a simple missionary who got in his way. A man of God. Such a man ain’t fit to be the hero of no story.”
“I’m curious. Did Sonia interview you for her ‘White Silence’ column?”
A wide grin that showed broken teeth, yellow-stained. “She tried, that foolish girl. But I says to her, ‘I’m an old wanderer who got up in the morning, put my pants on, and hoped I got matches to make me coffee and beans. No story there. Look around Fairbanks—Second Avenue filled with old men in sagging cabins sinking into the ground, staggering, limbs twisted. No thanks.”
“Any life story, told with selection, is fascinating.”
He grumbled, “Yeah, Edna, keep telling yourself that.”
I pointed across the lounge at a man who’d lingered in the doorway, stepped in, backed out, then, in a rush, plopped his body into a chair, his eyes riveted on us. Startled, I whispered, “He looks out of place.”
Clint followed my gaze. “Ty Gilley.” Then, a piercing, sidelong glance back at me. “I don’t trust him.”
“For heaven’s sake, why?”
“Look at him.”
I did. A short, roly-poly man in a forest green summer suit, a matching necktie, a fluffy white handkerchief sticking out of a lapel pocket, he seemed a Leprechaun dropped down into stark territory. Slicked-back black hair, so inky black I assumed it was dyed, parted in the middle as if by honed knife blade. Like some silent movie gigolo, but his small, pudgy face held large, luminous eyes, so that he seemed perpetually surprised.
“And the problem is…?” I wondered out loud.
Clint’s voice was clipped. “Too nosy. Asks too many questions and don’t provide his own answers. In the wilderness you don’t trust no man who asks too many questions.”
I chuckled. “Wilderness?”
Clint pointed toward the street. “In Fairbanks you step out of town and you’re in wilderness.”
“What do you know about him?”
“In town since early last fall. Supposed to be an engineer over to the Ladd Air Force Base, but he got rooms upstairs here.”
“Why nosy?” As I watched, Ty Gilley dropped his eyes down, but his hooded eyes watched us.
“He followed Sonia around for a while, peppered her with questions about the North. Her columns on ‘White Silence’ got to him, I guess.”
“What’s his story?”
“What we got—and he ain’t talking much—is that he took the job because he’s looking for his father. Ty fought in Japan, drifted, got a few bucks, headed up here. He claims his father left the family in South Dakota decades back, headed to the North, then disappeared. Fell off the map.”
“People disappear in Alaska.”
Clint nodded. “I guess he wondered all his life.”
“And he thought Sonia had the answer?”
“Like—her columns got him going. The interviews with old-timers. So many lost souls up in the Arctic, Edna. You head for the bonanza and the sun swallows you up. Maybe someone knew his dad. Maybe somebody got a dirty little secret. He’s…hoping.”
I took a sip of tea and sat back. “He has a right to wonder, Clint.”
Clint wasn’t happy. “Sonia told him she ain’t got news of the man who disappeared so many decades ago.”
At one point Teddy walked by Ty, dropping evening newspapers on the tables, and Ty touched his sleeve. The clerk flinched, confused, and waited as Ty tugged. Suddenly Ty cleared his throat and spoke so loudly he could have been addressing the room. “You spent any time up north? The Klondike, maybe?”
Puzzled, Teddy stepped away, but turned back, a thin smile on his face. “Isn’t Fairbanks cold enough for you, Mr. Gilley? The world up there got no appeal for me. God don’t pay attention to folks up there.” He shivered. “Don’t make many stops in Fairbanks either.” He laughed at his own joke, then walked away.
“Do you know any old-timers from up there?” Ty called after him.
Teddy shrugged him off. “This is as far north as I’m ever going, sir.” He disappeared into the small room behind the desk.
To his back, Ty yelled, “I’ll never understand the pull of the Yukon.”
Teddy stepped back out and said, “You’re not the only one.”
Ty went on, “They say that up in the North you feel really alive.” He waited a second. “Until you disappear.”
Teddy drew in his breath, glanced around the room, rolled his eyes in my direction, and walked away.
Ty caught me staring at him, and for a moment his eyes got cloudy. Standing suddenly, he spun around like a dervish, held my eye again, and fled past the reception desk and up the stairwell.
Clint leaned into me. “Mysterious.”
“It could be nothing.”
“It ain’t never nothing, Edna.”
“You act like he’s a criminal.”
Clint grinned. “Hey, in Alaska everyone is.”
Sipping the last of my tea, I changed the subject. “Clint, I didn’t see Noah West at Hank’s tonight. He begged off—tired.”
He chuckled. “In and out of Fairbanks all the time, that busy boy. The Indians done drive him crazy. And Sonia, too. Him and Sonia been on and off lately. I seen them at the Pastime Cocktail Lounge last week. Moody as all get out. Sonia fussing, Noah glaring. Nobody happy.”
“But they’re in love,” I protested, a foolish line.
“Don’t mean they can’t have the low moments.” He closed his eyes a second. “When I was married, me and the missus liked to not talk for days on end. Silence is the glue that keeps folks married.”
“I like them both. I was hoping to see him tonight.”
Clint watched me, curious. “He lives in a small cabin a few streets over in what everybody but the Chamber of Commerce calls Indian Village.” Clint smiled. “I’ll walk you over to his office tomorrow, noontime.”
Late the next morning I met Clint in the lobby, and we walked the few blocks to Noah West’s
office on Fourth Avenue. It was a cold, brutal day, the air dense with ice fog. As we walked, Clint carefully cradled my elbow, though he shuffled along, a little wobbly. I gazed at the storefronts with sagging or peeling signs, hand-painted notices in grimy windows, here and there a flickering naked light. Battered cars parked diagonally, some with dented fenders and cobweb-shattered windshields, junkyard relics, many kept running against the withering cold. Worse, sloe-eyed young men huddled in ragtag bunches, lost in caribou parkas, gazing out into nothing, loitering on the slick sidewalks. Only a passing girl, shuffling by with Woolworth earrings and Co-Op Drug Store lipstick, roused them.
Noah’s office was in the middle of a row of one-storied, tin-roofed hovels, matchbox constructions, many with weathered log-cabin fronts. The sign in his window announced in jagged black letters, “Noah West, Attorney at Law. Native Alyeska Fellowship.”
Inside was a small low-ceilinged anteroom, with a Mission-style green desk. A few chairs looked as if they’d been pilfered from the Odd Fellows Hall. A poster thumbtacked onto a wall: “Go Native.” A scene of blue-white snow, a wilderness cabin, an unattended dogsled. No people. Underneath a motto: “You can only talk to spirits if you listen to the quiet inside you.”
No one was in sight. Clint started to say something, but then I heard voices in a back room, Noah’s pronounced baritone and a woman’s trembling voice, pleading. Voices coming closer. Noah’s voice was confident, laughing, and soon an old woman walked out, Noah’s arm on her shoulder. Noah seemed surprised to see Clint and me standing there, but he smiled, nodded. Turning to the old woman, he said something in Qwich’in—or at least I assumed that’s what it was. The woman looked up into his face and smiled. She hurried out.