Breakup. Part 11

"We can drive ourselves," Cheryl said, sitting up.

"Right, and have you play b.u.mper cars with Wayne and Kay all the way home," Bernie said. Just because he wasn't pressing charges didn't mean he wasn't thoroughly p.i.s.sed off. "I'd as soon let a drunk out of here with his car keys in hand."

Kate had a fleeting wish that Ben Bingley confined his drinking to the Roadhouse. Bernie was the only bartender she knew who had a real conscience and acted on it. "You know, Cheryl," she couldn't resist saying, even knowing it would do no good, "the Bible says, Love thy neighbor. That's all it says. It doesn't say, Love thy neighbor only if he's a straight white antiabortion meat-eating bom-again right-wing Republican foot-washing Baptist. Love thy neighbor. That's all it says.

You miss that verse, or what?"

"I didn't miss the verse that says even the devil can quote Scripture for his purpose," Cheryl snapped.

Feet wet, her head aching, Kate had to smile. "That's not in the Bible, Cheryl, it's in The Merchant of Venice."

She repaired to the bar, intercepted along the way by Frank Scully, who insisted on grasping her hand and shaking it warmly. "G.o.ddam, if it isn't our trusty Eskimo protector! You do good work, Shugak! Saved all our a.s.ses yet again!"

The only reason he lived to see another dawn was that he was obviously drunk. "I'm not an Eskimo," she snapped, and shouldered him aside.

Bernie poured her a fresh c.o.ke, the Bakers more Glenlivet, Bobby a bourbon and Dinah a gla.s.s of fizzy water with a twist of 110 lime. Steven Seagal was still on the television screen, now getting on a horse in the company of a Chinese actress playing an Eskimo woman, although judging by the thickness of the tree trunks in the background, she should have been a Tlingit or a Haida or maybe even a Tsimshian.

"Can you ride a horse?" asked our hero, and the actress glowed and replied, "Of course! I'm a Native American!" at which point Old Sam Dementieff alarmed all the other old coots at his table by going off into what appeared to be an apoplectic fit. "Horses!" he recovered enough to wheeze. "In Alaska! Yah sure, you betcha! Head 'em up! Move 'em out! Ride 'em cowboy! Yeehaw! Just let me hitch my dogsled up to those oat-burners, yawl!"

"I beg your pardon, but what is all this concerning an access road?" Mr.

Baker said. The weighty and meticulous manner in which he put his words together caused Kate's eyes to narrow in sudden suspicion.

Bernie jerked his head toward the trio in the corner. "Those are the Jeppsens. They homesteaded forty acres on Mad Mountain six years ago."

He jerked his head at the front door through which Wayne and Kay had disappeared, Dandy helping her down the steps and copping a discreet feel while he was at it. "Those are the Kreugers. They got the forty acres next door to the Jeppsens, five years ago."

"Most of the problem," Bobby said, "is that Kay and Wayne have master's degrees and Joe and Cheryl dropped out of high school."

"Yeah," Dinah said, "the Kreugers actually read books, can you imagine?"

"Dreadful," Mrs. Baker said, very much the dowager d.u.c.h.ess.

"Deplorable," Mr. Baker said, eyelids closing and opening again in a long, slow blink, like an owl.

"And of course," Bobby said, "the Jeppsens are your ordinary, everyday born-again Christian fanatics, who think the Bible is the only book necessary. They home-schooled Petey," he added, "so they could keep him away from all those unG.o.dly teachers at Niniltna High."

"And you see how well it took," Bernie pointed out, but then 111 Bernie, the local basketball coach, always resented any reduction in the available talent pool for his team, and Petey was almost five foot ten.

"It used to be funny," Dinah said with a sigh.

"Not anymore," Kate said, rubbing gingerly at the sore spot on her head.

"Absolutely not," Mrs. Baker said, even more stately than before.

"Indutipably-inbutibaply-nope," said Mr. Baker.

Displaying a fine, if fraying sense of discretion for which Kate loved them all dearly, the hippie, the hillbilly and the cheechako let this pa.s.s. "Then winter before last," Dinah said, "Bonnie Jeppsen, Joe's sister, got the postmaster's job instead of Kay."

"The latest installment in the saga," Bobby took up the tale, "is the access road between the two homesteads. The Kreugers are higher up the hill than the Jeppsens, and somehow the Jeppsens got to thinking that the access road crossed their land and the Kreugers ought to hive to go around. But since the Kreugers going around would entail them going across Park land, Dan O'Brian naturally took a somewhat different view of the situation."

"I'll just bet he did," Kate said appreciatively. This part of the story was new to her.

Bernie added, "Of course, mostly they hate each other's guts because the Kreugers grow better tomatoes in their greenhouse than the Jeppsens do."

People in the Alaskan Bush have been shot for refusing offers for Boardwalk. "Breakup," Kate said, as if that explained everything, and perhaps it did.

"Breakup," Bobby repeated, without affection. "What the h.e.l.l is it with breakup? We make it all the way through winter without going totally insane and it's finally spring and we're gaining daylight and the kings will be up the creek any minute and now we got to start shooting at each other?"

"It's because people make it through the winter that they lose it during spring," Kate said.

I'll 112 They looked at her askance. "Sure, Shugak, that makes just a whole bunch of sense," Bobby said, and rolled his eyes.

"Think about it," Kate insisted. "The winter's long and hard and cold and dark, but people can get through it by looking forward to spring-h.e.l.l, sometimes spring is all they've got. It's so cold their water freezes, it's dark most of the day, maybe their spouse is sleeping around, maybe the kids are acting out, maybe they're broke, but they know spring is on its way, so they tough it out through the cold and the dark, knowing better times are coming." She drained her gla.s.s and set it down with a decisive snap. "And then spring comes, and their wives are still s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around on them, and their kids are still s.h.i.ts and they're still broke. It's spring and nothing's changed, and something snaps."

"I would prefer that it did not snap in my vicinity," Bobby said with dignity, "thank you very much."

"Mine either," Bernie agreed.

"Nor nine niether," Mrs. Baker said.

"I'll too on it, pa.s.s," Mr. Baker said.

Dinah looked at the Bakers, a considering expression supplanting the dreamy one in her eye. "You know, Kate, I think you'd best come to dinner, and bring the Bakers with you. Caribou ribs and onions." She looked at Kate and waggled her eyebrows. "And Bobby's lemon meringue pie." She looked back at the Bakers. "And aspirin. And coffee."

Click! went a shutter, and they looked up to find the lady tourist from Pennsylvania and her husband peering at them over the top of their camera. "I hope you don't mind?" she said. "It's just that you all look so-" she hesitated, and then said with a rush, "-so Alaskan."

The two of them beamed.

Mr. Baker belched.

"Come to think of it," Dinah said, "maybe you all should just stay the night."

113.

They reached the turnoff to Bobby and Dinah's, inches from a clean getaway, just as Mandy and Chick came barreling down the road on Chick's four-wheeler.

"Whoop!" said Mr. Baker, and rolled down the window to wave madly at his only child. He would have fallen out if Kate hadn't grabbed his belt and hauled him back in at the same time she jammed on the brakes.

Miraculously, they were still working.

The four-wheeler slid to a halt just off the truck's starboard bow, squaring at the edge of the pickup's headlights like a malignant toad.

It wasn't possible to make out facial expressions in the evening gloom, but Kate received the distinct impression that Chick was forcibly holding Mandy in the driver's seat.

Sitting very erect between Kate and Mr. Baker and always the critic, Mrs. Baker said, "She's supposed to be a musher. Where's 114 her dogs?" Her severity was marred by a loud hiccup, brought on by a particularly large pothole five miles back.

"That's gy mirl!" Mr. Baker whooped exuberantly. He leaned across Mrs.

Baker to inquire of Kate, "Did I you tell what a great musher is she?"

"Yes, you did," Kate said. Not a religious person, she was at this point heard to call on a higher power for a.s.sistance. She wasn't picky, she'd take anything. An earthquake would be good, something somewhere around 6 on the Richter scale, and the sooner the better. Unfortunately, the higher power appeared to have retired for the night. Somebody had to make the first move, so Kate shifted into second and turned to follow the blue Chevy's taillights down the one-lane game trail that pa.s.sed for the access road to Bobby's homestead.

The toad fell in behind her.

The three vehicles rumbled across the plank bridge spanning Squaw Candy Creek and pulled up into a neat row in front of the big A-frame.

Everyone filed inside, and Kate delivered Mr. and Mrs. Baker into the wrathful arms of their child and bent her head against the coming storm.

It was not long in breaking. Mr. and Mrs. Baker sat at the kitchen table, meekly drinking down mugs of hot black coffee, and Chick, Bobby and Dinah hovered around the eye of the hurricane, trying for Kate's sake not to laugh out loud.

"I send them off for a lousy little sight-seeing tour of the Park, and you almost get them eaten by a bear, involved in a plane crash and shot by Cindy Bingley?" Mandy flung out a hand in her parents' direction.

Mrs. Baker gave her a low five, and giggled into her coffee mug when Mandy's head swiveled around to stare incredulously.

Bobby abruptly wheeled his chair in a 180 and made for the console in the center of the room at flank speed. Chick hightailed it after him.

Dinah stayed within earshot, pretending to a.s.semble the ingredients for,dinner. "And then, on top of everything else, 115 you have the gall to take them out to Bernie's and get them stinking drunk?"

"She didn't get us drunk," Mrs. Baker said, sitting up straight in her chair, suddenly very dignified.

"Nah," Mr. Baker said with an expansive wave of his hand, unfortunately the one that held his coffee cup, and launched a spray of hot black liquid across the kitchen floor. "We wanted the trough. She just drink us to the led."

Mrs. Baker thought this so exquisitely amusing that she abandoned any attempt at dignity and positively guffawed. Mr. Baker chose that moment to erupt into poetry, and not just any poetry, either, but Vachel Lindsay going "boomalay boomalay boomalay BOOM!"

There was an outburst of snickering from the console, quickly suppressed. Dinah grabbed a sponge and bent down to mop up the spilled coffee, effectively hiding her face.

Mandy shifted her glare from Kate to Dinah.

"BEAT an empty BARrel with the HANdle of a BROOM!" Mr. Baker surged to his feet. "Be CAREful what you DO," he declaimed, forefinger raised admonishingly, "or Mumbo-JUMBO, G.o.d of the CONGO, Mumbo-JUMBO will HOO-DOO YOU!".

Dinner was served an hour later in an atmosphere redolent of caribou and restrained wrath. Dinah kept up a steady flow of mild gossip concerning various Park rats. Becky Jorgensen had pa.s.sed away quietly in August, never having left the Alaska Psychiatric Inst.i.tute where she had been resident since Roger McAniff had killed her husband and eight others in a one-day ma.s.sacre two years before. Breakups really were better-than-average hard on the Alaskan Bush, they all agreed. After his fifth bad fishing season in Prince William Sound following the RPetCo Anchorage spill, Ethan Int-Hout, Abel's second son, was thinking of moving his family from Cordova back to his father's homestead and opening 116 a bed-and-breakfast for fly-in customers. This naturally led to a debate on the merits and demerits of finishing the road from Ahtna to Cordova, a road in construction limbo since the Alaska Earthquake of 1964, which 9.2-on-the-Richter-scale event had taken out an essential bridge across the Kanuyaq River fifty miles north of Cordova. Kate, appalled at the thought of a paved, maintained road connected to the Richardson Highway pa.s.sing within three quarters of a mile of her homestead, was adamantly against. Jack Morgan, she remembered, delighted at the thought of a paved, maintained road connected to the Richardson Highway pa.s.sing within three quarters of a mile of her homestead, was as adamantly for. Bobby pointed out that with the Prudhoe Bay oil field in decline and salmon stocks around the state in chaos, tourism was a lucrative, low-impact industry that ought to be given its chance.

"Low-impact?" Kate said, bristling.

Dinah hastily changed the subject, reporting that probate had finally gone through on the Gette homestead and a distant cousin from Plainville, Illinois, had inherited. No news yet on what he was going to do with it. There was yet another rumor that the Fish and Game, bowing to pressure from sports-fishing interests, was going to limit the red catch on the Kanuyaq, a potential disaster for the many subsistence families with fish camps along its banks. Rumor also had it that the Fish and Game was thinking of limiting the commercial catch at the mouth of the Kanuyaq as well. These two rumors had given rise to a third, that subsistence as well as commercial fishermen were arming for Armageddon, so that the fish hawks in the area were prudently avoiding any low flyovers.

Conversation inevitably came around to the morning's bear attack. "Guy was lucky," Bobby said. "Bear could have taken him out, too. You figure he ran?"

"Wouldn't you?" Kate shot a glance across the table at Mr. and Mrs.

Baker. Food, drink and the acc.u.mulated events of the day had rendered them oblivious. They sat unheeding, shoulders slumped, eyelids at half-mast, dozing with their heads propped in their hands.

117 "Weird situation," Bobby said, ignoring the Bakers' potentially delicate sensibilities.

"Why weird?"

"Why didn't they have a gun? It's spring, for crissake, the bears are up, everybody knows that."

Kate licked her fork and put it down. "Bobby, how often have we had this conversation? Every time some transcendentalist type reads too much Rousseau and hikes out into the wilderness to become the neo-n.o.ble savage and starves to death, you get up in arms. Carol Stewart was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It isn't a pleasant way to die, certainly. But it isn't all that uncommon, either. There are a lot of bears in Alaska, and occasionally one eats somebody, usually somebody who has broken the rules of human-ursine cohabitation. And therefore,"

she added, "somebody whose loss can only benefit the gene pool. People are dumb, is all, even the experienced ones. Maybe especially the experienced ones." The memory of her own close encounter by the creek the day before lent an extra fervor to her words, and made Bobby give her a curious look. "What was it somebody said, you can't go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people?"

"Human-ursine cohabitation?" Bobby said.

"So I have a vocabulary," Kate said. "Sue me."

After dinner Chick pretended an injury to the four-wheeler that needed immediate attention requiring a.s.sistance and dragged Mandy outside.

Since Mr. and Mrs. Baker had pa.s.sed out end to end on the long couch, oblivious of any future malign influence Kate might exert, she went.

Bobby kicked back in front of his ham radio, shooting the breeze with King Hussein of Jordan, a regular correspondent and another avid ham.

He looked sublimely at home, and he should have, because he'd built the house to order when he came into the Park the same year as Dan O'Brian.

It was one big square room without any dividing walls or doors, except to the bathroom, and no rugs, to accommodate his chair. The center was taken up by a pillar of electronic equipment reaching high into the peaked roof. A table buried in 118 more electronic equipment encircled the pillar, from which Bobby talked to ham radio operators from all over the globe, took Park weather readings for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and broadcast his pirate radio station whenever he was in the mood. The rest of the house was arranged around the pillar; a king-size bed in the northwest corner, the kitchen in the northeast corner, the bathroom between. The living area of the house took up the south side east to west, a sprawling expanse featuring two armchairs and a ten-foot couch placed strategically in front of a huge stone fireplace flanked by triple-glazed picture windows framing a picture-postcard view, Squaw Candy Creek in the foreground and the Quilak Mountains in the background.

As Kate and Dinah were clearing the table, a third voice interrupted Bobby's conversation with the ruler of the sovereign state of Jordan.

Bobby listened, replied and said, "Gotta go, King, I got visitors. Been nice talking to you."

King Hussein's deep, precise voice gave a courteous signoff. The interrupt was KL7CC in Anchorage, with a telephone patch from Jack Morgan. "Well, hey, Jack. How are you?"

In Anchorage, Jack leaned back and propped his feet on a thick pile of case files, a broad grin spreading across his face. Bobby's voice wouldn't have sounded like that if Kate had been hurt. "Well, hey, Bobby, how you doing?"

"I'm fine, but Kate's looking a little flattened around the edges."

There was a brief, startled silence and Bobby said quickly, "Just kidding, Jack. I guess you heard about the jet engine falling on her homestead?"

The relief in Jack's voice was palpable. "Bill did, on the radio five minutes ago. I've been stuck in the office all day, I didn't know anything about it." A note of humor crept into the deep drawl. "They said which park and they said the homestead belonged to someone named Shaktoolik, so I figured it could only be Kate. You sure she's okay?"

"Absolutely, but I'll let her tell you that herself."

119 "Hey, Jack," said Kate, who had drifted irresistibly into range of the mike. "I'm okay."

"I'm awful G.o.ddam glad to hear it, Shaktoolik. Bill says they're saying that engine weighed about eight thousand pounds."

"It used to. It weighs about ten pounds now. Per piece."

A chuckle. "So Chicken Little was right. Mutt okay? The homestead?"

In Niniltna, Kate, well aware of listening ears tuned in from Chickaloon to Chistochina, replied, "Mutt's fine, the homestead's fine and other than being sick of hearing about Chicken Little, I am too."

"I'd like to see that for myself."

"Strap on the Cessna and come ahead on up."

"Soon's I get the chance, I'll take you up on that invitation."