Run Cold

by Ed Ifkovic

  “Ah, good friends?” I asked, smiling.

  His brow furled. “Yeah, only friend I ever had. Truth to tell, always had my back, as they say. He saved me from a hangman’s noose. More’n once.” He deliberated slowly. “In fact, I saved his sorry ass from a gang of miners set on stringing him up.” A feckless grin. “Tit for tat, the law of the jungle.”

  “Do want to see him?” Noah asked.

  “Yeah, for old time’s sake, maybe.”

  “I’d like to meet this Sam Pilot,” I repeated, though no one was listening to me. “He strikes me as…”

  Jack interrupted. “The ass owes me twenty bucks, you know.”

  Noah offered a thin smile. “Funny thing—he says you owe him twenty bucks.”

  “Nobody’ll believe that crap. Everybody knows Indians is cheap.”

  Noah squirmed in his seat, and Sonia, leaning in, tapped his forearm with her finger. Again the quiet suggestion—calm, calm, he’s an old man. Crazy.

  “You promised me stories,” I said loudly, grabbing Jack’s eye. He’d been glowering at Noah, irritated, and I feared a spitfire exchange between the two men.

  Noah sat back, amused now. He whispered to Sonia, “You see how the man you love goes off the rails? I’m ready to go to battle for a distant relative who sneers at me the few times we’ve met.”

  “Blood lines,” she whispered back. “They make a man do foolish things.”

  Waving a dismissive hand at the couple, Jack cleared his throat. “Yes, ma’am.” He swiveled his body away from Noah’s, facing me. Then, to make a point, he shuffled his chair, dragging it at angles to me. “You’re a woman what likes murder and mayhem.”

  “Tell me.”

  Jack took a long swig of beer, rolled his head to the side, and grinned mischievously. “Well,” he began, lazily drawing out the word, “I come close to hanging off a cottonwood tree so many times. What you gotta understand is that murder ain’t like you know it, ma’am. I mean, some bat-shit crazy mugger loose with a gun in a city street—or a husband thinking he can be free of the missus.”

  “You’re saying…”

  “I’m saying life on the frontier is different. Like the Old West.”

  I thought of my novel Cimarron, the Oklahoma land rush. The shifting code of law and justice. “A different set of rules,” I agreed.

  “Rules, hell,” he stormed. “Ain’t no rules. Only rule, if there is one, is survival. Christ, lady, you got your grizzly moms coming at you in the Bush and you chatter at them and hope to God they’re listening. You lose your way and you kill a caribou, empty out his guts, and sleep in his carcass while the snow piles up around you.” He paused, out of breath. “You get the picture, lady?”

  Another swig of beer, a satisfied belch. “You get so lonely you tell yourself that if there is a hell after you die—you sit in a room and hear people talking and laughing somewhere outside. But you can’t get at them. For eternity. Bone-marrow deep loneliness. A hunger…” His voice trailed off. “Okay, murder. You trap all winter, stow your pelts, wait for the first thaw, and you find a sucker done stole your cache. You track him down and—confront him. Red-handed, he is, standing there with your damn pelts. He lunges at you, you lunge at him. I win. Is that murder? In ’98 you stake a claim north of the Bonanza claim, upstream, and you return to find this cheekacho sitting pretty there. He points a gun but got the aim of a dizzy girl. A knife to his heart. Bingo.”

  I said nothing.

  Noah’s words were laced with anger. “But you robbed…killed…”

  Jack sucked in his breath. “Sometimes folks had stuff I wanted.” A deep rumble. “I took it.”

  “And they died?”

  “What can I say? This fool mocks me in a saloon. You lay in wait and ambush the guy.”

  Sonia rustled in her purse and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper, yellowed pulp, flaky. “I found this in our files. Some village printing press back in 1911. Yukon Call.” She pointed. “One paragraph here.” She read: “‘Horace Rowers, deputy marshal out of Circle City, shot to death by Jack May. May, a scoundrel on the run. Powers attempted to arrest May for thievery.’” She stopped. “Jack May? Is it you?”

  Jack was grinning widely. “Couldn’t never get my name right. Yeah, the buffoon run up against the wrong man.”

  “But were you ever arrested for murder?” I asked.

  “Yeah. More’n once. Skin of my teeth. The law was afraid of me.”

  Awkwardly he pulled an old leather pouch from a pocket, fingered it, and grinned. “Souvenirs.” Stained, a flap half gone, the pouch looked ready to disintegrate. He grappled with it, and a few silver dollars clanged onto the table. His hand grabbed them. But he took a folded piece of birch bark, opened it, and smoothed out an old yellowed piece of paper.

  “Back in the winter of ’29—maybe ’30—Sam and me locked up in Nome for robbery. Dumb-ass sheriff took our pictures”—a wide grin, posing—“’cause I’m good-looking. Next spring they wanna hang me for murder.” He tapped the crumbling poster. “There I am, plastered all over Kingdom Come.”

  “They caught you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you didn’t hang.”

  Again the sickly smile. “The one witness somehow disappeared.”

  A cheap poster, now faded, creased:

  WANTED FOR MURDER

  JACK MAYBE

  REWARD

  TO BE HANGED

  What little could still be made out showed a grainy picture of Jack, mostly gone but, oddly, the coal-black eyes and the jutting chin.

  We watched him carefully fold the sheet and shove it into the pouch.

  Silence.

  “So you…” My words stuck in my throat. I thought of Clint’s remarks. “You even murdered a missionary?”

  “Says he was. Who knows?”

  “Why?”

  “Says I flirted with his wife.”

  “Did you?”

  An impish grin. “Yeah.”

  “So you killed him?”

  “He came at me.”

  Jack’s eyes closed, and then popped open, his look particularly lascivious. A sickly smile. “Yeah, she was one pretty girl. Maybe she flirts with me. I’m a good-looking guy, you know, flirting like right in front of her husband, she twirls, smiles, he gets hot under the collar, threatens, she gets scared, accuses me of nonsense, and right in front of her boy and girl, and…and…”

  “You kill a good man,” I concluded, my teeth on edge.

  Noah was steamed. “You enjoyed being one of the bad guys.”

  “What can I say? Soapy Smith over to Skagway. His gang robbed caches of supplies—died in a shootout with some fellow. They wrote a song about him. Others—O’Brien’s gang, him hanged in Dawson. Took all the gold dust and nuggets on the Chilkoot Trail. Bodies floating down the Yukon.” He offered an exaggerated grin. “The Blueberry Kid up to Cleary Creek, he killed him three men. The miserable son of a bitch never burned daylight, I tell you that. But”—a dramatic pause—“I was the meanest man in Alaska. The one Judge Lynch’s Court never got to hang. Me and my Winchester .30.30.” He breathed in. “End of story.”

  “Where did you meet Sam Pilot?” Sonia asked.

  “Up around Fort Yukon.”

  “Nathan West is my grandfather,” Noah added.

  Jack looked surprised. “Hey, I knew him. Trapper. Some high-muck-a-muck in Fort Yukon. Like he’s king of nothing.”

  “My grandfather,” Noah said softly.

  “You can’t help that.” Jack’s eyes got a faraway look. “I remember his own folks don’t care for Sam Pilot. Athabascan Sam, they called him then. Drifted in and out of the village, and this Nathan tells him to get lost. Sam drunk mighty hard back then. Ain’t nothing worse than a drunk Indian who’s dumb as a river stone.”

  “Your buddy,�
� Noah noted wryly.

  Jack chuckled. “They say you can’t choose your family, but, Christ Almighty man, sometimes you can’t choose your friends. They’re just there like a rash on your neck.”

  Jack downed the rest of his beer, loudly bellowed to the barmaid who was back hanging over the jukebox—Patsy Cline was walkin’ after midnight and the barmaid seemed to think that was a good idea—and demanded another beer. The harmonica player was struggling through “She May Have Seen Better Days.” Slurring his words, drifting into silence, sighing heavily, hiccoughing, Jack slipped down in his seat. I nodded at Noah—time to leave.

  But Jack dreamily began a curious ramble now, some of his words lost or unintelligible, others choked with sloppy emotion, still others infused with a venom. A curious monologue: “Yukon, the fellow turns an ace and you know he’s cheating…Come outside and I’ll…you come up against Klu-tok, the crazy Indian on the Mulchatana River, he killed him a score of men…his body in the winter cabin thanks to me…you know the guy…flashy dressed, a gun to your back…Klondike Sally…you say that to me and…a pocket of gold nuggets, jangling…he says…a damned fool he is…Sam says…”

  On and on, disjointed, intoxicated, a Homeric sweep of scattered memory that finally dissolved into silence as Jack slumped in his seat.

  I gathered my gloves and hat, nudged Noah and Sonia, and waited, tapping my foot on the floor.

  Sonia, glancing around the room, suddenly froze. “There,” she pointed.

  In a dark corner, back by the kitchen door, stood Ty Gilley, nearly hidden in shadows, his back against the wall, his body facing us. Leaning forward, he had a palm against his chin. A light from a hallway silhouetted his head. Watching, watching.

  I started. “Good Lord. What?”

  “The man who came to Alaska looking for a lost father.”

  Once he realized we were watching him, he hunched his shoulders and turned his face away. But then, boldly, he leaned forward, staring into our faces. No—at Jack’s face.

  Sonia wasn’t happy. “He’s hounded me about my interviews.” She never took her eyes off the dark shadow. “He hoped I’d have information that could lead to his father.”

  “And do you?” I asked.

  She shook her head vigorously. “Of course not. He told me he took a job over to the Air Force base because he spent a lifetime wondering about his father, a man named Clay Fowler, a restless man, shiftless, so said his mother. Around 1917 he headed off to fight in France, but they got a letter from Anvil Creek, Nome. Then no more letters.”

  “He wants answers,” I said.

  Noah said into the silence, “But the world of the Yukon, the Klondike, Circle City, the gold rush, the frozen land…ice and snow…everything is a secret. Dark stories. Lost lives. Violence. White silence. Your articles told him…maybe.”

  Jack had been staring at Ty. He turned in his seat, and made a clicking sound. “Christ Almighty, man.”

  Noah went on. “Alaska is a place where people disappear. Plane crashes, sudden falls into the ice crevasses, landslides, blinding sunlight, starvation. Never heard of again. Every family got someone who never came home. It’s like—like a haunted land.”

  Jack snapped at Noah. “Christ, man, sometimes men just walked away. They start walking and never look back. The nothing they’re walking to is worth more’n that something they left behind.” He took a large grimy white handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose noisily. “Maybe his father just wanted to get away from his ma and him. Some men don’t wanna look back.” He shivered.

  He was looking into the shadows.

  When I followed his gaze, Ty Gilley was gone.

  Chapter Five

  Sam Pilot sat stiffly in the Nordale lounge.

  When I walked downstairs, headed into the lounge to meet Clint, Teddy leaned over the reception desk and grumbled, “When I come on duty an hour ago, he’s sitting there like a cigar store Indian, arms folded over his chest, staring straight ahead, silent, eyes like glass marbles. Like the dead, Miss Ferber. Somebody told me his name is Sam Pilot.” He tsked. “Another drunken Indian somebody gotta boot out of here.”

  Clint motioned me over to where he was sitting, across the room from the imperious Indian.

  “That’s Sam Pilot.”

  “I know.” I glanced at the unmoving figure, rigid as a statue, barely a flicker of his eyelids. “You ever meet him before?”

  Clint lowered his voice. “Many years back. Seen him with Jack Mabie. One time at a gambling joint in Valdez. The two shot up the place. A pretty gal shot in the hip.”

  I peered at the unmoving man, though I noticed a quick move as he scratched his chin. “What did you do?”

  Clint chuckled. “Skedaddled out of town. Gunfire ain’t hold no attraction for me.”

  “A sensible man.”

  There were a few stragglers in the lounge, mostly clustered on sofas near the reception area. No one was talking, and, indeed, no one was purposely looking at Sam Pilot—though everyone was conscious of his presence—and the dark sense of menace. I caught one Outsider, baffled and tittering, throwing a sidelong glance at the Indian.

  A tall, willowy man, rail thin, perhaps over six feet tall, with bronzed, leathery skin, without wrinkles despite his being probably in his seventies, he had a prominent hawk nose, high chiseled cheekbones under large, luminous black eyes. A lightning scar under his left eye, pale pinkish white against the dark skin. A jutting chin under a thick mouth. His most dramatic feature, though, was his hair—brilliant white, almost platinum, parted in the middle and cascading down his shoulders, ending just above his waist. The ghost of your nightmares. A little frightening, I thought, that regal look—a shaman’s ethereal look, awe-inspiring, distancing. That, coupled with his stillness—each time I sneaked a glance I detected no blinking or slight shift in his body—made him appear unreal, a phantom.

  No one sat near him.

  I had trouble imagining him with Jack Mabie, that small wiry man, all angle and bone, tiny. Irrationally, I imagined the two as the dark, failed negative of that noisome popular image—the Lone Ranger and servile Tonto. White hero and darker sidekick. Natty Bumppo and Chingachook. The dark night in the wilderness. But that unwanted imagery slid into something more bizarre. Mutt and Jeff from the comic strips. Crafty Mutt, a schemer, and bumbling Jeff. A devil’s dream, though: the tall bumpkin with his stumbling short friend. No—Sam Pilot and Jack Mabie occupied their own universe, sinister, dark, threatening.

  “What’s he doing here?” I whispered to Clint.

  “Dunno.”

  But Pilot suddenly raised an arm in the air as Noah rushed into the lounge.

  “I’m late,” Noah said to no one in particular.

  Noah approached Sam, extended his hand, but Sam did not shake it. Rather, the old man stood up, his bones cracking, eyes narrowed, face to face with Noah, the two men the same height, but Sam looked past Noah, pointing around the lounge. “I ain’t never been in a fancy place. Why you make me come here?”

  Noah acted flummoxed. “Maria said she’d drop you off and…” He stopped.

  “Jack ain’t here?”

  “No, we got to meet him at Mimi’s. But I wanted to talk to you first.”

  “Maria ain’t told me that.”

  Noah pointed to a chair. “Sit back down. Please.” He waved me over. “A few minutes. Sam, I also wanted you to meet Edna Ferber, a writer. She’s in Alaska doing research for…”

  Sam locked eyes with mine. Not friendly. A thick grunt, garbled. He dismissed me.

  Still flustered, Noah seemed at a loss. Finally, looking into Sam’s face—putting his face close to Sam’s—he said, “Sam, Edna is my friend.”

  “Mr. Pilot, your friend Jack is a local celebrity.”

  He grunted but for a second I detected the hint of a smile, though he sat back down. Clint, mutte
ring something behind me, stood and left the room. When I called to him, he waved his hand at me. With a ripple of laughter he said, “Life is safer in the wild.”

  I sat down in a chair facing Sam, though he turned away from me. Finally he stared at me. My chair was close to his, but I felt dwarfed by Sam and Noah.

  I waited.

  Sam spoke through clenched teeth, a rusty voice. “Celebrity, my ass. Jack—he always saw hisself as a hero. Bullshit artist, that man. Ask him how Jack London stole his life and put it into a book.”

  “So Jack tells stories, exaggerated?”

  He counted a second. “Three-fifths fudge and a lot of nonsense.”

  “He said you saved his life many times.”

  He sucked in his cheeks. “That’s true.”

  Noah added, “And he saved yours?”

  “That’s true.”

  “What isn’t true?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Murder?” I held his eye.

  Sam spoke through clenched teeth. “Everybody is a murderer.”

  I looked at Noah, then back at Sam. “I’m trying to understand the real Alaska. The raw underbelly.” I stopped. Sam was whistling softly.

  “You talk too much, lady.”

  Noah sighed. I waited, my eyes demanding that Jack look at me. His head rocked up and down, his eyes were cold, unblinking, but as I watched him his lips curled up slightly, giving a hint of stained yellow teeth, and then a rheumy cough from deep in his throat. “Christ, Jack’s been talking a blue streak.”

  I returned his steely gaze. “The meanest man in Alaska.”

  “Bullshit.” He scoffed. He pointed at Noah’s breast pocket—“Yeah, now, hurry up”—and Noah handed him a cigarette. Shoulders hunched, he waited as Noah struck a match and lit it. Slowly, coolly, he inhaled the smoke, his eyes suddenly dark as he sent out a cloud of gray smoke into the air, followed it as it drifted up to the ceiling. For a second his eyes shut dreamily, and then he contemplated the cigarette in his fingertips. “Man.” He put the cigarette between his lips, sucked in the smoke. “Heaven.” He held my eye. “Killing a man ain’t necessarily murder.”