Breakup. Part 7

He nodded miserably. "I gave her a leg up the side of one of those old houses. I told her to stay there while I went for help. It-the bear must have climbed up after her. I never would have left her if I'd thought- I never- Then I heard your truck and-" His face twisted.

"It's okay," Dan said with quick sympathy. "Never mind. We can talk about it later."

Stewart hid his face in his hands.

Dan was right, the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d probably was in shock. Coldly ashamed of her momentary awareness of him as an attractive man, and disregarding his equally obvious appreciation of her as an attractive woman, Kate said, "The trooper's on his way."

Stewart's head snapped up. "Trooper?"

"Chopper Jim?" Dan said, and Kate nodded. "The trooper from Tok," he told Stewart. "Jim Chopin."

"How'd you talk to him?" Stewart said. "I thought- Are there phones in Niniltna?"

"I called him from the NorthCom earth station." Kate indicated the tower just visible over the tops of the trees cl.u.s.tered between the airstrip and the village.

"The troopers are always called in on cases of accidental death," Dan said.

"Of course," Stewart said, head bent again. "Of course they are. Sorry, I'm still a little out of it."

Dan regarded him with a puzzled air. "You know, I could swear- We've met before, haven't we?"

Stewart shook his head. "I don't think so."

Dan's brows came together but he shrugged. "If you say so."

The Bakers had wandered across the strip to watch George swab out the inside of his plane. Kate hoped George had simmered 75 clown some, but the rigid set of his shoulders didn't look promising, in which case she hoped the Bakers would restrain any impulse they might have toward commentary. She wondered what Mandy was going to say when she heard the tale of the day's adventures. Somehow she felt that a fatal bear attack, a plane wreck and an attempted homicide were not what Mandy had had in mind when she sent her parents out that afternoon.

Dan strolled a little way down the runway, inviting Kate with a jerk of his head to join him. "So what did Mandy bribe you with to get you to play tour guide?"

She fell into step next to him. "The loan of her truck."

Dan grinned. "That's right, yours is slightly out of commission, isn't it?" He looked at Mandy's brand-new Ford. The winds.h.i.+eld had a horizontal crack in it that started in front of the steering wheel and progressed all the way across to the pa.s.senger side. The driver's-side door was crumpled in and sported two bullet holes. The black plastic b.u.mper was cracked right down the middle. Dan inspected the claw marks on the hood with a professional eye.

"Yeah," Kate said, "we had our close encounter with the bear, too.

His head snapped up. "Same bear?"

She nodded. "I think so. The way the road switches back, about the time she hit us she could have come straight down the slope from where I found the body." She paused. "She had blood on her face and muzzle, and what looked like flesh between her claws."

"Jesus."

"Not a pretty sight," Kate agreed, and took a deep breath to steady her stomach. "Still, hard to get too upset over bears acting like bears."

"Yeah." He didn't believe it any more than she did, but in the face of nature red in tooth and claw he was d.a.m.ned if he'd let Kate outmacho him. " 'She?' "

"It was a female, a big one, six, seven hundred pounds."

"Which way was she heading?"

76 "West, last I saw."

Dan's brows snapped together. "West from the mine?"

"West from a mile or so down the mine road."

"Heading away from the village, then."

"Last I saw," Kate repeated. They both knew how futile it was to try to predict the path a bear might take.

"You scare her off her kill?"

"I don't know. Maybe. You know what the road's like, and I had the truck in second gear. We were pretty noisy."

"And bears do tend to get a little cranky when their meals are interrupted," Dan observed.

Kate remembered the enraged grizzly, standing on her hind legs, claws extended, showing off a very long, very sharp, very fine set of teeth and an even finer set of lungs.

Dan stood back and surveyed the truck again. "You're awful G.o.ddam hard on trucks, Shugak." He poked a finger into one of the bullet holes, and looked at Kate with a raised eyebrow.

She made a face. "Ben Bingley went on a toot on his kids' corporation dividends, apparently. George had just brought him back-" She told him about the ground loop and from his delighted grin knew his next stop would be George's hangar. "Anyway, they'd just flown in from Ahtna when Cindy showed up. She wanted to discuss the matter. Over a Smith and Wesson."

"My, my," Dan said. "Bet the Bakers enjoyed that." He smiled slowly.

"Kate Shugak, tour guide. Wish I could have been along for the whole ride. Did they say if they enjoyed themselves? They signed up for a raft trip down the Kanuyaq yet? You could probably dump them in along about Chitina without half trying, get 'em wet all over, maybe even get 'em drowned. Worth a try, don't you think?"

Chopper Jim's arrival spared her the necessity of a suitably discourteous reply. The Bell Jet Ranger settled down and Jim was out before the rotors stopped turning. To Kate he said, "Just couldn't wait to see me again, could you?"

Dan laughed. "My words exactly."

77 Jim hitched up his gun belt. "What have we got?"

They told him. He walked over to the truck and unwrapped the body. He looked at it without expression, and listened to Mark Stewart's story with even less expression.

Kate and Dan helped Jim load Carol Stewart's body into the back of the chopper. Stewart got into the pa.s.senger seat and the trooper closed it after him. Instead of walking around to the pilot's side, he walked out from beneath the rotors and motioned to Kate. "He say the bear come after him, too?"

"He said something about shoving her up on the roof of one of the staff houses out back of the mine while he went for help. Other than that, he hasn't said much of anything."

Chopper Jim was silent for a moment, staring at the end of the runway, brows knit. "Okay. I'll fly him and the body to Tok. I got an emergency call about a wreck on Sikonsina Pa.s.s. Some a.s.shole's boat slid off the trailer and front-ended a tractor-trailer full of liquid oxygen." He adjusted the brim of his hat with a flick of his fingers, in a crisp, somewhat exasperated manner that suggested he'd like to square away life in all of rural Alaska, or at least that part under his jurisdiction, in the same no-nonsense, no-action- wasted fas.h.i.+on. "I just love breakup."

They looked at the helicopter, Stewart waiting, silent and staring, the tarp-wrapped body of his wife invisible behind him.

"He said they came up here to get away from it all," Kate said.

Jim's grin was taut and mirthless. "Didn't get quite far enough, did they?"

78.

There was a lot more traffic on the road between the village and the Roadhouse than there was on the road between the village and the mine, so it was in better shape, with most of the winter's ice broken up and potholes smoothed out to no more than on average a foot deep. It was twenty-seven miles from Niniltna, and exactly nine feet and three inches outside tribal jurisdiction, which location made it the only legally licensed purveyor of liquor in twenty million acres of Park. A square, solid building with a corrugated tin roof, a satellite dish perched on one corner and a haphazard jumble of tiny rental cabins and Bernie's home out back, it made up in atmosphere what it lacked in architectural aesthetics.

There were no dogsleds and no snow machines visible in the parking lot.

There were three rows of vehicles, beginning with a blue Chevy crew cab pickup.

79 Kate's face brightened. "Great, Bobby's here. Bobby Clark, a friend of Mandy's and mine," she explained to the Bakers.

At the end of the same row there was a fifty-foot Pace Arrow motor home with Pennsylvania plates, proudly displaying the wear and tear of twelve hundred miles of Alcan and another four hundred miles of Alaska dirt road. Kate shook her head. They were coming up earlier every year, and it was getting so you couldn't get them to leave once they'd come.

Welcome to Alaska, now go home. Her eye traveled to the vehicle opposite the RV. "That G.o.ddam Frank Scully," she said before she thought.

Mr. Baker cleared his throat. "And who is Frank Scully, Ms. Shugak?"

"He moved up from Was.h.i.+ngton last year, bought Greg Migaiolo's cabin."

Mr. and Mrs. Baker looked inquiring.

Kate pointed. "He drives that Cherokee Chief over there, and he still hasn't got Alaska plates on it. That always ticks me off, people move out into the Bush and think they can get away without paying for a new license and registration."

They pulled in between a rusty black Ranchero and a rustier brown Plymouth sedan with both b.u.mpers missing. Kate put the truck in second and shut off the engine. The Ford was running well even if the driver's-side door still wouldn't open. "Now, folks, remember what I told you, the Roadhouse isn't exactly what you're used to. Are you sure you wouldn't rather head on back to Niniltna? My Auntie Vi makes great cocoa, not to mention fry bread."

"Ms. Shugak," Mrs. Baker said, displaying a hitherto unsuspected firmness, "if you are a friend of Amanda's, you know she doesn't keep liquor at the lodge."

"Yes," Kate said meekly. "I mean, no."

"Well, after what we saw this afternoon, I for one would kill for a drink."

"I for two," Mr. Baker added.

They smiled at Kate. If they weren't careful, they were going to 80 upgrade from stereotypes to real live human beings before the day was over. Kate grinned. "I'd kill for some rational conversation myself.

Okay, but don't say I didn't warn you."

But at the door to the Roadhouse, Mr. Baker paused. "Ms. Shugak-"

"Yes, Mr. Baker?"

"That woman at the mine-"

"Yes?"

"Was it our bear that killed her? The one that ran into us on the road?"

Kate briefly considered lying, and quickly discarded the notion. "Probably."

"There was blood on her muzzle."

"Yes."

"That woman's blood."

"Yes."

Mr. and Mrs. Baker exchanged glances. "Will someone go after the bear, try to kill it?"

Kate looked surprised. "Why?"

Mr. Baker blinked. "Well, naturally, I a.s.sumed- I've been hunting in Africa, Ms. Shugak. When a lion becomes a man-killer, the only thing to do is to hunt it down and kill it, otherwise it will go on killing men."

Kate sighed. "Mr. Baker, an Alaskan grizzly eats anything that doesn't move out of the way in time, animal, vegetable or mineral. That includes bugs, canned goods, canteens, backpacks and people, as well as any and every other mammal that comes down the pike. Protein is protein. They're a perambulating appet.i.te with a serious advantage in speed and armament.

Most of the time they leave us alone. Sometimes they don't."

Mrs. Baker regarded her with a quizzical expression. "It doesn't appear to upset you very much, Ms. Shugak."

Kate shrugged, and repeated what she had said to Dan, this time with more conviction. "Hard to get upset over bears acting 81 like bears. Comes with the territory. It's not pretty, but then nature often isn't."

The Roadhouse door opened abruptly into the conversation, almost catching Mrs. Baker on the nose and smacking into Kate's reflexively upraised hand. A man somersaulted out of the building to roll down the steps and fetch up flat on his back in a puddle of muddy slush. There was a slurred curse.

The Bakers regarded the outcast for an expressionless moment before Mr.

Baker reached for the door, which was swinging slowly closed, and pulled it open with a polite inclination of his head. Mrs. Baker swept through, with Kate bringing up the rear, feeling like a very minor courtier in an exceptionally regal retinue.

Inside, the bar was three deep, there wasn't an empty table in the joint, and the floor was jammed with dancers in Pendleton s.h.i.+rts, Levi's and wafflestompers, the men distinguished from the women only by their beards. On a twenty-four-inch television screen suspended from one corner of the roof Steven Seagal was putting out an oil fire in a series of actions that would have put his a.s.s into orbit on any oil field other than Hollywood's. An enthusiastic audience led by Old Sam Dementieff was improvising new dialogue. Half a dozen older women sat in a circle quilting, mugs of hot b.u.t.tered rum at their elbows, Auntie Vi firmly guiding the gathered needles in some complicated knot. She looked up, saw Kate and beckoned. Kate deliberately mistook the gesture and waved back airily.

Another crowd stood around two pool tables in the back, the crack of ball on ball muted by the occasional flush of a distant toilet. Jimmy Buffett was on the jukebox, wanting to go where it's warm, accompanied by half a dozen tone-deaf backup singers who felt the same way, including Frank Scully, evidently suffering no guilt feelings whatever at not contributing his share to the state treasury.

The tourists from Pennsylvania were easy to spot. They sat at a table by themselves, attired in matching plaid polyester pantsuits.

82 Matching Pittsburgh Steelers windbreakers hung over the backs of their chairs, matching potbellies pushed at their s.h.i.+rts, and matching befuddled smiles spread across their faces as they took in Life in the Alaskan Bush, a point-and-shoot camera at the ready on the table in front of them, right next to a dog-eared copy of the Milepost, Everytourist's all-purpose, super-duper utility guide to Alaska. In spite of herself Kate thought they looked kind of cute.

The air smelled of stale beer, roll-your-owns of old tobacco and older marijuana, and wet wool. Eau de breakup.

Kate broke trail to the bar, where Bernie was pouring out drinks with all eight hands. He was a long, gaunt man with a receding hairline in front and a ponytail that reached to his waist in back to make up for it. He looked like an aging hippie only because he was one.

Bernie Koslowski was Chicago-born and Midwest-bred and all flower child.

He had been mugged by Daley's finest at the 1968 Democratic convention, had danced in the mud at Woodstock in 1969 and had merrily burned his draft card on the steps of the Capitol in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., in 1970, whereupon Attorney General John Mitch.e.l.l, unamused, had had Bernie and three thousand other demonstrators thrown behind a chicken-wire fence on the Mall, in direct violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. Bernie took it personally. Upon release, he walked by the White House to flip Nixon the bird and hauled a.s.s for Canada, eventually migrating into Alaska through the Yukon Territories, working construction on the TransAlaska Pipeline. He retired from the pipeline to buy the Roadhouse in 1975. If the Roadhouse wasn't connected by road to the TransAlaska Pipeline's right-of-way, there were other means of transportation an ingenious and thirsty pipeliner could and did promote, including, one glorious day two years before, a D-9 Caterpillar tractor. Business boomed.

Bemie's father, who never let anyone forget he had gone ash.o.r.e with the first wave at Anzio, had struck Bemie's name from the family Bible and forbidden mention of it in his presence. His mother and sisters sent him surrept.i.tious care packages every year 83 at Christmas, filled with water filters, Swiss Army knives and waterproof compa.s.ses ordered from the REI catalog. From time to time they would inquire solicitously as to the state of his health, since blubber couldn't be all that nutritious as a dietary staple, and did his Eskimo friends live in igloos? Bernie had never met an Eskimo in his life, or seen an igloo, and since whales had been put on the endangered species list, muktuk was in short supply, and Aleuts ate seal muktuk anyway. Or the ones he knew did.

One of his Aleut friends who ate seal muktuk jerked her head toward the other end of the bar, where Bobby Clark was, as usual, sitting at the center of a lot of laughter and rude comment. "Life of the party,"

Bernie said. "How you been, Kate?"

"Don't ask."

"All right," Bernie said agreeably, and poured Kate a c.o.ke without waiting for an order. "Where's Mutt?"

"Guarding the homestead from the federal government."