a Night Too Dark (2010) (16 page)

“Maybe somebody should stay with him,” Kate said, looking over her shoulder.
“Maybe somebody should leave him the hell alone,” Old Sam said, shoving her out the door in front of him and closing it firmly in Auntie Vi and Holly Haynes’s faces.
“He never told us his name,” Kate said.
Holly Haynes took a shaky breath and let it out again. “Um—”
“You know him?” Kate said. She thought of the steel-toed boot, the boot of someone who worked around heavy equipment. “Someone from the mine?”
Haynes hesitated, and shook her head. “I was going to say, what happened to that hiker that the ranger was so upset about?”
“What hiker?”
“Remember, in the café? Memorial Day weekend?”
Memory came flooding back, of the wannabe backwoodsman in Dan’s office on the Step, of his raggedy-ass gear and his romantic notion to hike up to Bright Lake. “If anyone had gone missing, everyone would have heard before now. And Dan’s guy—” She hesitated, thinking back. “The toe of one of his boots had been punctured.” She shook her head. “No, it was the right boot. This guy had his left one.”
She looked at Old Sam. “But it couldn’t be, anyway. Dan’s guy said he was headed for Bright Lake.”
Old Sam snorted. “Bright Lake’s in about exactly the opposite direction from here. If this is him, bastard sure took the scenic route.”
Haynes persisted. “It’s been a month. I know it’s a long way, but anybody can go pretty far in a month.”
True enough. Kate compared her memory of the man in Dan’s office that day to the one sleeping in Johnny’s bed. If memory served, this guy seemed to be about the same height. His own mother wouldn’t have been able to identify him from the mess of his face.
“Probably should get him to Anchorage, have him checked out,” Haynes said. “I’ve got a pickup. If we put some padding in the back we can take him in in that.”
“Let him sleep,” Auntie Vi said. “Best thing for him.”
“Damn straight,” Old Sam said. “Dumb bastard.”

Ten

It’s not Davis,” Dan said that evening.
“Why not?”
Dan’s eyes were red-rimmed, his face sported a grayish red stubble, and his clothes looked slept in, but regardless he spread his arms and burst into song. “He once was lost, but now is found . . .”
Kate flinched. Old Sam winced. Mutt put her nose up in the air and howled.
“Thanks, Mutt, another country heard from,” Dan told her, and looked up again. “Davis did go missing. Wasn’t anything we didn’t expect. You saw him,” he said to Kate. “He was either gonna die or get rescued.”
“He got rescued?”
“He’s three days out and he stumbles over his own feet, falls down a couloir on the trail up to Bright Lake, and breaks his leg. He trips his beacon and I had to call in the goddamn Air Guard out of Eielson to pick him up. Cost sixty fucking grand. Our tax dollars at work. This guy ain’t him. I personally put him on a plane for Anchorage and told him to stay the hell out of my Park.”
There was a brief, charged silence. Kate and Old Sam looked at each other. “You aren’t missing anyone else?” Kate said.
Dan had to smile at the hopeful note in her voice. “Sorry.”
“So,” Old Sam said, putting into words what they were all thinking, “who the hell is this guy?”
A day later the Grosdidier brothers had their patient at the airstrip, bandaged like a mummy and ready to load on George’s Otter turbo for transshipment to Providence Hospital in Anchorage. Out of what she assured herself was a misplaced sense of responsibility, Kate was there to see him off. Peter Grosdidier roughhoused with Mutt while the other three brothers stood talking to Kate. Old Sam, who had taken a proprietary interest in the stranger, was present, too.
“He’s still not talking?” Kate said.
Matt shook his head.
“What’s wrong with him?”
Matt shrugged. “It could be post-traumatic amnesia. Or maybe dissociative amnesia, or even repressed memory.”
“What’s any of that goddamn medical mumbo jumbo mean in English?” Old Sam said.
Matt made a vague gesture that encompassed the Park. “His mind might be repressing something that happened to him out there. Hell, everything that happened to him out there. Pretty fair guess that it wasn’t a walk in the, well, Park for him. How long post-traumatic amnesia lasts is usually related to how serious the injury is.”
“Do people usually come out of it?”
“Yeah,” Matt said. “Usually.”
The corollary to that being sometimes they didn’t. “He had a lot of injuries,” Kate said.
“Tell me about it,” Matt said with feeling. “I had to order in a new supply of four-by-fours.”
Kate looked down at the unknown woods warrior. “If he does come out of it, how long will it take?”
Matt looked down at the guy, too. “No idea. But you don’t get over that amount of trauma in a day or two. One thing for sure, he probably isn’t a Park rat or he would have survived his trek in better shape.”
“And he woulda got himself found a lot quicker,” Old Sam said.
Maybe, Kate thought, and maybe not. Not every Park rat was as backwoods apt as Old Sam.
Everyone looked at the unknown hiker wrapped in olive green Army blankets, his one good eye open and fixed in a thousand-mile stare on something over his head that none of the rest of them could see. They all looked away again with the half-ashamed, half-relieved embarrassment the sane felt in the present of the not so. Kate had been relieved to see that the swelling on his face was reduced to the point where the shape of his features had returned to something less gargoylian, although it was still a roadmap of what he’d been through.
It was with relief they heard the approach of the Otter, and turned to watch it touch down at the end of the strip. It pulled to a halt in front of the Chugach Air Taxi hangar and George came out to open the door and pull up a step stool for the passengers to disembark. Mine workers got off the plane in less of a hurry to go back to work than they had got on to go on R & R. Many looked rather the worse for wear, and Kate hoped none of them would be operating heavy equipment any time in the near future.
Lyda Blue was last out, slinging a daypack over her shoulder. Kate caught her eye and raised a hand.
Lyda nodded and walked over to say hello. Her eyes dropped to the lost guy and the daypack slid from her shoulder to the ground.
“What?” Kate said.
Lyda opened her mouth and nothing came out. The color drained from her face and she started to go down.
“Whoa,” Kate said, catching her. “Guys. Guys! Help me out here.”
The Grosdidier brothers scampered around and caught Lyda before she went splat. The Otter’s step stool was confiscated and slid beneath Lyda’s butt, and her head was pushed gently but firmly between her knees. She submitted for several deep gasps of air, and then she struggled free, coming down on her knees next to the stretcher. A shaking hand reached out, a fingertip touched the lost guy’s cheek.
“Lyda?”
Lyda Blue looked up, her face frozen but for the tears spilling down her cheeks. Through numb lips she said, “It’s Wayne.”
Between them the lost guy stared unblinking at the sky.
And Sergeant Jim Chopin of the Alaska State Troopers chose this moment to set his Cessna down light as a feather at the end of the runway. He taxied to the much smaller hangar next to Chugach Air, killed the engine, and got out, to be greeted by an ecstatic Mutt who had identified the sound of his engine when he was still a mile out.
She escorted him back to the group at very nearly a prance. He studied Kate’s expression, eyed Lyda Blue’s crumpled face, passed briefly over Old Sam and the four Grosdidiers, and came to rest on the man on the stretcher. “What seems to be the problem here?”
But Dewayne Gammons is dead,” Jim said.
Kate had never heard him sound more at a loss. She didn’t blame him. “I know.”
“You found his body,” Jim said, reminding her, reminding everyone in the room. “Bear snack.”
“I know,” Kate said again.
“This girl—” Jim looked at Lyda, who was sitting in a chair looking pale and strained.
“Lyda,” Kate said. “Lyda Blue.”
“You know him well enough to make a positive identification?”
Since Lyda seemed incapable of speech, Kate said, “She works admin out at the mine. Plus they were friends.”
“She just identified him today?”
“She just got back from her week off. It’s the first time she’s seen him since he showed up.”
Jim was determined to be obtuse on the subject for as long as possible, because he knew what was going to happen when he stopped. “When, again, did you say this guy came out of the woods?”
“Yesterday,” Kate said. She knew what was coming, too, and she wasn’t any happier about it than he was. “Fourth of July.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Didn’t you say what’s her name, Hollister, Haversham—”
“Haynes,” Kate said.
“Yeah, Haynes, the goddamn Suulutaq staff geologist, didn’t you say she was at the homestead when this guy came crashing out of the woods?”
“Yes.”
“And she didn’t recognize him?”
“Jesus, Jim,” Old Sam said, defying all efforts to exclude him from what he knew was a hell of a story in the making. “He wasn’t hardly human when he come out of the woods. His own mother wouldn’t a recognized him.”
“Okay,” Jim said. “So now he’s on his way to—”
“Anchorage. Matt said he needed a big hospital, preferably one with a stable full of shrinks.”
“Okay,” Jim said again. “Say he is Gammons. He parked his truck, hiked out into the Bush, got lost returning his body to nature—”
Lyda flinched at the sarcasm in his tone.
“—evidently nature turns him down, and a month later he staggers onto Kate’s homestead. That about it?”
Nods all around.
“Okay,” he said for the third time, and there was no mistaking his irritation now. “Just fan-fucking-tastic. If Gammons is alive—more or less, from what I saw—then who the hell belonged to those pieces you people pulled out of the woods a month ago?”
And he glared at Kate and Old Sam and Lyda like it was all their fault.

Eleven

It was coming on seven o’clock at night, and Niniltna was in post-holiday mode, with crooked bunting hanging from the eaves of houses and Alaska and USA flags fluttering from porches. Everyone who wasn’t at fish camp or waiting on Alaganik Bay for the Fish and Game to announce an opener or working at the Suulutaq was out in force. Many of them had been drinking since the day before and were full to the brim with good spirits and bonhomie. Jim turned a blind eye to any and all lingering fireworks, and against all expectation on his way home did not actually see anyone driving under the influence, for which he was profoundly thankful.
He and Kenny had caught their bad guy in Ahtna, although the bad guy had not given up without a fight. Jim, not a small man, and Kenny, a very large man indeed, had both been put to strenuous effort to subdue one guy maybe five eight weighing maybe 150 pounds. All he had to do was resist and keep on resisting, and this he did with vigor and enthusiasm. The trailer park mob that poured outdoors to watch didn’t help, many of them previously known to both Kenny and Jim and many more well lubricated in celebration of the day. For a while the arrest appeared to be teetering on the edge of
precipitating a riot. Kenny was finally driven to putting his hand on his sidearm in a show of force. He didn’t pull it, he didn’t go that far, he just let it sit on the butt of the .357 Magnum. Jim was fully occupied in hanging on to their bad guy and couldn’t even hitch his gun belt in support, but that was okay. Enough of the crowd had seen
Dirty Harry
and were ready to abandon their fellow to his fate on the strength of it.
Their guy’s energy leached away with them and Kenny and Jim bagged him along with a trailer full of stolen property, including a closet full of weapons. The most interesting of these was an assault rifle with a canvas grip full of loaded clips. “Ah, Mr. Kalashnikov, I presume,” Kenny had said. “And if I’m not mistaken, a Type 81. I wonder where the hell that came from.” He looked at Jim. “Other than China originally, I mean.”
Jim didn’t care. He wasn’t a gun nut. He could clean and load a 9 mm Smith & Wesson automatic and his backup piece, an M&P .357, and produce a respectable grouping of shots on the police silhouette target he printed out on his computer once a month. He wasn’t a hunter, he didn’t own a rifle, and he owned no recreational weapons. A closet full of probably stolen and certainly unpermitted weapons, a majority of which appeared to qualify under AS 11.61.200(h)(1)(C) as prohibited, looked to him like a Class C felony and nothing more.
The good news was Bobbie Singh was going to be able to keep the perp out of his hair for at least five years and probably more if Jim was any judge of his character. The gentleman did not appear to him to be a viable candidate for time off with good behavior.
Still, yesterday’s had been a tense afternoon, made more so by a close encounter of the newspaper kind, this in the form of an interview by one Benjamin Franklin Gunn of the
Ahtna Adit
, the town’s weekly newspaper. He made Kenny and Jim pose for a photograph in front of the pile of illegal weapons. Jim liked trophy shots about as
much as he liked interviews. He was left feeling sore in body and in spirit, neither of which was alleviated by the necessity of reopening an investigation into a case that had been disposed of a full month before. While he did not grudge Dewayne Gammons his return to the ranks of the living, he was seriously pissed off over the prospect of trying to identify the month-old remains of yet another idiot who had gone wandering off in the Park without a clue as to what was lying in wait for him there.
The only way to make something foolproof was to keep it away from fools. He didn’t know who’d said that but it was a rule to by god live by if he’d ever heard one. He wondered when science would invent a buzzer that would go off on Maggie’s desk when a fool stepped off a plane at the Niniltna airstrip.
All he wanted now was food, a hot shower, and a bed. And the promise of at least a few fool-free moments.
Kate was on her way home, too, by prior arrangement detouring first by Auntie Edna’s. The best bulk cook among the four aunties, she always had something on the stove in a quantity large enough to feed the crew of an aircraft carrier. Her father had been a Filipino and a damn fine cook and he had taught Auntie Edna well, and today what was on the stove was lumpia, chicken adobo, and rice.
None of that was new. What was new was the line at the door, made up mostly of, you guessed it, Suulutaq Mine workers. Kate arrived to find Auntie Edna in the act of exchanging a recycled garbage bag containing four white Styrofoam containers for a fistful of cash from a young mine worker who might have been drooling a little out of the corner of his mouth. Kate didn’t blame him, given the collection of aromas wafting from Auntie Edna’s kitchen.
Auntie Edna looked up to see Kate take her place at the end of the line, and waved her forward with an imperial gesture. “My niece,” she said, “very important, busy person.” Everyone else shifted their feet and sighed and sulked and Kate could feel their resentful
glances boring into her back, but none of them was so foolish as to walk away and lose their place in line.
“When did you get started in the take-out business, Auntie?”
Auntie Edna, normally an Olympic-class grump and hands down the sourest of the four aunties, this fair summer evening looked happier than Kate had ever seen her. “Some boys follow their noses to my kitchen on Memorial Day,” she said, aiming a beam of Auntie Joy–wattage at the line. “Other boys follow. Good eaters, all them boys.” She lowered her voice. “And good payers, too.”
Over her shoulder Kate saw that Auntie Edna had borrowed some of the larger pots from the school cafeteria, which sat steaming on a stove with all four burners on high. Tacked next to the door was a hand-lettered menu, beginning with bagoong. Kate toted up her order and was ready with her tab when Auntie Edna handed out a full bag, and almost went into shock when Auntie Edna waived payment. “My niece,” she told the line, turning Kate to face them, hands on her shoulders holding her on the top step. “She make mine happen. She why you here. Okay, next?” A firm shove and Kate was displaced on the top step by the next in line.
The combined smells liked to drive Kate insane before she got to the homestead, and she was conscious enough to look guilty when Jim raised an eyebrow at how few lumpia had survived the trip. It wasn’t her fault. Lumpia was finger food. You can’t eat long rice and drive at the same time. “Did you know Auntie Edna is running a take-out restaurant out of her kitchen?”
He nodded. “I’d heard something about it.”
She shook her head. “Auntie Vi sells her B and B, Auntie Balasha is selling kuspuks at the Riverside Café, now Auntie Edna is selling Filipino takeout out her back door. What next?”
“I’ll set the table while you shower,” he said, and picked her up and kissed her. She kicked him in the shins with one of her dangling feet, but not very hard.
Jim pulled all the leftovers out of the refrigerator to join what Kate had brought home, which didn’t look like anywhere near enough to either his eye or his stomach. Fifteen minutes later they sat down to a meal that while it adhered to no particular nutritional guideline was immensely satisfying. Jim had even sliced some sashimi from a fresh king filet he found in the refrigerator and mixed up a wasabi–soy sauce accompaniment.
All was quiet for a time, and then Jim sat back and burped in a very satisfied manner. “I might live.”
“Me, too. So how was your day, dear?”
He told her. “How was yours?”
She fetched the boot remnant that was still sitting on the deck.
He studied it, turning it over in his hands. “Suulutaq buys gear for their employees, right?”
“Outside gear. Parkas, jackets, bibs, overalls.”
“And boots?”
“And boots.”
“Boots like this one?”
“Almost exactly like this one, I’d say.”
He grunted, and set the boot aside.
“Bed?” she said.
“God, yes,” he said, and followed her up the stairs. They stripped off their clothes and tumbled down together and were instantly asleep.
The next morning Kate woke up, sat up, and said, “Who else hasn’t shown up for work at Suulutaq in the past month?”
Jim opened one sleepy blue eye and considered. “Good question. You’re back on the clock.”
She threw back the covers and swung a leg over the edge of the bed.
A long arm snaked out and grabbed her before she got both feet on the floor. “Where do you think you’re going?”
She let herself fall back onto the mattress. “I think I’m staying right here.”
He pulled her beneath him. “Good decision.”
That it was.
After checking in with Maggie at the post and turning a blind eye to the accumulating pile of pink call slips she had left in the exact center of his desk, Jim went to Old Sam’s house. This was a log cabin on the very edge of the Kanuyaq River, about five hundred feet north of Ekaterina Shugak’s old house, now occupied by Martha Barnes and her large brood of children, six or eight of which he could hear whooping and hollering in a game of cowboys and Indians. Sounded like the Indians were winning.
Old Sam’s cabin was very much lost in the tall grass, and the forget-me-nots, columbine, and moss campion that were running riot over the sod roof provided a much-needed homing beacon. A path led to a weathered but sound wooden walkway that led in turn to the cabin door, and from there down to a small dock. At the end of the dock there was a bench made from lengths of alder woven together in a sturdy frame that had achieved the patina of old pewter. On that bench sat Old Sam, coffee mug in hand and feet crossed on an overturned galvanized steel bucket. He’d heard Jim’s footsteps on the dock. “Go on in, get yourself a mug up if you want.”
Jim had to duck to get in the door. Inside, there was a counter with a sink and a pump handle, an oil stove for cooking, a wood stove for heat, a beat-up brown leather Barcalounger and shelves made of two-by-twelves fixed to every inch of available wall space. Jim, perforce, paused to look at some of the books on the shelves. Old Sam’s taste in reading was catholic, he’d give him that. He had everything ever written by Robert Ruark, including three different editions of
Use Enough Gun
. Wilbur Smith and Peter Capstick were well represented, and Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour very much in evidence.
Jim pulled down a book with a leopard-print cover that revealed itself to be a much-thumbed copy of
The Truth About Hunting in Today’s Africa
, which fell open to a black-and-white photo of “the dreaded tsetse fly.”
He closed the book and replaced it on the shelf. So far as he knew Old Sam had never left Alaska.
The next shelf was dedicated to Captain Cook, including a venerable edition of Cook’s three-volume log bound in worn maroon leather with gilt titles, a copy of Tony Horwitz’s
Blue Latitudes
, a favorite of Jim’s, and the Cook biography by Alistair MacLean. The next shelf was reserved for Alaskana, autobiographies by Wicker-sham and Gruening and Hammond, histories of the war in the Aleutians and the gold rush, bios of Bush pilots. He opened one at random and found dog-eared pages with copious notes in the margins.
He’d never thought of Old Sam as a reader. The old man had always seemed to him to be more a man of action than reflection. He shrugged and replaced the volume on the shelf. No law said a man couldn’t be both.
A chrome-legged dining room table and chairs that would have been new around 1957 took up the center of the room. Overhead was a narrow sleeping loft, reached by a homemade ladder whose uprights were worn smooth from long use.
It felt very familiar, and after a moment Jim knew why. Although older and smaller, Old Sam’s cabin looked a lot like Kate’s old cabin. Well, why not? Old Sam must have known Kate’s father. They might even have helped put up each other’s cabins. Why screw with a floor plan that worked.
This cabin had electricity, though, and a plug-in coffeepot. Jim poured a fluid the viscosity of thirty-weight into a boat mug he found on a shelf and added a precautionary dose from the can of evaporated milk standing providentially near to hand.
The sun was warm on his face as he walked down the dock. The
current was running strongly downstream, where other cabins and houses and docks could be seen with their toes in the swift-running water. Old Sam moved over on the bench, which creaked, but not alarmingly. Jim sat down next to him and crossed his heels on the edge of the dock. He took a sip of coffee and hid his wince. “Meant to say yesterday, aren’t you supposed to be down Alaganik way this time of year?”
“I would be if the goddamn fish hawks would call an opener.”
“Who’s minding the
Freya
?”
“That Jeppsen boy and the Lestinkof girl Kate wished on me.”
“Who’s minding them?”
“Got her anchored up just offshore of Mary’s site. She’s keeping an eye out.”
The two men contemplated the passing river in companionable silence. A pair of eagles chittered from the top of a nearby scrag, three ravens chased each other in a madcap spiral, and a lone seagull zeroed in on the carcass of a spawned-out salmon cast up on a nearby sandbank. Almost immediately half a dozen other seagulls materialized to fight for their share.
Martin Shugak went by in an ancient, paintless dory powered by a seventy-five-horsepower Mercury outboard engine that looked brand-new. He raised a hand in greeting to Old Sam, saw Jim and hunched his shoulders and looked the other way.
“Nice outboard,” Old Sam said.
“Don’t go there,” Jim said.
A little while later Edna Aguilar came upriver in an olive green inflatable boat with a two-horsepower Evinrude on the back that looked like a large mosquito. It sounded like one, too.
“Is it just me or does she always look pissed off?” Jim said.
“It ain’t just you,” Old Sam said.
The proper thing would be to compliment Edna on last night’s meal but Jim was too scared to. Both men gave perfunctory waves
and prayed silently that she would go on by. They breathed more easily when she had.
Andy Martushev appeared in his canoe, paddle moving through the water at a steady beat, the sun illuminating the crystalline drops of spray over the bow when he changed sides.
“Andy,” Old Sam said when Andy was in earshot.
“Sam,” Andy said.
“Want some coffee?”
“Got some waiting on me at the café.”
“And somebody a lot prettier to wait on you,” Old Sam said.
Andy grinned and paddled on by. “He’s dreaming,” Old Sam said.