by Ed Ifkovic
Stunned, Preston rocked on his heels. Then, in a flash, his hand flew out, and he shoved Noah in the shoulder. Surprised, Noah flinched, but stood his ground. Jeremy looked horrified, blinking wildly, and pulled at Preston.
Preston’s voice seethed. “Lawlessness. Celebrated in this horse town. And Paul. God, his own sister is murdered and he’s defending the murderer. Everyone is talking about Paul taking his side.”
Jeremy, his face beet red, grabbed Preston’s arm and maneuvered him up the sidewalk. He hissed, “Another street brawl, Preston? Your mother is…”
“I don’t give a damn about my mother.”
Back in Noah’s office, I noticed a change in him. Iciness covered him, and he even tucked in his head, turning away. He muttered something about work to do, Harlin Spence waiting to be sprung from jail. Feeling unwanted, I looked at Clint who nodded at me. Let’s go. Let’s leave the man alone. Frantic, I wanted to say something, though I was at a loss for words. So I simply walked away, mumbled my goodbye, but just as I left I glanced back to see Noah, still dressed in his parka—a dull gray one today and not that dreadful incendiary scarlet parka, that bullfighter’s cape—slumped in his chair, facing out same window he’d stared out when I’d arrived earlier. He was a statue, his eyes riveted on the deserted parking lot outside, that squat space of packed snow and ice, with a couple broken-down jalopies, some rusted oil drums, shattered fence posts. A wasteland, that view, a place where people left their trash and hoped the snow would hide it.
Outside, Clint spoke into the silence. “You gotta save him, Edna.”
“What?” I looked into his face. “What, Clint?”
He wagged a finger at me. “I know the Dené. I know how they’re built, Edna. His pride’s been hurt real bad, he feels suckered by folks who should love him, always said they loved him, and he’ll let it crush him. He won’t believe he’s gotta defend himself because he’s innocent. He don’t understand that white folks don’t play by such honorable rules.”
“But he’s a lawyer, Clint. Washington Law School, for God’s sake. He understands American law.”
“In his head, maybe. One part of him. But not in his heart. That’s where the real Noah lives. In his heart he’s an Athabascan.”
“But what can I do?”
“Show him that he has to fight.”
“How?”
“You got a big heart, Edna. Show it to him.”
Chapter Thirteen
Irina Petrievich left a message at reception asking me to join them late that night. “We want to see you.” A glass of sherry and some wild-raspberry strudel, Irina said in her note. “Please. We don’t like leaving you alone at this sad time.”
Paul picked me up at the Nordale and said little on the short ride to the Petrievich home. He sneezed, apologized. He sneezed again. Apologized. He reached into his pocket for a handkerchief. Sonia once mentioned Paul’s history of long, nagging illnesses, in bed for weeks, shivering under blankets, plodding through the horrible winters.
“You have a cold?”
He grumbled. “You noticed?”
“Alaska doesn’t agree with you.”
“Truer words were never spoken, but they have nothing to do with my health. But, yes, our family doctor says I was born to live in the tropics. And the Fates plunked me down in a town where winter never ends and everyone is joyous when the temperature rises to zero.” He shrugged. “I don’t have the robust constitution of my warrior father.”
I looked at his profile. “Do you go hunting in the Arctic with your father?”
He sneezed, apologized. “As a boy, yes. I did. The males in the family have no choice. Bonding, initiation, puberty reached when you shotgun a grizzly to death. I haven’t gone in years. I see no need to freeze in a sagging wilderness cabin or tuck myself into a snow crevasse or skin the hide off a monstrous caribou. Outhouses have little appeal for me. So I stay here and ingest cough medicines.”
“I was surprised at the invitation from your mother.”
He glanced at me. “Why?”
“A time like this. Grieving. A family often wants to be alone at night.”
He stared out the windshield. “My parents are committed to being…civil. The perfect hosts. And you’re famous—here to visit them.”
“No, Paul, I came to visit Fairbanks. Yes, them, too, because I consider them friends, but not…” I stopped.
He sucked in his breath. “I’m sorry. My words make me sound too…unforgiving. It’s a sad house now. I think they don’t want to be alone. They don’t know how to deal with Sonia’s death.”
“And you?”
He looked away. “I keep to myself, Miss Ferber.”
“I must tell you again how sorry I am, Paul.”
He waited a bit. “I know.” A heartbeat. “Me, too.”
“You weren’t close?”
He drew in his breath. “Nobody is close in my family.”
He shot a quick glance at me.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m wondering what you think of me.”
“Is that important?”
“Oddly, yes. I’ve watched you from across a room over the dinner table. You don’t miss a thing. Sharp lady, you are.”
“And what do you think I see?”
He deliberated a second. “Someone who isn’t too happy with the family he was born into.”
“But they’re good people. Hank and Irina.”
“They certainly are. But goodness has nothing to do with happiness. And now that Sonia’s…gone, well, there’s too big a hole in that house.”
“It must be horrible for you to lose your sister like that.”
But Paul stopped talking, hunched over the steering wheel as though unsure where he was going, and, arrived at the home, he rushed me inside, took my parka and scarves and gloves. As Hank and Irina greeted me, he slipped away, headed upstairs. I wondered why Paul still lived at home, a strange residence, given his professed disaffection for his family. He paused on the stairwell, turned, and caught my eye. In that moment I winced because his hasty look was cloudy and troubled.
We sat in the living room, the three of us. Hank was dressed in a suit but with his bolo necktie loosened. He looked tired, beat up, his wrinkles deep, rutted. Irina was in a black evening dress, a little too formal for an evening at home, and she wore a garish rhinestone brooch on the lapel. Her hair was pulled up into a French knot. Not very flattering, because Irina’s small oval face now looked flat. She sat demurely on the sofa, both hands holding a goblet of water so tightly I feared the glass would shatter.
“We just feel so lost, Edna. We sit here and…”
“But,” Hank interrupted, “we thought we’d spend some time with you. Your visit is so short. And this morning I was speaking to Ernest Gruening, who called with his condolences.”
I nodded. “Yes, I got a telegram from him this morning. At the Nordale. Washington is cold, he says, but not from the temperature.”
Irina sighed.
Hank bit his lip. “It’s those damned Southern senators who hate us so fiercely. Strom Thurmond. Filibustering any debate. It has nothing to do with Alaska—they’re just afraid of another vote against segregation. I…” A sheepish smile. “I can’t seem to stop, can I?”
I didn’t want to discuss statehood. Not now…not in this house of unbearable grief. Then why, I asked myself, was I sitting in Fairbanks in March, the end of a brutal winter? I could be in hot Arizona at a spa. Or—or in my toasty Manhattan apartment, sitting by a sputtering radiator as I gazed down into the cold New York streets. Or—a passable Sunday dinner with my lovely nieces at Passy, where the waiters bowed before me.
When I said nothing, Hank looked at Irina, then back at me. “We feel like we owe you an apology.”
Hank’s forefinger kept circling the rim of his whiskey gla
ss. Every so often he took a sip, tentative and unsure, gazed into the glass, as though afraid it was empty. His eyes sought the bottle of whiskey sitting on a sideboard. He seemed to nod at it, an acknowledgment that the bottle hadn’t moved. Slumped in the side chair, he sank into the cushions, his neck tilted to one side.
“I spent a few hours with Noah West.” My words purposely bold, loud.
Irina spoke. “Yes, we heard.” She glanced at Hank, who was frowning. “Dear Noah. You know, we’d hoped that he would be the one for her—to settle her down, you know. A good solid young man, a lawyer. Who cared deeply for her.”
“Not now, Irina,” Hank said.
She faltered. “A part of the…”
“Family,” I finished for her.
“Yes.”
I chose my words carefully. “He’s grieving tonight.”
She watched her husband. “Of course.”
Hank looked away, uncomfortable.
Irina’s eyes got wet. “I saw them married, you know…in my head…lovely…”
I waited a second. “Noah being an Indian didn’t matter?”
Hank looked annoyed and spat out his words. “Of course not.” He stammered, “I—we, that is—wanted him as a son-in-law.”
Irina was nodding furiously.
For a moment he closed his eyes and seemed to relax. When he opened them, he wore a dreamy expression. “Edna, we’ve known Noah since he was a boy. I knew his father. His grandfather is still a friend, the old man up there in his log cabin in Fort Yukon. Noah West was…stable.”
I sipped my wine. “You make it sound like a curse.”
Hank looked over my shoulder. “In Alaska young men drift or wander and disappear. They have mercurial passions; they have pie-in-the-sky dreams. Wanderlust. Days of twenty-two hours of sunshine make them antsy. Months of winter grayness and darkness make them morose. Noah, as I say, was stable. It’s a blessing.”
“And yet you think he’s capable of murdering your daughter.”
My abrupt words stunned them. They shot looks at each other, Irina dropping her eyes into her lap. Hank downed his whiskey. Tasteless, perhaps, my tone, but so be it. Something had to be said.
“Not now, Edna, please.” Irina was trembling.
“I like him.”
“Everyone likes him.”
Grabbing the edge of the table, Irina stood up. Sobbing, she rushed out of the room. I could hear her weeping in the kitchen. Hank watched me carefully, sadness in his eyes.
Hank poured me more wine, refilled his whiskey glass, and then stabbed at the dying fire. He seemed obsessed with the task, meticulous and steady, and watching, I said nothing, stared as he attacked the embers, added new logs, used a bellows. Bent over, face hardened, he looked mesmerized with the brilliant blaze.
For a while we sat there quietly, the two of us, lost in the fire.
There was a knock on the front door, someone was let in, and Clint Bullock’s gravelly voice roared that he was late, sorry. Hank looked back at me. “I asked Clint Bullock to join us. I know you like that old prospector.”
I nodded. Yes, I do.
Divested of parka but still clutching his gloves, Clint walked into the room, mumbling his apologies. “Had to help a man with a dogsled. For the carnival.” He watched Hank resume his seat, and he nodded at me. “How you holding up, Hank?”
Hank smiled. “All right.”
Clint’s chuckle was dry. He scratched his beard. “Well, you ain’t telling me the truth. I’ve knowed you since you was a young boy. Even then your shoulders turned in like a frightened bird when you was troubled.”
Hank was nodding. “Clint, pour yourself a drink.”
The sourdough went to a corner hutch and poured himself a tumbler of whiskey, downed it, refilled his glass. Hank and I watched him, and I caught Hank’s eye—worry there, concern. Clint walked crookedly, as though favoring his left side. Bending, he winced, closed his eyes.
Hank looked distracted as Clint, sitting back, watched him closely, sizing him up. The crusty old pioneer settled in, scratching his beard again—I’d observed that it was a nervous habit of his—and gulping whiskey.
“Heard from Lucky Willis,” Clint began. And in an explanation to me, “Old hunting buddy of ours. Crazy old coot, half Inuit, half Aleut, and hundred percent loner. He spent the winter in a tumbledown shack near the Canadian border. Weather turned real bad, and he got caught out in a snowstorm, lost four or five toes, in fact, dragged hisself to a military base. Just out of the hospital, here in Fairbanks. Funny old fool…wants to go back before someone steals his pelts.” He looked at Hank a long time. “Says to say hello to you.” A pause. “Asked me to tell you how sorry he was about…Sonia.”
“Where did you see him?” Hank asked slowly.
“Drinking at the Mecca. Drunk as a skunk. Taking off his shoes to show folks his bandages. Crazy.”
Hank was nodding. “Damned good guide, I tell you. I saw him face-off a grizzly like he was shooing a house cat.”
Clint chuckled. “The man gotta be a hundred now. He was old when I was setting traplines back on the Brooks Slope back ’round 1910 or so. First time I seen him.”
On and on they talked, the two of them, breezily so, contented, and sitting back, eyes half closed, I enjoyed the lazy reminiscences of the two old men. I marveled at Clint, cleverly working his quiet magic as he refocused a tense and shattered Hank. Both men leaned in, as though over a campfire, swapping anecdotes about the old days. Hank talked of being a young, happy-go-lucky boy, hunting with his father, coming down the Yukon River on a first boat after the spring break-up and being stranded in Fort Yukon. Of hunting lodges, of caribou, of long days munching on stale pilot bread and salmonberries, gnawing on roasted porcupine. He recalled Noah’s grandfather teaching him to make a fire with birch fungus and flint. The time Clint and Hank got stuck on the icy tundra and had to burrow into a snowdrift and cover themselves with spruce branches, huddled together under a lemon-yellow sky so close you could touch it. On and on, rambling, drifting, while I sat and listened.
Something happened to Hank. His body relaxed, his dull eyes brightened, his hands quivered like young birds. I savored the transformation, oddly pleased, for a moment his grief contained. This was a man who’d tackled life head on, adventuresome, fierce, driven, a man happier away from cities and newspapers and money and homes—and even, I supposed, family. The young man, fearless, striking out, headed toward the sun-blazed horizon. The man who once holed up in a shabby cabin deep in the Arctic tundra, buried under caribou hides, lulled by the hooting of the snowy owl and the cawing of the raven as night deepened and there was not loneliness but solitude.
On and on, the two talking, the rich man in the disheveled evening suit, his tie loosened, his speech thick with whiskey; the other, the rugged prospector who never had a dime to throw away.
I thrilled to it, really.
“Edna, I’m sorry. We’re boring you.” From Hank, looking away from Clint.
“On the contrary, Hank. This is why I came to Alaska.”
Clint winked at me. “Hank and I know the real Alaska, Edna.” He breathed in. “There’s an old saying: Once you’ve weathered the Bush, you’ll never be the same.”
“Those were the days.” Hank’s voice got melancholic, breaking at the end. My heart went out to him. “Do you know Robert W. Service, our poet laureate? The first words a child in Alaska learns, you know.” He breathed in. “‘There’s a whisper on the night wind, there’s a star agleam to guide us; and the wind is calling, calling. Let’s go.’” His hands trembled. “‘Let’s go.’”
Clint and I smiled, and Hank bowed.
“‘The wind is calling, calling,’” Clint echoed.
Suddenly Hank closed his eyes, tears seeping out, and the whiskey glass slipped out of his hand.
“Over,” he whispere
d. “Over.”
Chapter Fourteen
While waiting for Clint, I sipped steaming coffee at the Gold Nugget. I stared out the grimy window at the dull façade of the Nordale. The ice fog had passed, replaced by a bone-marrow cold, scattered ice crystals speckling the air. I sat with a paperback—the same Herman Wouk bestseller—but I gazed idly up and down the busy Second Avenue. How could folks live like this? The endless gray of the long, long winter barely mitigated by the fleeting brilliance of a summer of almost perpetual sunlight. Bad for the system. It would wreak havoc with my regimen, my eight hours of sleep (in darkness), followed by a brisk morning walk (in daylight). The way God intended human beings to live. Of course.
I watched the street, expectant. The people striding past seemed robots, numb from the bitter cold. I wondered what these hurrying folks thought of the murder of one of its most visible citizens? Poor Sonia, who’d sailed up and down Second Avenue, hell-bent on her titillating stories for The Gold. A car chugged by, spewing exhaust, pulling in front of the Arcade by the Cottage Café. An Air Force lad, dressed for summer in a skimpy jacket, scurried into a doorway. He threw back his head as he ran, shivering from the cold.
A contradictory town, this Fairbanks, I considered, with decrepit log cabins juxtaposed against towering futuristic skyscrapers, with craggy sourdoughs bumping into high-heeled socialites dining on Polynesian meals at the Tradewinds. Teenagers giggled at the soda fountain counter at the Co-Op Drug Store, while Indians tethered silver-furred malamutes outside the hardware store. A town where folks lined up to see the newest Disney flick at the Lacey Street Movies, and everyone seemed to be young and bustling—vibrant, thrilled. So many pregnant women, proud, happy. A town where there were ten airline offices in a half-block stretch of street. A laundry with the ridiculous blinking neon sign: The Pantorium. Prices for everything were staggering, unbelievable. Bread for a quarter. Outlandish. Bananas a quarter a piece. An emperor’s treasure, coveted. A town in which people paid for everything in shiny silver dollars.