A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (20 page)

He stood by the buffet table and ate strips of the salty ham while he filled a small paper plate with deviled eggs. He felt a bit foolish, but he could not move away from the buffet table, eating handfuls of the chips and dip and mixed nuts, nodding at people with his mouth full, smiling, absolutely out of control. When one of the airport personnel came up and said, “So, you’re not a cop,” Burns just smiled at him too and shook his head, popping another of the tangy eggs into his mouth.

There was a slide show. One of the nurses had been in the Grand Canyon the past summer and showed slides of her river trip. They were good slides, not professional, but full of steep purple rock and shadow. Burns stood behind the couches during the presentation, eating carrot sticks and drinking 7UP, and the Grand Canyon on the hospital wall, the foaming brown river, the two huge yellow rafts, and the travelers in their bikinis and sunglasses all gave him a kind of spin and he finally stopped eating and sat down.

“You’re from Connecticut,” a woman next to him said. It was Karen, the chief nurse. In the near-dark he saw that she was about his age, a brunette with an aquiline nose, like a pretty schoolteacher.

“Yes, I am,” he said. The slide changed and everybody laughed: four naked people holding hands ran toward the river.

“Which one is you, Leslie?” Glen Batton said.

“Dream on, Glen,” the projectionist said.

The woman next to Burns, Karen, whispered, “Before we were transferred, we lived in New London for ten years.”

Lake Mead appeared as a blue plate under a pale sky. It was the first slide that had a horizontal theme and then the lights clicked on and there was applause. “This year,” Leslie said to the group, “we’re going to the Everglades and the Keys.”

Glen Batton, who had been sitting with Julie, said, “Well, keep your clothes on around the alligators, Leslie.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Julie said. “He’s been in Alaska too long.”

People were standing up and moving the couches against the walls now, and suddenly the lights went down and a tape began to play a Beatles song that Burns knew, but didn’t know the name of, and three couples began to dance. Burns went to the window and holding his hand against the pane, he saw the stars.

“The weather’s clearing for a spell.” One of the deputies had come up to him.

Burns looked at the man. “Did you find that dog?”

“Not today, but we will.”

“How often do you have to do this?”

“Not twice a year. Usually just spring. A lot of dogs are let loose. It’s a bad deal.”

“Come here,” a man said from behind him, taking his arm. It was the counselor, the Inuit, Victor. “I’ll show you something.” He led Burns past Karen and down the hallway and out the side door into the cold. “Check this.” The man pointed over the roof where Burns saw a finger of yellow light run up the sky and fade followed by two pale pink ones that shifted like something seen through a depth of water.

“I’ve never seen them before,” Burns said to the man. His breath rose as white mist.

The man smiled. “Alec hadn’t either,” he said. “I’m sorry for what happened. He was related to you?”

“He was my son.” Now a greenish white washed up the sky and flared in sections as if cooling.

“He was too smart for this place,” the man said.

“What do you mean?”

“What would keep him here? All the white guys with their dog teams? Alec was a genius, right? He must be what a genius is.”

“Possibly,” Burns said. The cold had gone through him and become a pressure in his neck. Now the pink was back, shooting like a crazy beacon into the black.

“You’re staying with Julie?”

“Yes,” Burns answered, and alerted by something in Victor’s voice he added, “Why?”

“Nothing,” Victor said, looking up, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. “I could never figure them. Alec and her.”

“I see,” Burns said. For a moment the sky was black. “She’s so . . .” Burns opened the sentence hoping the other man would finish it. He wanted this information.

“I don’t know. I shouldn’t talk. You’ll see that not much up here is what it seems, but they didn’t fit. She’s too sociable. Maybe that’s what I mean.”

Suddenly a canopy of blue light came up the sky and then shredded and disappeared.

Someone took Burns’ arm and he felt a body next to him. “Aren’t you freezing?” Karen said. She shivered against him, hugging his arm with both hands. “It’s twenty below.” Burns put his arm out and around the woman.

“Do you know what happened to him?” he said to Victor.

“I don’t. I took him hunting once, his first year here, before he moved out. He was good people. I never saw somebody so swept away by this place. He loved it all. He was an intense guy all around.”

Karen shifted her position, running her arms around Burns’ middle and burying her head in his shoulder. “It’s cold!” she said, laughing. The night continued to convulse above them, a huge panorama revolving across the horizon. The sharp dry cold sized Burns’ skin, his face. The food and the slides were all gone. He was awake.

“What’s the weather tomorrow, Victor? Could a person fly somewhere?”

“We’ll get one day,” Victor said. “Tomorrow you could fly anywhere you want.”

INSIDE, KAREN
kept his arm, the cold now real in the warm room. Most of the people at the party were dancing, and Burns saw Glen Batton and Julie moving slowly to the music, another song he knew but couldn’t identify. He didn’t know the name of five songs in the world. It was a wonder to him; he didn’t know any songs.

Karen asked him if he wanted to dance and he smiled and said he had to go. She led him back to the coats, which were in the dark entry hall. She handed him his parka, and the way she looked at him, frankly, without any real pity, led him to do something he hadn’t done in ten years. He leaned to her and put his free hand around her back and kissed her. She embraced him fully, but without anything frantic, and the dark of the hall and the smell of the coats made him feel like a boy again and now too he was full of resolve about tomorrow as he held her there, lifting her against him. He liked feeling her body and she shifted twice against him, moving so their legs were interwoven, and he heard her moan in the shifting coats, and he did not let go. Then he heard his name. Glen was saying his name.

“Excuse me,” Glen said, coming down the dark hallway. They had disengaged by the time he spoke again. “Julie asked me to tell you that I’m willing to take you out to Kolvik tomorrow.” Glen was looking at Karen. “The weather’s supposed to clear.”

“I appreciate that,” Burns said. “Are you sure?”

“The weather is going to be splendid.” Julie had come up behind him. She saw Burns putting on his coat. “Where are you going?”

“I thought I’d get some rest. Deviled eggs, the Grand Canyon, the northern lights . . . this is a lot for an old man.”

“He’d never seen the lights before,” Karen said, squeezing Burns’ arm.

“Here,” Julie said, taking his arm from Karen. “I’ll go with you.”

“No, please,” he said. “I know the way. Please. Stay.”

Julie retrieved her coat and pushed Glen back to the party. Karen stood around until she saw that Julie was serious about leaving, and then she took both of Burns’ hands and reached up and kissed him quickly, drifting back to the party herself. As he opened the door for Julie and pushed out into the white night, Burns saw Batton watching them.

The night was now still, the first stillness Burns had felt in Alaska, and he felt the weight of the profound chill, the northern sky fringed with erratic blooming light. “Her husband ran the armory here,” Julie said. “He was killed loading freight two years ago.”

“She stayed.”

Julie looked at him. “People stay,” she said. “You come out, you don’t go back.” Julie held his arm all along the crunching snowy road and they didn’t speak further, but fell into step like the oldest of friends, and Burns let the night and the cold disappear and he imagined that she was thinking what he was thinking: that tomorrow he would see where Alec died.

AT JULIE’S
trailer, the lights were on and two little boys sat at the kitchen table in their stocking feet drawing with crayons. “Well, hello, Timmo,” Julie said. “How are you?” Neither boy looked up, but Burns could see their eyes looking around. “Is this your cousin?”

Timmo nodded.

“Well, good. What’s he drawing?” The cousin turned his paper a bit so Julie could see the two figures on the sheet. Burns looked at the two brown smudges. The boy traced a line from one to the other. “This is you shooting a caribou, isn’t it,” Julie said. “And it is very good.” The boys smiled to each other. Julie opened the cupboard and put out a plate of graham crackers and poured two glasses of milk. “Now, Timmo,” she said, looking at her watch, “at eleven, you must go home.” She looked up at Burns. “This is Timmo and his cousin No Name.” At this the boys giggled. “Timmo is an artist who comes over some nights. His mother is in the Tahoe.” Burns stood there in his coat. He wanted one of the crackers. He wanted them all. He smiled at the beautiful native boys. What a day. He had been warm and cold and hungry. This was all so new.

Julie took her coat off and came over to him. “We’d better go to bed,” she said. “You’ve got a big day ahead, and if we don’t leave the room, they’ll never eat the crackers.”

THE NEXT
afternoon, in the low white angle of sunlight, Burns walked out to Glen Batton’s place, a trailer behind the Forest Service buildings. The light was terrific, knifing at Burns, and he squinted behind his sunglasses.

In the small yard he slipped and fell, and climbing awkwardly back up, saw that he had stumbled across the hindquarters of a caribou lying in the snow. “That’s the freezer up here,” Glen Batton said from the doorway. “Fresh meat all winter. Hop in the truck, I’ll be right there.”

Batton seemed in a good mood, quite happy to show Burns all he knew about the small airplane, which was tethered—along with a dozen others—out on the frozen sea. A runway had been freshly bladed through the drifts along the waterfront, and Batton talked Burns through all the preparations he made, taking off the heavy insulated blanket over the motor, checking the oil, freeing the flaps. He had Burns help him push the plane forward a foot, cracking the icy seal between the skis and the snowpack. He opened the passenger door and pointed out the emergency gear under the seat, the food, the cross-country skis, and then he pointed to a small orange box in the back of the small cargo space and said, “Don’t worry about that, Mr. Burns. That will start signaling on impact.”

And Glen was chatty on the way over to Kolvik, talking to Burns—over the intercom—about his work with the Forest Service. They flew up the river in the sunshine, Batton pointing out the moose and caribou. He explained that for the caribou counts he usually took one of the secretaries and that Julie didn’t like that. “Did you ever have a spat with your wife, Mr. Burns?”

“A spat?”

“You know, where she’s jealous over something you’re doing, although you’re totally innocent.”

“I guess, sometimes,” Burns said, his voice distant on the intercom, sounding small, like what it was: a lie. Helen had never fought with him, never complained. She had been a sweet, happy, confident woman who had—even in their extremity—never fought with him.

“Yeah, well, Julie . . .” Batton said. “That’s why she left last night and went home early with you.” Batton pointed ahead, where a small herd of caribou moved across the frozen river. “What am I going to do, land out there and screw Denise?”

A haze had come up, like bright smoke, and the plane rippled across the changing sky. Burns was concentrating, trying to see the country as Alec might have seen it.

“We take a lunch and stop for lunch,” Glen Batton went on. “But that’s lunch. People eat lunch. Right?”

The rest of the flight was different from what Burns could have foreseen. He couldn’t get Glen to put down in Kolvik. They came upon the small toss of cabins which was Kolvik and Burns’ heart lifted, but then it all changed quickly. There was no strip near the small village, of course, and Glen explained that it wasn’t safe to land in the snow so soon after the recent storms. He made one pass by the clearing near where Alec’s cabin had been and laid down a pair of tracks with the skis, but then circling he explained to Burns—through the noisy intercom—that it was too soft, too dangerous. Shoulder to shoulder with Glen Batton in the front seat of the smallest plane he’d ever been in, Burns asked again if they couldn’t possibly try to land.

“No can do, Mr. Burns,” Batton said, his voice tiny through the receiver, sounding miles away. “Too deep, too soft. No one else has been out either. That’s where he lived”—Batton dipped the passenger wing steeply and pointed—“below that hill.” There was no sign of anything in the perfect snow. They made one more broad circle over the area, seeing several moose in the valley where Alec supposedly had trapped, and then they headed west toward home. Burns felt the little plane rattle in the new headwind, the door flexing against his knee more than it had for the flight out, and he felt a disappointment that replaced hunger in his gut. He’d been so close. He could have jumped from the plane and landed in the drift. From the air, the place where his son lived had looked like all the other terrain they’d seen: snowy hills grown with small pine. Alaska gave up its stories hard. He’d learned nothing.

They had flown quite low on the way out, but now Glen was taking the plane up to three and then four thousand feet. The sun was obscured in the west in a thick roseate mist. Burns was silent, mad at first, feeling cheated, and then resolved simply on what he now knew: he would ask Blazo.

“You spoke to the sheriff,” Batton said.

“I did.” Even Burns’ own voice sounded remote on the intercom. “He was a help.”

“And now you’ve been to Kolvik.”

“Not quite, Glen. I’ve flown over it.”

Batton ignored him, resetting some instruments, finally saying, “Did you ever see Russia?”

“I never have.”

Batton leveled the plane at five thousand feet and turned it slightly, squinting through the windshield. “You know, it’s funny your being here. I wouldn’t have walked across the street for my old man and here you’ve come all the way north to see where your kid died.” Burns said nothing. “There.” Glen Batton pointed at a faint solid form below the sunset. “That line. That’s Russia.”