A Cold-Blooded Business (15 page)

Wednesday morning the Transportation Department had been faced with changing out three shifts of employees at once instead of just one, and the plane had been reconfigured to fly all seats to accomplish this feat with the greatest dispatch. She rifled through the stack until she spotted another canceled manifest and paged forward to the next flight.

As she had expected, reconfiguring the plane to all passengers appeared to be standard procedure the day after a canceled flight, unless there was a medical evacuation, in which case the medevac igloo usurped the extra seats.

By eleven her eyes were beginning to cross and she rose from the kitchen table and stretched. Mutt was on her feet immediately, eyes pleading.

They took the left fork of the bike trail this time, and the left tunnel, toward Point Woronzof. Wednesday's snow had melted and the trail was down to the pavement in most places, but the sky was a leaden gray and a brisk wind nipped at Kate's ears and stung her cheeks, as if to remind one and all that though the calendar might say spring, it was only March, and not to get too cocky or the inevitable April blizzard could just as easily be two feet deep instead of one.

The sound of jets taking off increased as they neared the end of the north-south runway of Anchorage International. It was Friday, one of RPetco's one-flight days, Kate remembered, departing at nine A. M." returning to Anchorage at three P.M. There were benches next to the trail, and she kicked one free of a layer of ice and sat down to watch a Federal Express 747 hurtle into the air a hundred feet over her head.

The roar of the engines struck her like a blow, and as she plugged her ears with her fingers Kate remembered the gas screaming through the pipes at the Production Center. It occurred to her that this might be the noisiest job she had ever taken on, on or off the Slope. The jet climbed up and outward and Kate unplugged her ears. The smell of jet fuel exhaust stung her nostrils, but the resulting quiet was a physical relief. She leaned her head against the back of the bench, tucked her hands in her pockets and closed her eyes.

When John King had made his unenthusiastic offer of employment eleven days ago, she had accepted it as a lighthearted romp through RPetco's discretionary fund, nothing more, with the added bonus of a look at the North Slope. She'd never been farther north than Fairbanks before, and like Dutch Harbor, it was a trip beyond her wallet if it went unsubsidized by a job. She'd even toyed with the idea of demanding a bonus, depending on how fast she brought the dealer down. Jack, damn his eyes, had been right in his assessment of her initial lack of concern over what Slopers might or might not be inhaling, snorting, popping or mainlining. As far as Kate was concerned, they all had more money than God and they all thought they owned the world. If they couldn't handle it, too bad.

Something had turned that indifference around. It might have been the sight of Martin, ill and hostile in that hospital bed. It might have been the pipe liner yanking on the bear's tail--if he hadn't been on drugs he should have been. It might have been the thought of the two Naborhoff roughnecks throwing that chain up on the rig floor, higher than kites and in danger of losing more than a few fingers.

She realized, with a growing sense of annoyance, that this job had put a face on the monster. No longer could she think of the oil companies at Prudhoe Bay as monolithic corporate juggernauts getting the oil out of the ground no matter whose nest they shit in along the way. Instead there was Dale Triplet!" a production operator who could tell you how many barrels of oil there were within the walls of her separation center at any given moment. There was Sue Jordan, who came into the communications center after hours to give the night operator a coffee break and stayed on until morning to handle the medevac and notification of next of kin. There was Gideon Trocchiano, convinced that a good meal could cure anything that ailed you, from homesickness to the Prudhoe Bay galloping crud, and who was determined to prove it with liberal doses of thyme, garlic and parmesan. There was Jerry Mcisaac, on call 24 hours a day, 180 hours a week, hand never very far from his medical bag, self never very far from his ambulance, ready to respond at a moment's notice to any injury, no matter how slight. There was Toni Hartzler, whose supply of humor never ran out, no matter what the provocation from ignorant Outsiders.

Sure, they only worked one week of every two. Sure, they pulled down more in a year than Kate would see in her lifetime. Sure, they washed no dish nor made no bed during their week up. They still spent half their lives six hundred miles from home and family and any semblance of a normal life, and most of them never drew a breath of fresh air from the day they got off the plane at Prudhoe until the day they got on it again.

She wouldn't go so far as to say she admired them, but she'd damn well take her best shot at ridding their workplace of the drug of their choice.

Not that she was convinced she'd get any thanks for it. A jet clawed its way into the sky over her head and she plugged her ears automatically.

The sheer volume of product she'd seen during the post-race celebrations Saturday night was enough to stagger anyone. The universal casual acceptance of its presence was equally staggering. If something wasn't done, and soon, someone was going to get killed. She remembered Chuck Cass. Someone already had been.

Again she thought of that delayed charter, and the events which followed, and wondered if there was a correlation or if it was all just coincidence. She didn't think so. Kate wasn't big on coincidences.

Mutt went looking for trouble and found it, stampeding a mangy-looking cow moose out of the undergrowth. To Kate's relief Mutt decided either that she wasn't that hungry or that the cow looked a bit stringy for her refined palate, and allowed the cow to escape into a clump of alders. A while later she came back with a satisfied expression on her face and a bit of rabbit fur sticking to her muzzle. "Shame on you," Kate told her.

"Terrorizing these poor little citified rabbits and mooses."

Mutt uttered a short, joyful bark and bounced forward to nip at the hem of Kate's jeans. Another leap away, and she paused to look hopefully over her shoulder.

"Oh, ho, so it's going to be like that, is it?" Kale gave chase, catching Mutt's tail and giving it a brief tug before running for her life. Mutt nipped the left cheek of her behind and streaked ahead to run three times around a conveniently placed birch. She stopped, looking at Kate expectantly, ears up. Using a long patch of ice yet to melt in the shade of the birch, Kate took a long running jump and slid past Mutt and the tree, giving Mutt a smack on the butt as she skidded by.

They played tag all the way back to Earthquake Park, where Kate cried uncle, and the rest of the journey home was accomplished at a walk more befitting two grown women of their age and maturity, although once Mutt did try to trip her, and once Kate bumped Mutt into a drift of wet snow.

They emerged from the tunnel flushed and out of breath, and much refreshed.

Jack came home for a late lunch and Kate drove him back to work and kept the Blazer. Instead of returning directly to Jack's and her mound of paperwork, she drove to Bean's Cafe" and parked. Inside, a tattered, tired group of men sprinkled with a few women were eating lunch, their exhaustion lightening a little as the hot foot hit their bellies. Some were unkempt, some were downright dirty, most of them smelled. None of them was her old man. She described him to a woman administering a tuberculosis test to anyone who would sit still for it, but the woman, although sympathetic, had other concerns on her mind and wasn't much help. From Bean's Kate went to the Brother Francis Mission, a large building that looked exactly like what it was, a former municipal warehouse converted to a shelter for street people.

Upon inquiry she was directed to a tall man with a shock of untidy gray hair and an official when who stood listening with a patient expression to another man who looked merely officious. As Kate came up behind them she heard the officious man protest, "You're not helping here, Brother Bob, you're merely enabling these people to stay drunk." Brother Bob murmured, "We're enabling people to stay alive," but the officious man wasn't listening, and after holding forth for another five minutes without once pausing to draw breath he marched out. As he marched Kate noticed he looked neither to the left nor to the right, probably for fear that if he saw someone warm and dry, who otherwise might be dying of exposure out on the street, that it might change his ideas, and above all else, a change of ideas was the thing most to be feared.

Kate described the old man and Brother Bob said, "Could be any one of a dozen men we see here every night," echoing the words of the woman at Bean's. "Although when it starts getting wanner, they start moving outside." He looked at her. "Is it important?" Kate thought of the box of carvings riding around in the back seat of the Blazer, of the old man's bewildered, exhausted face when he had said, I just want to go home. "Yes," she said. "It's important."

He looked at her curiously. "He a relative?" She hesitated and almost said yes, before she remembered she didn't even know the old man's name.

"No," she said finally. "Not a relative. But I want to help, if I can."

"You'll have to find him first," he said, not unkindly.

"You have any idea where I should start looking?"

He looked her over, this time with a critical eye, lingering on Mutt, who met his gaze with an inquiring yellow stare. What he saw apparently satisfied him. He named half a dozen bars, and said, "If you don't find him in any of those, check the hillside above the railroad yards. A Jot of our people build Visqueen tents down in the alders come spring."

Kate drove uptown and checked the bars, one after the other. It was not an uplifting experience. She dodged three fights in the first two, and they all smelled of beer and vomit and stale cigarette smoke.

The last one, the Borealis Bar on Fourth Avenue, was almost exactly like the previous five: dark and smoky, Randy Travis on the jukebox telling the world why he cheated. A bar ran down one side of the room, tables that hadn't been wiped in memory of man crowded together across a filthy floor. One couple eyes closed, bodies pressed tightly together, swayed between two tables without moving their feet.

A group of four men sat around another table, fresh glasses newly arrived from the bar. The three older ones were cheering the fourth one, barely a boy. All were Native Alaskans, all were conspicuously drunk, and as Kate watched the cheers took an ugly edge. "You too proud to drink with us?" one of them demanded.

"No," the boy mumbled, trying with ineffective gestures to shove away the glass held under his nose. "Doanwannanymore."

"I think he thinks he's too good to drink with us," one of the others said. "Come on, Phil," the third man said. "We'll teach him to show respect for his elders." Two of them pinned the boy's arms and tilted his head back and the third pinched his nose and poured the drink down his throat so that he had either to drink or suffocate.

Kate leapt forward instinctively. "Stop!" She slapped the glass away and heard it crash somewhere behind her. "Stop it!" She pulled the boy free and put his head between his knees. His thin shoulders heaved beneath her hands as he choked and gasped for breath. Kate was so upset she forgot herself and began to lecture. "What the hell is the matter with you? Is this the way they taught you in the village? To make someone do something they don't want to, that's bad for them?

Shame on you!"

She would have been surprised and probably incredulous if she'd known how much she sounded, and looked, like her grandmother in that moment.

The other three men were so far out of it they could only stand, weaving, and curse. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

"S'not nanny your business."

"Yeah, fuck off."

"Yeah, fuck off."

"Leave my brother '," one said. He managed to focus long enough to step forward and paw at her.

Mutt growled once, low down in her throat. When they didn't hear her she upped the volume. They heard her that time, looked down, dropped their hands and started backing up in a body.

Kate squatted next to the boy. His face was streaked with tears and he swiped ineffectually at the mucus running from his nose. "You okay?"

He didn't look at her. "Yes."

"You need a ride somewhere?"

"You got any money?"

She did. A lot of it, in cash, wadded in her pocket. She looked up and saw the three men standing at a distance, eyeing a Mutt who was eyeing them right back. "No," she said. "I don't have any money. Or not much.

You hungry? I could buy you a burger."

He shook his head. After a moment she rose to her feet, and looked mean in the direction of the three men. Mutt looked mean, too, and they backed up another step. They were still backing up when Kate walked out the front door and back into the relatively clean air outside.

There was a Mcdonald's across the street and she went inside and ordered the biggest Coke they had and drank it down in one long swallow. She lowered the cup, the smell of deep-fried fat hit her nostrils and she barely made it to the bathroom in time. She retched and gagged until there wasn't an ounce of fluid left in her entire body. When she came out of the stall there was a young woman in a Mcdonald's uniform waiting with a mop and bucket. She gave Kate a look of disgust and disdain.

"Jesus, you people."

Kate started to say, "Wait a minute, I wasn't drinking," but the other woman shouldered her aside roughly and began applying the mop to the floor with jerky, angry movements.

Sometimes there is just no cure for a situation. Kate stifled her anger, washed her face and hands in the teeth of the other woman's repugnance and left.

She and Mutt walked down E Street and up Second to the beginning of the Coastal Trail. The gutters ran free with melt-off but the sidewalks were still covered with a combination of slush and ice. Walking was tricky.

It got trickier when she pushed through the alders and began slipping and sliding down the hillside. In places the snow was up to her behind, and her tennis shoes and jeans were soon wet through. She had built up enough speed to scare herself when a limb caught her cheek with a sharp sting. She yelled out a protest and grabbed instinctively for her face.