Midnight come again (14 page)

As he passed the Kosygin, he noticed again how deserted it seemed. His footsteps slowed, then stopped.

Well, what the hell. It was a Russian ship, he'd been seconded to Bering to ferret out a bunch of Russians of dubious moral and ethical character, one of whom was now dead in what could, without too much of a stretch, be called suspicious circumstances, and there wasn't anyone around to tell him not to.

He looked around. The Half Seas Under crew had disappeared into the cannery, and everyone else was too far away to see, or were minding their own business.

He walked up the gangway and went on board ... there is no time in the summer of midnight sun.

--Crazy Dogholkoda Kate finished loading the Here and watched it taxi out to the runway and take off with its distinctive grumbling roar, shouldering the world into the sky. A flatbed thundered past, on its way to the Alaska Airlines terminal. Traffic in and out of the airport had slowed, but probably wouldn't entirely stop until sometime in late September, if not October, certainly not until the last salmon had made it up the river.

And then Baird would put the seats back in the planes and begin ferrying Outside fishermen to Anchorage for their flights home, local residents to Anchorage for winter supply runs, and Natives to Anchorage for the AFN convention. In January he'd take the seats out again and start hauling dog teams to Anchorage and Fairbanks and Whitehorse. After the last musher made it under the burlwood arch in Nome, he'd hose down the insides of his fleet and the cycle would begin all over again.

After four months, the last two filled with fourteen to eighteen-hour days, it was all pretty much routine. When Baird had suggested splitting her job into two twelve-hour shifts and hiring a second person for the ground crew, her first instinct had been to protest. She wanted the work, she needed the work, she had to have the work to occupy her every waking moment, to keep her so busy she wouldn't have to remember, to exhaust her enough so that she could sleep without dreams infiltrating her subconscious.

She couldn't think of the past winter on the homestead without a shudder, without the lurking fear that the anguish of those months all alone in the middle of that enormous, echoingly empty Park would return and take her right back down to the bottom. She wasn't sure she could pull herself out again. She wasn't sure she would want to.

Here she was too busy to be lonely, the only people she knew were her boss and his pilots, and the only things even remotely recognizable were the makes of the various planes flying in and out. There wasn't a relative within five hundred miles, or a mountain close enough to see, or one single fishing boat tied up at the docks named after the daughter of someone with whom she'd graduated from Niniltna High.

There was nothing here to remind her of her life, of the people in it, of the people she'd lost. She could breathe here, with care, but she could breathe. If she went home, she'd start to suffocate again, and there was still enough of an instinct for survival to get out while she still could. If she had stayed ... Against her will the memory of that day in March surfaced, when the trees and the mountains and the very sky itself seemed to close in on her, when after it was over, all she had was the wound on her arm to remind her of what had almost happened, of what would happen if she didn't get out. She'd driven to Niniltna that evening and flown George to Anchorage that night. She'd been waiting when Job Service opened its doors the next morning, invented a name, made up a social security number, inverted the numbers on her driver's license, lied about losing her identification, and had been on a plane to Bering that afternoon.

The good old state Job Service. If you wanted away from your life and you could walk without scraping your knuckles on the floor, Job Service would take you there.

From the instant she had stepped foot on the Bering tarmac she'd been working flat out; nonstop, hard, backbreaking, strenuous work, work that left her spent and depleted, work that left her too tired to think, too tired to move, too tired to feel, too tired to remember anything beyond the arrival time of the next load and the maximum tonnage and load limits of the plane it was shipping out on. She worked, she ate, she slept briefly for a few hours snatched from the work, and then she got up and did it all over again. There were plenty of birds for Mutt to hunt in every direction, a hot shower not too far away, and if the toilet was an outhouse, at least she didn't have to haul a honeybucket.

Baird, thank god, had it pumped on a weekly basis by the local service.

So far as Baird knew she had no friends or relatives, no life to infringe on her devotion to the task at hand. In four months she had never taken a day off. She rarely left the airport, sending him to the Eagle store with a grocery list when needed, which always included whatever new bestsellers were on the checkout stand, nothing to stimulate her imagination or challenge her intellect, just words on a page to occupy the front of her brain while everything behind lay dormant and detached. She hadn't dared to bring any poetry with her. She hadn't listened to music in eleven months.

The old gods were silent as well. Agudar, Calm Water's Daughter, The Woman Who Keeps The Tides, they no longer spoke to Kate. She didn't miss them, she told herself. She didn't even miss Emaa anymore.

Kate was in neutral. The motor was running, but it wasn't going anywhere. It was just so much as she was capable of, and no more.

There was a tentative knock at the door and she looked up. A short, pudgy man with a tentative expression on his elfin face stood in the doorway, eyebrows raised. "Is a bad time, yes?" She smiled, glad to be diverted from her increasingly morbid thoughts.

There was one other person she knew in Bering besides Baird and the pilots. "Is a bad time, no. Come on in, Yuri. What are you doing up at this hour of the night?"

He came in and sat down across the desk from her. "I have the problem with sleeping," he said. "I can't. So I get up and wander around the little town. Everybody is having this same problem, I think, because everybody else is up, too."

"No. It's just summertime in Alaska." And she was struck again by how normal everything was, how ordinarily everyone went about their business, the fishermen setting their nets and pulling in fish, the postal workers distributing mail in the post office, the waitresses bringing coffee to their customers, the gas station dispensing gas, the grocery store selling groceries.

Suddenly she wanted to rip the door off its hinges and scream, "How can anything be normal, how can anything be ordinary, don't you people get it, Jack is dead\"

"Ekaterina?" Yuri peered at her worriedly through a shock of thick, untidy black hair, ragged around the edges as if hacked off with a knife. Like hers.

"Ekaterina?" he said again, and this time his worried voice brought her back. Her breath was coming rapidly, her heart thudding painfully in her throat, her hands had clenched into fists.

"Something is wrong, yes? A bad time this is." He half rose from his chair. "I go."

"You stay." She summoned up another smile from somewhere, aware that her supply was running low, and with a deliberate effort calmed her breathing and relaxed her hands. Her heartbeat obediently steadied, and slowed to a more normal rate. "Did you want to ship something? Or did you just drop in to say hello?"

He brightened. Fumbling through his pockets, he produced a grimy deck of cards. He looked at her hopefully.

Her smile was more genuine this time. "Snerts?" She rummaged through the desk and came up with her own deck. "Remember, I told you, it's more fun with three or more people." "I don't care," he said, clearing a space.

"You teach me to beat you."

"In your dreams," she said without force.

He stayed for two hours, during which they played six games and drank Diet Coke she fetched from the cooler in the hangar.

"Diet?" He made a face.

"You're awfully picky, for someone who didn't used to be able to drink any pop at all."

His face fell into tragic lines, and Kate was about to apologize when she noticed the twinkle in his eyes. "Just for that, I'm blowing by you with thirteen cards left on the pile."

"Hah! Just try, you--you American! I leave you in dust!" It wasn't the first time he'd made a late-night visit. He was a native of Russia, and worked off one of the processors that put into port a couple of times a week. She'd met him one morning when he came in with a box to ship to Anchorage. He'd explained that the crew of his boat loaded up at home on nesting dolls and saints' icons with gilt haloes and surplus Red Army watches for resale in Fourth Avenue shops in Anchorage, in order to get around the currency laws, so they'd have a little cash to spend in America. She had found him to be no threat, even amusing, and he had dropped by the next time his boat was in, the first time she'd taught him Snerts. Thereafter it was part of both their routines; when his boat was in, Yuri showing up at the hangar in the early hours of the morning when he knew Kate would be alone and probably not very busy.

He'd made a mild pass at her the third time they'd been alone together.

She had refused as kindly as she knew how, using up as much nice as she had energy for because she was glad of his company when three o'clock rolled around and she started thinking about September. The early morning hours were the worst. She'd acquired her new scar at three a.m.

Yuri had taken his refusal with good humor; mostly, she suspected, because he was looking for an easy way into the country and was prepared to put the moves on any likely American female who might be susceptible to a proposal of marriage. That night she had risen to the top of his list. Now she had been eliminated, and they could be friends.

Over the weeks he had told her about himself in little snippets dropped here and there, about his boyhood, about the filthy, freezing, losing war in Afghanistan. He had been invalided out of the Army, no great loss to the Army as he'd been a lousy soldier, and no great loss to him as the Russian Army was no longer able to meet its payroll. He had been unable to find work, and one day had come home to the apartment his family shared with two others to find that his wife was gone, along with their two daughters.

"What did you do?"

He shrugged and put a five of spades on a four of spades a second and a half before she did. The back of his hand was thick with the same black hair that grew from his head with such exuberance. "What I had to. I move out because I have no money for rent, but I find a friend who will let me sleep on his floor and use his bathroom for a few rubles. I speak the English well, no?"

"Yes."

"My mother insists. Very smart, my mother, she say America will win Cold War and we will all have to speak English. So. I hire as interpreter to American who wishes to sell Coke in Russia." He regarded his Diet Coke with a proprietary air, drained the can and set it down with a satisfied smacking of his lips. "Before that I drive truck for a while. Before that I buy and sell on black market, a little."

"Did you ever see your wife or your daughters again?"

"No. I am stuck." He held up his deck as evidence.

She ran through hers once more, and then, on the count of three, they shifted one card from the top of their decks to the bottoms and began dealing in threes again. "I'm sorry."

"Me, I am sorry, too. But then I get this job, on this big boat--" he flung out his arms "--and I come to America, and I meet you!" He grinned. "Even if you won't marry me."

"Find yourself another way to get into the country, buddy," she said.

He looked wounded, but not mortally.

She managed to throw the fifth game.

"Hah!" he said, triumphant. "I get better at this Snerts!"

"Hah," she said in turn, "I get revenge next week."

His happy grin faded. "I don't know, Ekaterina. Next week we may not come to Bering."

"Oh." She was silent for a moment, searching for dismay, and found none.

Her smile this time was obviously forced. "Then it was very nice meeting you, Yuri."

"And for me to meet you, Ekaterina." He took her hand and bowed over it, a gesture that would have looked ridiculous on anyone but a European with two thousand years of civilization at his back.

Yuri hadn't been gone for five minutes before everything she had been feeling before he showed up came crashing back in on her.

Jim Chopin, of all people. Chopper Jim, First Sergeant of the Alaska State Troopers, also known with some truth as the Father of the Park. He just had to show up and destroy what fragile peace of mind she had managed to achieve after four months' effort. He even had the gall to be angry, not just angry but furious, almost violent in his rage. It had roused a brief spurt of answering anger in herself, which had died almost immediately, much to her relief. She didn't want to feel like that.

She didn't want to feel.

She thought, without much interest, that she'd never seen Chopper Jim angry before. Certainly he'd never been angry with her. Irritated, amused, intrigued, challenged, impressed by and yes, aroused, but never angry.

He was here under an assumed name. That could only mean one thing, that he was working undercover. Was there something hinky going on at Baird Air? Slowly, reluctantly, engaging gears rusty with disuse, she thought back over the past four months, of the loads of airfreight going in and coming out, of the shippers and the receivers.