Breakup. Part 4

"Oh, all right, they're driving me nuts, too. Just get them out of my house for a little while, please?"

43 "How long have they been here?" Kate demanded.

"Thirty-eight hours," Mandy said. She checked her watch. "And forty minutes."

"Not even two days?" In spite of herself, Kate's shoulders shook.

"Jesus, Mandy, get a grip." She waved a hand toward the window.

"Besides, what used to be my transportation is buried beneath four tons of sc.r.a.p metal. And it's breakup, I've got a thousand things to do."

"Like what?"

"Like finish my income taxes."

Momentarily diverted, Mandy said, "You left it to the last minute again this year?"

Kate bristled. "You got a problem with that?"

"No, it's just that last year you swore-" At Kate's expression Mandy floundered. "It's just that you're usually such a planner, Shugak, I'd think-" She looked at Kate again and steered the conversation back to where she wanted it in the first place. "You can use my truck to ferry them up to the mine, and drop me off at my trailhead on the way."

Kate's expression did not noticeably soften, and Mandy dropped her voice a persuasive octave. "Look, if you could just show them around the place, tell them some of the good old stories. Shove them off the edge of the glacier. Just kidding," she added quickly when Kate's brows rose.

"Ha. Ha ha ha. Seriously, Kate. If you could just get them off our backs for three or four hours, I'd sacrifice a goat in your honor. Please, Kate."

Kate put her hands on her hips and demanded, "Did you hear a word I said?"

Mandy glanced over at her parents and lowered her voice further to a whisper, as if she thought that if she did her parents couldn't hear every word she said in a twenty-five-foot-square cabin. "They actually think I'm going to come home. Can you believe it? It's like they're deaf, Kate! When am I coming home, Amanda dear, Dad says, and I say, I am home, Dad. Next fall, perhaps? he says, and I say, I am home, Dad.

There's this man at home, Amanda 44 dear, Mother says, he's a Cabot and so suitable, and I say, I'm not getting married, Mother, and I'm sure as h.e.l.l not coming home to get married, and Mother says, He's so charming, Amanda dear, you'll adore him. You'd think I was some kind of witless little deb, fresh from her coming-out party!"

Her voice, having risen over the last words, stopped abruptly as Mandy waged an obvious battle for self-control. Kate looked at her, at the weathered skin that made her look older than Kate, though she was two years younger, at the neatly trimmed cap of thick brown hair, the deeply set gray eyes surrounded by wrinkles that came from years of squinting into an Arctic sun from the back of a dopsled She was mostly muscle and bone, and she was dressed in a fashion to wring her mother's heart, or much as Kate was, in plaid flannel shirt, jeans and tennis shoes. She didn't look much like a Boston Brahmin debutante, and in fact she wasn't one, but only because she had made her escape the instant she was of legal age.

Mandy had been born in Hyannis, Ma.s.sachusetts, on Valentine's Day thirty-two years before. The day after her birth her father, a banker who inherited one fortune from a Carnegie forebear and made a second lending overpriced money to Israel and Argentina, put her name down for Va.s.sar, eighteen years hence. That same day her mother, a great-niece of Henry Cabot Lodge, began making plans for her daughter's coming-out party, also eighteen years hence. The interim was taken up with piano and ballroom dance and French lessons, instruction at a private, exclusive girls' school and private, exclusive parties given in private, exclusive homes to which children of only the most private, exclusive families were invited.

Somewhere along the line the Bakers must have slipped up in their indoctrination. No one knew it better than Mandy, who during childhood and adolescence was able to conceal her deplorable preference for . .

Bean over Halston (who had been dressing Mrs. Baker since her coming out), Robert Service over Robert Lowell (a second cousin once removed) and hiking the Appalachian Trail over sailing off Cape Cod (Mr. Baker maintained a 45 sloop in Newport), but the day she turned twenty-one and came into her trust fund she came out of the closet. "I'm moving to Alaska," she announced at breakfast.

Their maid Carlotta nearly dropped the bowl of muesli she was handing around.

Her father laughed comfortably from behind his paper. "Don't be silly, Amanda dear, you're graduating from Va.s.sar next year."

"I'm moving to Alaska instead," she said, and her mother said, "What do you think of this shade of taffeta for your ball gown, Amanda dear? Too pink?"

"I don't know and I don't care, Mother," Mandy said. "I won't be wearing it. I'll be in Alaska."

"It is too pink," her mother decided. "I'll have to ask Roy for more swatches."

"Whatever, Mother, but you'd better get it sized to fit you, because I'll be in Alaska when they strike up the first waltz."

Carlotta, who had been with them since before Mandy was born and who at that point knew her rather better than her parents did, burst into tears, threw her ap.r.o.n over her head and ran from the room. Mandy went upstairs to pack.

They trailed after her all the way to Logan International Airport, she in a Yellow Cab and they in the Bentley, driven by Carlotta's husband, Alfonso (a Bentley because Mrs. Baker said that Rolls-Royces were getting positively common when bourgeois entrepreneurs like Donald Trump drove around in one). They protested her decision in louder and louder voices right up to the time the hatch on the jet shut in their faces.

Mandy changed planes in Seattle and arrived in Anchorage on a cold, snowy day in March. She transferred her trust fund to an account at a local bank, found a real estate agent with a pilot's license and began flying into remote properties in the Bush. It took her two months to find exactly what she wanted. When she did find it, an abandoned lodge on Silver Bottom Creek and 130 acres, she bought it, along with three nearly feral dogs, without haggling. She knew from the real estate agent's face that she'd overpaid. "I 46 don't care," she told Kate. "At least for the first time in my life that d.a.m.n trust fund is being used for something besides bachelor bait."

It took her the whole first summer just to clean up the mess the previous owners had left and take inventory, her first winter included a record snowfall that caved in a corner of the roof, and she learned the hard way how not to attract the attention of hungry grizzlies. But she did survive, which was more than most wannabe frontiersmen could say.

And out in the Great Alone, with a silence she almost could hear, she was truly and deeply content for the first time in her life.

The following year, attending the World Championship Sled Dog Races during Anchorage's Fur Rendezvous, she met Chick Noyukpuk, also known as the Billiken Bullet, a two-time world champion dogsled racer and part-time drunk. The attraction was instantaneous and mutual, and she brought him back to the homestead with her. When he'd sobered up he made friends with her huskies, half-wild half-wolf creatures that slunk around the lodge and would approach close enough to s.n.a.t.c.h food from her hand and no closer. Two were females and came into heat almost immediately, followed by two litters, one of five and the other of seven. Chick had them in traces before they were three months old. He found an old sled in the pile of debris behind the cabin, mended it and hitched up the team. Mandy, skinning her first beaver in the front yard, paused to watch them parade back and forth, the short, stocky man with the black hair and the big grin kicking off behind a tiny forest of dangling tongues and plumed tails. "Hey," she said finally, laying down her knife. "Let me try that."

Eventually she became the fourth woman to win the Iditarod and the third to win the Yukon Quest. They traded off the team, Chick racing the dogs one year, she the next, and the newspapers started calling her the Brahmin Bullet. When they weren't racing they came home and oversaw their breeding and training program, trapped mink and beaver, hunted moose, caribou and black-tailed deer, dip-netted salmon out of the creek and did a little desultory 47 gold panning, more out of the wish to maintain an Alaskan tradition than out of any real desire to strike it rich. It was a good life. She didn't ask for more.

Except, perhaps, Kate thought, to be left alone by her parents, and for perhaps the first time in her life realized that being the only child of deceased parents wasn't necessarily all bad. "Look, Mandy, make Chick give your parents the tour. He's mushed over every inch of the Park, he probably knows it better than I do."

"Kate," Mandy hissed, desperate now, "these are people whose closest approach to a Native American has been a benefit revival of Nanook of the North at the Boston Museum of Art. Mother asked Chick if he did rain dances."

"What did Chick say?" Kate couldn't resist asking.

"Only if there was a forest fire that needed putting out. It's not funny, Kate!"

Kate, choking, whispered back, "Mandy, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm an Aleut. What makes you think they'll take to me any better than they did (?hick?"

"You haven't had carnal knowledge of their one and only daughter," Mandy said grimly. She brightened at a new thought. "I'll pay you."

"Good," Kate said, surrendering with a sigh to the unconcealed panic in her friend's eyes. "Now we're getting somewhere."

"How much?"

"One million dollars."

"It's yours."

Kate laughed. "Or alternatively, the loan of your truck for a supply run into Ahtna."

"You can have the million," Mandy said earnestly, "just as soon as they die and I inherit."

She didn't add, The sooner the better, but they both thought it. "I'll settle for the loan of the truck," Kate said dryly. "I'll need it anyway if I'm going to ferry your parents around."

"It's yours," Mandy said, holding up both hands flat out. A 48 done deal. "You can have it. I'll buy another. No problem. My dividends are up this year from last." Obviously afraid Kate would change her mind, Mandy dug in her pocket and handed over the keys forthwith.

Accepting them, Kate wondered if the IRS would call this exchange barter and subject to tax.

49.

An hour later, she was wondering if there was any insanity in her family.

To the barely concealed relief of her two guests, Mutt remained behind to keep the fear of G.o.d in the go team. Mandy had been dropped off at the top of the trail leading to her lodge, and Kate had driven the twenty-five miles of ice, slush, pothole, washboard and washout to Niniltna in a loquacious babble of information about Alaska in general, the Park in particular, and the Kanuyaq Copper Mine's life and death.

There followed a complete history of the building of the Kanuyaq River and Northwestern Railroad, beginning in 1900 with the probably apocryphal story of two old Ninety-niners prospecting for gold with a couple of hungry pack mules. Casting about for graze, they looked up and saw a green mountain, only to find upon arrival 50 that the mountain was not covered with gra.s.s, it was made of copper.

They carried the news Outside, and a couple of the robber barons of the time, Carnegie and Mellon, or maybe it was John Jacob Astor, Kate couldn't remember and by this time didn't much care- "Guggenheim and Morgan," Mr. Baker said.

Startled, Kate looked over at him, and then had to grab the steering wheel with both hands when the right front tire lurched into a pothole and Mandy's brand-new, bright red, four-wheel- drive Ford Ranger XL long-bed Supercab bottomed out. When they regained the horizontal-was the play in the steering wheel just a trifle looser than before?-Mr.

Baker said, almost apologetically, "The Guggenheims are cousins."

"Oh."

"Distant cousins," Mrs. Baker added in austere reproof, and Kate wondered how the Guggenheims had managed to offend Mrs. Baker's delicate sensibilities. In the end, she decided that Mrs. Baker's beef probably had more to do with money than s.e.x; maybe the Guggenheims had rooked the Bakers on a deal that rooked the shareholders even more. It had to be one or the other; in Kate's experience, s.e.x and money were the prime motivating factors in every human quarrel. Look at G.o.d's fight with Adam and Eve, and that was probably over s.e.x only because money hadn't been invented yet.

Or maybe it was just that she had s.e.x on the brain this spring. She brought herself firmly back into the present and her tour guide duties.

Guggenheim and Morgan, then, purchased leases from the federal government, as Alaska was at that time a territory, finished the railroad from Kanuyaq (kanuyaq was Aleut for copper) to Cordova by 1911 and ran raw copper ore down it for twenty- seven years. The ore played out at about the same time the price of copper went into the toilet, and it was abandoned in 1938, except by Park rats searching for useful fixtures such as stoves, iceboxes and toilets, and by the ever heavy hand of time.

Kate's voice, a broken husk of sound to begin with as a result 51 of the scar that nearly bisected her throat, a reminder of her former job in the investigator's office of the Anchorage DA, was just about gone. Mr. and Mrs. Baker had noticed the scar and ignored it, thereby demonstrating how very well they had been brought up. They were a polite and attentive audience, she'd grant them that. Still, the journey seemed interminable. They pa.s.sed Niniltna without stopping, Kate thinking that Auntie Vi would be good for cocoa and fry bread on the way back and that her pa.s.sengers would need it then more than they did now. There were only a few homesteads and a few lone cabins on the road between the village and the mine, and the surface had deteriorated conspicuously because of the lack of traffic to pound it into some semblance of shape.

Mandy's pickup bounced and jounced from pothole to pothole, so that riding inside the cab was like riding inside a washing machine on the heavy-duty cycle. Mr. and Mrs. Baker attached hands like limpets to the dash and hung on for dear life.

It didn't help when Kate jammed on the brakes and no one was wearing a seat belt.

"What-" Mr. Baker started to say.

There was an audible gasp from Mrs. Baker, and Mr. Baker looked around to see a grizzly explode out of the brush onto the road, catch sight of the big red truck, apply its own brakes by application of hindquarters to the surface and slide to a halt six inches off the front b.u.mper.

"Big one," Kate observed, trying to sound a little bored and succeeding, she was pleased to note, fairly well.

Mr. Baker swallowed audibly. Mrs. Baker might have whimpered. Neither was in any state of mind to hear the breathless quality in their fearless guide's voice. A casual glance over her shoulder rea.s.sured Kate that Mandy's .30-06 was hanging on the gun rack in the back window as usual. Good to know.

The bear was a female in the prime of life, with a thick, glossy brown coat, loose around her body after her winter nap. In the very short s.p.a.ce of time granted for reflection, Kate estimated the bear's weight at approximately seven hundred pounds.

52 Picking herself up briskly out of a puddle of slush, the bear let forth a roar of outrage, lowered her head and charged with a force and speed unpleasantly reminiscent to Kate of the previous morning. All seven hundred pounds. .h.i.t hard. A high-pitched scream sounded from Mrs.

Baker. "Oh my G.o.d!" cried Mr. Baker, and a grim Kate, who had automatically thrown out the clutch when she slammed on the brake, held on to the steering wheel with both hands as the truck skidded back at least four feet.

The grizzly roared and rammed again. The truck slid back again, but the second ramming was less enthusiastic, and this time Kate had managed to shift into second before the bear hit, so the backward motion was only three feet and change. The grizzly bawled defiance a third time, reared up on her hind legs and made one swipe with a paw at the front b.u.mper, which resulted in a screech of tearing metal. She placed her forepaws on the hood of the truck and did a violent push-up. Her claws left parallel grooves behind on the brand-new truck's brand-new paint job. The whole front end sank two feet, the shock absorbers groaning beneath the strain, and bounced back up again, so that Kate's head nearly ricocheted off the ceiling. As he was a foot taller than she was, Mr. Baker's did.

Kate heard his curse as if from a great distance. Time seemed to have decelerated somehow, as if they and the bear were pa.s.sing through deep water, the weight of it slowing action as well as reaction. There was no time to be afraid, but there was all the time in the world to observe.

This bear was a beauty, standing eight feet or so at the shoulder. Her hump was the size of a small mountain, well formed and mature. There were dark red stains around her nose, mouth and throat, indicating a recent feeding, in which case Kate couldn't see what she had to be so cranky about. The silver tips of her coat caught the rays of the morning sun.

There were no signs of a cub, which would have gone a long way toward explaining her throwing down the gauntlet to a top of the line Ford four-wheel-drive, one of the few mobile things in 53 the Park that outweighed her. She reared up on her hind legs again, front legs curving in cla.s.sic confrontational stance. Kate examined the claws revealed thereby with detached interest. Shreds of something pale were caught between the claws of the right paw.

The bear gnashed her teeth at them. The clicking sound of incisor upon incisor was clearly audible inside the cab. It sounded just like an axe chopping wood, in fact just like yesterday's visitor, only louder, more solid and somehow infinitely more threatening. Someone whimpered.

The bear gave a fourth and final bellow, dropped to all fours, whirled and charged headfirst through a thick stand of mountain hemlock, which proved less unyielding than the Ford's front end. The green branches crashed together, and as they quivered to an indignant standstill in the grizzly's wake, time returned to its normal steady pa.s.sage.

It was quiet in the cab of the truck for quite a while. At last Mr.

Baker stirred. "What," he said, striving for an even tone despite the beads of sweat popping out on his forehead, "may I ask, was that extraordinary creature?"

"That?" Kate said, and had to clear her throat. "Oh. That would be your basic brown, or grizzly, bear. Ursus arctos horribilis. An omnivorous North American mammal with a plantigrade gait. Plantigrade," she explained kindly, "means it uses the entire sole of its foot in walking.

h.o.m.o sapiens is also a plantigrade mammal." It was difficult to shake off the pedant, Kate discovered, once she got hold of the scruff of your neck.

"Indeed."

"It's warming up," she added, "so they're waking up."

Mr. Baker refrained from remarking on the superfluity of Kate's last statement and turned to his wife. "Are you quite all right, my dear?"

Mrs. Baker shifted in her seat. Her voice was thin but steady. "Ms.

Shugak, don't you think we should, perhaps, drive on?"

"Certainly," Kate said, because the West Coast has its end to 54 hold up, too. She let out the clutch and set off once again up the road to the mine, only very slightly grinding the gears. "The indigenous population of this area is largely Athabascan, but there has been a good deal of immigration from other parts of the state over the years-"

A mile later the road mercifully ended in a cl.u.s.ter of shabby clapboard buildings, all painted the same fading red with white trim. Kate parked the truck in front of what had been the old mess hall and they got out to look at the view.

It was sensational. The overcast had cleared and they were fifteen hundred feet up, with the blue-white peaks of the Quilak Mountains at their backs, stretching southeast to northwest, uncompromisingly beautiful and, Kate was pleased to see, effortlessly outhaughtying the Bakers. "Prince William Sound is that way," Kate said, pointing south.

"And this"- a sweep of arm indicated a wedge of area that stretched from horizon to horizon-"is the Park. This valley is pretty much the Park's center, and where most of the people in it live. Just around that bluff, you can't see it from here, is a little plateau, we call it the Step.

That's where Park Headquarters is. And see the glaciers?"

It would have been hard to miss them. There were half a dozen in sight, beginning with the Kanuyaq, a sheet of translucent blue ice a hundred feet tall that formed the head of the Kanuyaq River. Water opaque with gray glacial silt roared downstream at the base of the cliff on which they stood. The glacier calved as they watched, an immense shard of blue-green crystal detaching from the main body of ice to fall ponderously into the river. A few seconds later the Crack! boom! crash!

splash! reached them.

The swift-moving surface of the river swelled into a wave that slammed into both banks at the same time. It uprooted a clump of small alders and washed out a boulder the size of Gibraltar, rolling it downstream as if it were of no more consequence than a gla.s.s marble.

Even the Bakers seemed impressed. "Spectacular, really," said Mr. Baker.

55 It was better than nothing, and Kate had begun to shepherd them toward the mill when Mrs. Baker said, "Why, who is that, do you suppose?"

Kate heard a sobbing kind of shout and turned to see a man stumble out from behind what had been the company store. He fell practically at their feet. "Help me," he said, clawing at Kate's legs. "Help me." He fell forward, gasping for breath.

She knelt and took hold of the man's shoulders. "What is it, mister?

What's wrong?"

"My wife, my wife!"

"What about your wife?"

His voice rose to a scream. "My wife! My wife!"