Upon This Rock

by David Marusek

  “Ed!” Ginny yelled. “Did you hear me?” She slurred a little, though Poppy didn’t see any obvious booze within her reach. Maybe it was the paint thinner fumes. He felt light-headed himself.

  Ed smiled at Poppy and said, “Heading to Anchorage, Prophecy?”

  Poppy couldn’t imagine why he would ask him that. “No, we’re in till Thirdmonth. Unless . . . are you telling me the road is open?”

  “DOT is plowing tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “The Caldecott Lodge is reopening.”

  “In the winter? That’s crazy.”

  “That’s what I said, but Jack Colburn in Chitina told me so himself. They’re planning to keep it open at least through the new year. It’s part of some tourism study on the Northern Lights. So, I ask again, is there a bonus trip to Anchorage in the cards?”

  It was a thinker. Money in the bank and no time like the present to spend it.

  “Maybe. Why?”

  Ed used a palette knife to point to a stack of cartons leaning against the log wall. The one drawback about cottage industry goldpans was their shipping weight. Ed and Ginny couldn’t afford to buy blank pans or ship finished ones via the mail plane.

  Ed said, “I need someone to drop those off in Spenard and pick up an order from Blaines.” He offered Poppy a handwritten list of art supplies. “I already phoned it in, so it should be waiting for you to pick up.”

  Poppy didn’t accept the list. “If I decide to go,” he said, “the boys will come fetch your pans and your list.”

  Behind him, Ginny said, “How’s Mama P? Any better?”

  “Any better than what?” Poppy asked, turning to her.

  “Is she talking?”

  “Yes, ma’am. She’s talking to the Savior and the saints.”

  “Tell her we’re all praying for her.”

  Trash Run

  TR1 1.0

  WHAT KIND OF ASSHOLE, Jace Kuliak asked the rushing wind, names his daughter Deuteronomy? A girl so lovely it was hard to breathe. There wasn’t even any reasonable way to shorten her name: Deuter? Deutie? Dee Dee? People in town referred to her as Deut. Rhymes with Toot, they all said like it was their original joke. They insisted that that was what her own family called her. It was parental abuse was what it was. Seriously, people, give your children normal names.

  But the really weird thing was that people in town knew about this Prophecy girl two years before Jace did. How was that possible? He’d interacted with the family on several notable occasions and never laid eyes on her. If he had, he’d remember. She was that striking. You couldn’t forget her in a million years.

  Of course, at the time he’d been preoccupied with a French girl.

  Well, forget the French girl. Forget the seasonal workers. Forget those girls in L.A. Forget Marcie from high school. Forget them all. No girl he’d ever known meant more to him than Deuteronomy Prophecy, dumb name and all.

  After checking out the rogue cabin at Trapper’s Slough, Jace embarked on his main mission of the day, the trash run. He tore up the Chitina River on the new Tundra snowmobile, leaving the scattered homesteads and mining claims and every trace of civilization in his wake.

  Though the valley at that point was twenty miles wide (32 km), snowy mountain massifs on both sides made it feel closed in, like a canyon. If Jace continued another sixty miles east (97 km), he’d cross the Canadian border into the Kluane National Park of the Yukon. The two North American neighbors had stacked their grandest national parks up against each other at their common border, creating a combined 28,500 square miles of wilderness (74,000 sq. km), much of it permanently buried under sheets of ice. Jace was about as deep into the backcountry as a backcountry ranger could get.

  Not deep enough to escape litter, however. In this case, it was a century’s worth of climbing expedition trash.

  With nine of the highest sixteen peaks in the U.S. located within its borders, the park (and the territory that preceded it) was a long-time favorite destination for serious mountain climbers from around the world. Current expeditions observed strict park pollution regulations: everything climbers brought in, they brought out again when they left. It wasn’t always so. For generations, the standard expedition practice was to abandon whole camps in place as the climbers finished using them. They left tons and tons of airdropped equipment and supplies behind without a backward glance.

  No worries. By the next climbing season, the old camp would be buried under ten feet of new snow, and a brand new base camp could take shape on virgin terrain.

  And that was how the trash might have remained forever, hidden under strata of compressed snow and ice, if global warming hadn’t happened. Now, many Alaska glaciers were rapidly melting, and each year a new crop of old junk sprouted from the ice like spring crocuses.

  Last summer, park officials assigned Jace to a team of backcountry rangers and the park archeologist to begin remediation work on Cadigan Glacier.

  Cadigan Glacier had been the site of a succession of base camps ever since the first ascent of College Peak in 1935 by the ill-fated Moore Hall Expedition. College Peak, at 14,470 ft. (4,410 m), was among the fifty highest peaks in the U.S., but it was the runt of the litter of local mountains. Its immediate neighbor, Mount Bona, at 16,421 ft. (5,005 m), ranked as the fifth highest independent peak in the United States. Yet for all its grandeur, Bona was an easy climb, a mere Alaska Grade 2, literally a walk in the park. By contrast, runty College Peak offered mountaineers a real challenge, an Alaska Grade 5, a highly technical, potentially dangerous climb. Thus it remained popular.

  A helicopter dropped Jace’s remediation team on Cadigan Glacier in June. Over the next few days they collected and divided climbing debris into three categories. First were objects in good enough shape and with enough historical value to be salvaged as cultural artifacts. These items they removed by air. Included were museum-grade examples of 1940s-era felt boots and wooden skis, custom-made ice axes and snow shovels, glass thermoses and rawhide snowshoes.

  In the second category were objects that were too broken or worn out to be of any practical or cultural value and were constructed from decomposable material like wood, wool, or iron. These they left on the glacier to molder or rust away on their own.

  Finally, there were objects deemed to be without any value whatsoever that were made from non-decomposable materials like plastic, glass, or fiberglass such as tarps, food wrappers, drink pouches, and broken ski poles. These they bundled up for winter disposal by snowmobile.

  OF COURSE THEY had no future together, even if he figured out how to get past her homicidal father and brothers to ask her out. A romance was hard enough to pull off without all the loaded guns. And what about their kids, if they decided to have kids one day? Would Deut insist their kids be brought up crazy?

  Kids. Jace caught himself thinking about kids again. It was happening more often lately, even before Deut had shown up. The French girl had had a kid, a son. Jace had never met him, but he was the reason Danielle was in Anchorage in the first place. She and the kid lived in a Paris suburb for most of the year, but her ex in Toulouse had custody of him for nine weeks each summer, and Danielle just found it easier to cope with her loss by leaving France altogether during that time.

  Danielle spent the summer of 2009 working for a wine wholesaler who staged wine-tasting events for restaurants and liquor distributors in cities across the U.S. Meanwhile, Jace was in Anchorage attending a public hearing of the citizens’ advisory commission on federal areas at the Captain Cook Hotel. After a program break, he blundered into the wrong ballroom. Winery reps from Europe, California, Australia, and Argentina were set up at tables along the walls. He saw her from across the room pouring glasses of Chardonnay for a knot of men in jackets and ties. Jace stood out in this crowd with his NPS ranger uniform. He wasn’t fond of wine, but he decided he’d like to try a glass of Chardonnay. He lingered at her table, and they seemed to hit it off. Her accent floored him, and her legs made him weak. But sh
e was on the clock, and he was wearing the wrong kind of name badge, and eventually a suit politely asked him pay the $50.00 guest fee or leave.

  They met up later, and he took her to dinner at the only blues club in Alaska, and a darned good club at that, even by Danielle’s refined standards. When they left Blues Central, well after 10:00 p.m., she seemed disturbed that it was still as light as day out. She invited him up to her hotel room. She was on the tenth floor with a room overlooking Cook Inlet. She quickly shut the blinds on the panoramic view and asked him to leave them shut. He said he would. In hindsight, that should have been a clue.

  From the moment Danielle invited him to her room to the moment he unhooked her bra, Jace was nervous about measuring up to her sophisticated European sexual expectations. He was a meat and potatoes kind of lover. Just the basics, ma’am. Nothing too spicy or weird, thank you. But he needn’t have worried; things went smoothly, and he only stumbled once, during the big reveal when her silken panties came off for the first time and she had no snatch. No, she had a snatch, only it was a completely hairless one. He’d seen plenty of bikini waxes and fancifully trimmed carpets, but nothing like this, and at first he thought there was something wrong with her, a missing gene for pubic hair or something. (He’d never heard of manscaping either.)

  Fortunately, his cock wasn’t confused, and he soldiered on and did his best. Also fortunately, she’d gone a long time without getting any, so meat and potatoes were fine by her, as long as the portions were generous. And they were.

  Afterward, they lay in each others’ arms and talked through the night. Under all the perfume and makeup, silk and nylon, and notwithstanding the nude pubes, Danielle proved to be an ordinary, lonely, single mom just trying to make her way in an uncaring world. She showed him snapshots of her little man on her phone. Jace, in turn, entertained her with tall tales about Alaska, of which she’d only seen the airport and hotel. Was she aware that Alaska was as big as the entire European Union? That the national park where he worked was the size of Switzerland and could boast having taller mountains, wilder rivers, longer glaciers, and richer oxygen?

  “Some days I see more bears than I do people,” he bragged.

  “Bears?”

  “Yes, grizzly bears! Black bears! Polar bears! It helps that I’m a man. The scent of a woman’s blood can drive a bear mad. Hell, bears will chase the scent of perfume and shampoo, even deodorant.” He kissed her bare breast and inhaled deeply the fragrance of her flesh. “A bear would eat you up.”

  Her eyes grew so wide with alarm that Jace kicked himself. Why was he talking so boneheaded stupid? He changed the topic to moose, how docile they were, and dumb, and how cute their babies.

  And then, out of the blue, he invited her to visit him sometime at his little “chalet in the park.”

  The next day they slept in, ordered room service, and screwed leisurely until it was time for her to catch a plane. They exchanged addies, but he didn’t expect to hear from her again.

  TR2 1.0

  JACE KULIAK’S HOUSE in McHardy wasn’t exactly a “chalet.” More like a Cape Cod style house that was constructed in a boomtown minute from green lumber in 1910.

  About a year before meeting the French girl, Jace was at Mail Day when he overheard a couple of locals talking about Orion Beehymer’s great grandnephew’s car accident. Beehymer was the area’s eldest old-timer. He had come to McHardy in the 1960s. His great grandnephew, who lived down in Oregon, had been texting while driving and had caused a serious traffic accident.

  Beehymer volunteered to cover the boy’s attorney fees and needed to sell off a town lot or two in a hurry to pay them. He’d been buying up the McHardy Monopoly board since 1971, and he owned more townsite lots than anyone else.

  An impending land sale qualified as headline news in McHardy. Small subdivision lots inside the national park were rare enough, but McHardy townsite lots never came on the market. Jace knew what he had to do with this intel — inform his boss, the park superintendent. Despite ANILCA, the park’s longterm bias was to extinguish private inholdings whenever possible. But because of the recession and budgetary constraints, the park would be unable to take advantage of the Beehymer family’s bad luck in Oregon.

  Not that Beehymer would have sold land to the park service in any case.

  A couple of days later, Jace happened to run into the elderly land baron in person on the narrow footbridge across the Caldecott River. “Heard you’re selling town lots,” he said to him.

  “Just the one lot, ranger.”

  “How much you asking?”

  “How is that any of the park’s business?”

  “I don’t suppose it is. I’m just curious, you know, as a private citizen, not as a park employee.”

  Beehymer looked him over. Apparently, all he’d seen of Jace before they spoke was his uniform. “I never heard of a flat hat with a pony tail. Just what kind of parkie are you anyway?”

  “A backcountry ranger. We grow beards too. And yodel.”

  Beehymer studied him again, this time with a calculating squint. “Forget it. I’d never sell to the likes of you — whatever the likes of you are.”

  “I don’t blame you, but I’m not in the market anyway. I was just curious how much a lot goes for in McHardy these days.”

  “It’s a lot with a house on it.”

  “Really? It’s got a house on it?”

  “That’s what I just said. And two sheds and a functioning well. The only functioning well on that whole block.”

  “So, how much you asking?”

  “Fifty-six thousand US dollars, with owner financing.”

  Jace didn’t have a handle on real estate values, but it seemed to him you couldn’t buy a house anywhere for that little money, let alone a house inside the largest national park in the country. A mob of possibilities crowded his mind.

  Like most of the other male rangers at Caldecott, Jace lived in the men’s bunkhouse and shared sleeping quarters with five other park and concessionaire employees. This total lack of privacy had put a major crimp on his love life. This was because a national park in Alaska in the summer was an incredibly girl-rich environment. Besides the steady stream of exotic foreign girls visiting from every corner of the globe, there were the seasonal workers, including his female colleagues in grey and green. More than two hundred seasonal workers, at least half of them college girls, came up to McHardy and Caldecott each summer to bus the tables, serve the ice cream, interpret the Nature, drive the vans, row the white waters, and lead the glacier hikes. And on the mind of every college girl embarking on her Alaska adventure was the possibility of a summer romance with a tall, strapping, handsome, tree-hugging, 420-friendly, educated, gentle but firm and studly park ranger in his faux-military-style NPS uniform.

  At least that was Jace’s observation. The problem was finding a little love nest under the Midnight Sun to call his own. A house, his own house in the ghost town of McHardy, would solve that problem big time.

  “Fifty-six thou?” Jace said, turning numbers in his head. “Sounds reasonable. So, what’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothin’s wrong with it.”

  “Then how come nobody’s bought it yet? There are plenty of folks wanting to buy town lots, I hear.”

  “Because nobody came up with the down payment yet.”

  “Oh, yeah? How much is the down payment?”

  “Fifty-six thousand US dollars.”

  Jace laughed. “That’s some owner financing you got there!”

  “You can take it or leave it, ranger. Now, I answered your questions. Am I free to go, or are you detaining me?”

  “Show it to me.”

  “You said you’re not in the market. Don’t waste my time.”

  “I might be in the market after all.”

  “You might be, but you’d still be a ranger.”

  “Listen, Mr. Beehymer. I get it. You’re not a fan of the park service. I’m used to that. But I’m a private citizen too, and a man, a
nd it’s my opinion that a man would have to be totally insane not to want to own a little piece of this.” He waved his arms all around to take in the glacier, the volcano, the former copper mine, Larkspur Peak, Stubborn Mountain, the birds in the sky, the torrent of water under their feet, the billowing road dust, the mosquitos, the fresh odor of earth sprouting new life everywhere you looked.

  Orion Beehymer stared at him.

  LUCKY STRIKE LANE was located off Main Street on the south side of town. It was unpaved dirt and ended in a cul-de-sac at the McHardy Creek Trail trailhead. The house stood halfway up the block, and to get to it they passed other houses that were either boarded up, falling down, or abandoned altogether. Some had rusted-out old pickup trucks parked on rotting tires in the street out front.

  Jace snorted when he first saw the house Beehymer was offering for sale. The exterior siding was falling off, exposing black tarpaper walls. Portions of the roof were covered with tattered blue tarps. What windows there were were broken. Fireweed and horsetails had conquered the yard. And one of the advertised amenities, one of two outbuildings, was a flattened pile of splintered rubble. Beehymer stood in front of the expired shed with an expression of befuddlement. When had this happened?

  The front door of the house was unlocked, but Beehymer couldn’t force it open more than a few inches. “Frost heave,” he said by way of explanation. “Let’s go ’round back.”

  They entered the house through the back door, and the horror show continued. The hardwood floors were so warped it would take a Mars Rover to navigate them. Paint flakes cascaded from the walls like dandruff. The ceilings all bowed in on their centers, evidence of a leaky roof. The living room ceiling sagged so much that Jace was afraid to enter in case it collapsed on him. Animal scat and not a few tiny, desiccated rodent bodies lay everywhere. The entire bedroom was full of spruce cones, the work of a hyper-enterprising squirrel. The house’s only heating source was an ancient Preway oil-drip stove. No telling if it was still operational. The walls were originally wired for electricity, but the town’s power plant had gone dark in 1938. And the odor! There was mold somewhere and plenty of it.