Midnight come again (17 page)

All the buildings were on pilings with steps up to the front doors or porches.

There were outhouses everywhere. There was no community sewer in Bering, although there had been some talk of an above-ground flowline system connected to a sewage treatment plant. The sooner the better, as the current nonsystem had the city of Bering acting as a leach field for the city of Bering. Enough to turn the entire state Department of Health a pale, algaeic green, the same color as some of the many shallow lakes that interrupted the city lots and streets in every direction.

It was so typical of the state government's reactive style of administration. Take a bunch of people who had been migratory hunter-gatherers for thousands of years and tell them they had to settle down in villages. They comply, and then the government won't give them schools so their kids have to be sent away from home to receive a high-school diploma. Molly Hootch and eleven hundred other village kids had sued to correct that situation. So now the villages had schools but no sewers, and the legislature wouldn't fund them, either, and probably never would until forced to by a lawsuit.

In the meantime, a cloverleaf was being built at the corner of Minnesota and International in Anchorage, a city of less than three hundred thousand people, at a cost of eighteen-point-two million dollars.

Ninety-five percent of that was in federal funds, true, but those funds could have been allocated to something more beneficial to the Alaskan population than another road in Anchorage.

It soothed Kate to focus on the folly of the Alaska state government in their dealings with Bush communities, rather than dwell on the fact that this was the first time she'd been into Bering since she had managed to strongarm Baird into buying her tampons so she didn't have to go in herself. It was the first and only time she'd seen him blush. She was, well, not comfortable, exactly, at the airport, doing her job at Baird Air. Content wasn't the right word, either. Safe didn't work because she didn't feel safe anywhere anymore. Call it uninvolved, for lack of a better word.

Uninvolved was good. Uninvolved, nonpartisan, uncommitted. The world rolled on but she wasn't part of it. She was one layer removed, insulated from the joys and sorrows and laughter of daily life by her very indifference to it. She wasn't hurting anyone, she kept herself to herself, she was the cat waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone. Nobody's seen you for four months! You couldn't have called? You couldn't have dropped somebody a postcard?

The words had been reverberating in her head since Jim shouted them at her the night before, and for the first time in nearly a year she felt something.

Guilt.

There was almost as much activity in town as there was at the airport; people loading trucks with boxes and bags and case lots of groceries, two marine chandlers doing a roaring business in propellers and engine oil and mending twine, the post office preparing pallets of wet lock boxes filled with Kuskokwim River reds. Villagers from up and down river, identified by the strong smell of hard smoked king salmon, jostled for space with fish buyers from Seattle decked out in cargo pants and olive green T-shirts from Banana Republic. Fishers in hip boots covered with fish scales formed groups to discuss and embellish their most recent catch. Japanese workers fresh off the processor staggered out of Eagle and AC with bags and bags of beef cut into rib eyes, New York strips, T- bones, filet mignons, tenderloin, pot roasts, rolled roasts, rib roasts. From another door came Koreans loaded with boxes of Camel cigarettes, unfiltered.

The restaurants were full, with lines to get in. The post office was jammed with locals and transients sending red salmon packed in dry ice to friends and family Outside. The fish were up the creeks and people were making money fast and spreading it faster. Busy, bustling, it would have been brawling if there had been any bars; the ka-ching of the cash register played a joyous harmony to the melody of commerce in this Kuskokwim River hub.

The source of all this activity was one continuous dock that ran between downtown and the river. The surface was made of two-by-twelve wood planks stained dark with the drippings of engine oil and fish gurry, and edged with twelve-by-twelves which served as mounting blocks for hoists and seats for tourists and a safety lip for the forklift backing up a little too close to the edge. The dock rumbled like thunder as trucks, tractors, forklifts and jitneys passed down the alleys created between canneries and warehouses and shippers and processors, and dust clouds from the gravel roads hung like ephemeral visitors from another world until they were exorcised by the next truck carrying a crew to work or an engine to a boat or a load of fresh frozen fish to the airport.

Kate, Mutt padding at her side, walked the dock slowly, taking it all in, if she but knew it retracing Jim's footsteps of that morning almost exactly. She saw the man and woman from Jim's room unloading a tender full of reds. The fish were averaging about nine pounds, she thought, and Gonzalez and Casey were hustling with the best of them. They both seemed to know their way around a dock. They both had at least ten years on every other member of their crew, too.

Gonzalez saw her and smiled. Casey saw her and frowned. She didn't stop.

One of the processors was pulling away, a boat registered in Seoul, Korea, and when it had cleared the dock and stood out to the middle of the channel, she saw the Kosygin, one hundred and twenty-five feet of rusting steel and deserted deck.

Dasvidanya, Jim had said, and then, spasibo. Kate didn't know much Russian but she knew enough to say goodbye and thank you, mostly due to Yuri, that sweet Russian man who had given her something to look forward to on those nights that stretched out too long. She looked down at the stainless-steel watch on her left wrist. A shout came from the head of the gangway, and she looked up to see Yuri himself beaming and waving at her. "Ekaterina! Come up, come up!" She looked around and thought she saw Casey glaring against the rays of the sun. "Hey, Yuri," she said, and let Mutt precede her up the gangway. He greeted her with an enthusiastic hug and three kisses on alternating cheeks. Still beaming, he dropped a hand to Mutt's head and scratched vigorously. Mutt, taking her cue from Kate, stood still for it, a resigned expression on her face. She'd met Yuri before, so his advances were marginally acceptable but, like Kate, she never cared much for strangers pawing her.

Yuri stood back, hands on Kate's shoulders, and continued to beam.

"Ekaterina! Finally you visit me, instead of me visiting you! I have not seen you down on the dock before this day! What do you do here?"

She shrugged, unobtrusively relieving herself of the weight of his hands. "Thought it was time I took a look around. All work and no play ... " She smiled.

He laughed uproariously. "Makes our Kate a dull girl, yes? I remember this American saying! Well, come, come, I will show you our ship, yes?"

"Sure, I'd like to see it." She followed him inside, almost tripping over the raised lip of the hatch. It felt like a long time since she'd been on a boat. But then it felt like a long time since she'd been anywhere but Bering, and done anything except clean, service and load airplanes.

It was dark and cool inside, a relief from the glare of the afternoon sun, and quiet in contrast to the hustle and bustle of the dock. "Not much going on today."

It was in fact very quiet for a working processor, but Yuri shrugged, spreading his hands wide. "We deliver our fish, we deposit our check, we take on supplies, we leave soon. Today, we rest. Come!"

He led the way to the galley, a long room that ran nearly the width of the beam of the ship. It smelled of the deep fat fryer and it was shrouded in a haze of cigarette smoke. Mutt sneezed.

A group of men were gathered around a table that ran the width of the room, which was set with half a dozen bottles of vodka, two brown sausages hacked into uneven slices and several round brown loaves of bread. Yuri stepped to one side as Kate followed him in, bellowing something in Russian and revealing his prize with a flourish of hands.

There was a rumble of feet to equal the thunder of the dock boards outside, and Kate was surrounded by a group of young men with admiring eyes. Everybody was talking at once, until Mutt barked, a single, warning sound. There was a momentary silence, until one of the young men, plump and dark, made a respectful remark. Everybody laughed and Kate was swept forward into a place of honor. Room was made for Mutt at her side, and Yuri put together a plate of bread and salt. He made a little speech and offered the plate with a bow. Kate got back to her feet and accepted it with a return bow, which went down very well.

Kate didn't think any of them were over thirty, and they were all dressed in Western clothes that looked just off the rack at the Gap.

Everyone's hair looked as if it had been cut beneath the same bowl Yuri's had been, and to a man they chain-smoked Marlboros. "We are Marlboro men, no?" one of them said, flourishing his cigarette in Kate's face.

"You are Marlboro men, no," she said, trying not to cough. She never could abide the smell of cigarette smoke.

Jack, learning this, had quit the week they met.

Yuri began introductions. There were Sergeis One and Two, Danya, Karol, Fadey, Gregori and Yakov and some others whose names Kate didn't manage to catch. They were very glad to see her and determined to make her feel at home, probably partly because she was the first woman they'd seen to talk to since they had left their's. They nudged each other over her scar, but nobody asked any leading questions, or Yuri didn't translate them.

One man, older than the rest, asked Yuri a question, and looked at Kate with more interest at the response. His eyes were deepset beneath thick brows, his nose was large and fleshy, his mouth a rosebud pout. "You work Baird?" he said. "You--" He said another word, and when she didn't understand, made large, swooping gestures with his hands. "Oh, am I a pilot," Kate said, and shook her head. "Sorry. No. I am not a pilot."

The man lost interest immediately, retreating to a corner of the room to brood over a bottle.

"Sorry, Ekaterina," Yuri said in her ear, "Ziven thinks everyone who is not pilot is not here." He looked anxious. "You are not offended? You understand?" Kate thought of some of the pilots she had known, and how there was barely room in the cockpit for them and their egos, and smiled. She ought to introduce Ziven to Larry Maciarello. There was a couple made in heaven. "I understand," she said.

The bread was a little dry, but she rubbed it in the salt and took a bite as they watched anxiously. She smiled. "Good," she said thickly,

"thank you." A shout went up and several hands hit her shoulder approvingly. A thick tumbler of vodka was shoved beneath her nose and it required a great deal of tact to refuse it. Disappointed, a Diet Coke appeared in its place, Yuri beaming that he could serve her in kind. She looked up to see Yakov on his feet proposing a toast. He raised his glass to her and tossed it off. Everyone else followed suit, and looked at her expectantly.

"Welcome to Alaska," she said and tossed off her Coke. Mutt sneezed again. There was tremendous applause, and a boombox began to blast the Beatles' White Album. Back in the USSR, indeed.

They wanted to know everything about her. How old was she? Was she married? Did she have children? Had she been born in Alaska? Had she lived there all her life? What did she do? Did she have a fiance? Where in Alaska? Had she been to Disneyland? The Grand Canyon? Tombstone, Arizona? The Rock and Roll Museum in Cleveland? New York? Hollywood? Did she have a boyfriend? Was Mutt a sled dog? Did Kate mush the Iditarod?

Did she have any sisters? Had she ever seen Michael Jordan play basketball? Well then, had she ever seen Wayne Gret- sky play hockey?

Was it true that all black Americans were seven feet tall? Did she have any cousins? Any nieces? Did she know any girls in town who might like to go out with a nice Russian boy?

"Nice Russian boys?" Kate said, peering around. "Where?"

There was another shout of laughter when Yuri translated this and more vodka disappeared. Kate was a little apprehensive but nobody wandered outside to fall overboard or picked a fight with anyone else or made a pass that couldn't be resisted. When Yuri decided to take Kate on a tour of the ship, it was unanimous; the entire crew fell in behind to form an honor guard.

The Kosygin was as rusty on the inside as it was on the outside. It wasn't very clean, either, the crew evidently content to allow the next batch of fish to wash away the evidence of the previous batch. The gear looked similar to what could be found on an American processor, only older and some of it in serious need of service. There were storage areas closed off by waterproof hatches, but none of the doors were locked and Yuri was more than happy to demonstrate the sealing mechanisms for a wide eyed, admiring Kate. She didn't see anything behind the doors while they were open. The crew quarters were the standard two-man staterooms with the obligatory pinups and piles of dirty clothes. There was a laundry and a kitchen that looked a lot like the ones on board the Avilda, a crabber she'd shipped on some years before.

Kate was disappointed. This was a Russian ship, after all. It seemed odd that Russians would wash their clothes in a machine made by GE.

They went back to the galley and began another round of toasts, pledging eternal friendship between Russia and America and undying devotion to Kate. Danya, red-faced and hoarse, embarked on a story that looked hilarious and which Yuri refused to translate. Kate laughed dutifully when everyone else did, which appeared to give them a good opinion of her, although she thought privately that merely by being there and being female she had fulfilled her role in their lives.