Midnight come again (20 page)

"Anyway, I went to work for the state in the attorney general's office--had to do something with that degree. I had a good time, but ...

"

"But?"

"It's a big town, Anchorage. Some people say it's Alaska's biggest Native village, you know, because there's more of us there than anywhere else."

"That's what they say."

"I missed Bering. I missed my family." She gave Kate another sideways look. "And then there was this guy ... "

"I knew there had to be a guy in it somewhere."

Alice laughed. "Yes, you did, or you ought to have. His name was Paul.

He was fresh out of school with a degree in marine biology, and he was so in love with me he couldn't see straight."

"Nothing wrong with that."

"No, except he was in love with the Bush more."

"Oh."

"Yeah. So I brought him home for Christmas in 1986. Mom liked him, and so did Gramps. The whole family did. He got a job with the state counting fish upriver, and we got married. I have a daughter," she added proudly.

"No kidding? How old?"

"Ten."

"What's her name?"

"Stephanie."

"Pretty name."

"Yeah, and she's really smart." Alice's proud smile dimmed a little. "I think she's going to want to go as soon as she can."

"Where? To school?"

"School, Outside, you name it. I don't think she's staying in Bering for much longer than it takes to graduate from high school."

"How about Paul?"

"Paul is long gone," Alice said with a wry twist to her mouth. "He did a study on the crash of marine life in the North Pacific, went totally tree-hugger on us and got a job with Greenpeace. Last I heard he was tying himself to a bridge in Seattle." A pause. "I was angry at first, but now I don't know. He's a believer, you know? Totally, passionately, completely. Must be where Stephanie gets it."

"Hey. Alice." A man stepped into their path. He was short and dark, with intense black eyes and a sullen frown. He was weaving slightly on his feet, and Kate could smell the liquor on him from six feet away.

"Charlie," Alice said without enthusiasm.

"I wanna talk to you." Charlie spoke with the slurred diction and the peculiar emphasis of chronic drunks, I wanna TALK to you, as if the forceful stress of one word above all others would draw attention and compel obedience. It achieved only the former.

"I told you, Charlie, it's over."

"I LOVE you, Alice. I can't live WITHOUT you." His sullen expression dissolved and he began to weep. "Why won't you TALK to me? I LOVE you. I know you love ME. Please TALK to me, please." "I said I was sorry.

Please, just leave me alone."

"Is it the booze? Because I can quit, any TIME. Just come BACK to me."

"No, Charlie."

"Bitch." They stepped around him and walked past. "Bitch, bitch, GODdamn bitch. Think you're so great. Think you're BETTER than everybody else!

Well you've got another THINK coming to you! I'LL show you!"

They walked on, Alice's head and color high, ignoring the curious or impatient glances cast their way.

"Bitch! I ought to--I ought to--you'll come back! You'll come back, and I won't BE here! THEN what'll you do!"

"Who was that?" Kate asked in a low voice.

"A mistake," Alice said briefly, and Kate said no more.

The Chevak family lived in one of the homes in the Tundra Subdivision northwest of town, by the side of a long gravel road that looked exactly like every other gravel road in Bering, laid down over reeds and brush and alder and avoiding the requisite number of ponds and lakes. "How do you find your way around this place?" Kate said when they reached the doorstep. "Mutt, stay." "Oh, she can come in," Alice said cheerfully, and opened the door. "Mom?

Gramps? Stephanie? I'm home, and I brought a friend!" She kicked off her shoes and Kate followed suit. "What do you mean, how do I find my way around?"

"There's nothing to tell where you are around here. It's just flat, no hills or mountains."

"There's always the river," Alice pointed out.

Kate was unconvinced. "I remember you used to talk about the river at school, it was almost like a person to you."

"It is. She is."

"She? The river's a she?"

"Oh you bet, about as contrary and cranky a she as you'd ever want to meet. Mom? Steph? Gramps?" She walked over to the wall and pointed. "We keep this one wall unpainted to remind us."

"To remind you of what?"

Alice pointed at a series of horizontal stains, one above the other.

"High-water marks. This one is from 1979, this one is from 1983--" she pointed to a mark above her head "--and this one is from the Great Flood of 1994."

Kate remembered reading about the chronic flooding beneath which Bering labored five springs out of six. Baird had referred to it as flood season, without animosity, simply a fact of life in Bering. "It's why most everybody tries to have two floors," she remembered him saying now.

"At least they can move their furniture upstairs while the downstairs dries out." He'd displayed marks similar to the ones Alice was pointing to now, left behind by various floods on the wall of the hangar, not without a certain perverse pride. You think you can survive in Alaska?

Try spring in Bering.

"It's backed up ice that causes the flooding, right?"

Alice looked at her quizzically. "You're kidding. Aren't you? Doesn't the Kanuyaq ever flood? Isn't Niniltna ever under water?" Kate thought of the tiny village on the banks of the eight-hundred-mile-long river that led to Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska. "No," she said, too abruptly, and tried to cover it with a weak smile. "Not that I remember. We're farther south than you, maybe we don't freeze up as hard."

"Huh. Well, Bering does flood, big time, on average once every ten years. There are little ones in between, too. And yeah, it's ice that causes it. The river freezes over every winter, and come spring and breakup, the ice jams and the water backs up in back of it, and over the banks it comes. And the villages flood."

Kate looked at the line above Alice's head. "Must be awful." Alice smiled. "It's kind of fun, actually. Everybody moves upstairs, and you have to use a rowboat to get to school and church and the grocery store.

It is a mess cleaning up the mud afterward, though."

Kate looked at the marks again, two of which were over her head. "I'll bet."

There was the creak of footsteps from the floor above and an old man appeared on the stairs. "Hi, Gramps," Alice said, bustling forward. "Are you hungry? Where's Mom? She said she'd cook if I made the salad."

"She went to get a salmon from your uncle." He peered past his granddaughter. "And who is this?"

"This is a friend from school. Kate, this is my grandfather, Ray Chevak.

Kate Shugak, this is my grandfather, Ray."

There was a sudden stillness about the old man. "Kate Shugak? Any relation to Ekaterina Shugak?"

"My grandmother, uncle," Kate said.

"Gatcha," the old man said softly. "Ekaterina's granddaughter."

Kate felt his eyes following her all evening. Over the broiled salmon, the boiled salmon eggs, over the salad and the sticky rice, she would look up and he would be watching her. He smiled in all the right places in the conversation and made all the right responses to remarks directed his way, but it was as if he were only half in the room; the most essential, the most vital part of him somewhere else, somewhere he'd rather be. Kate saw Alice glance at him in puzzled fashion from time to time, but she asked no questions to draw attention to his introspection.

Alice was the mirror image of her mother, Dorothy, who was as round and cheerful as her daughter. Alice's daughter, Stephanie, while bearing a close physical resemblance, couldn't be less like her mother or grandmother in personality. They were outgoing and verbal; she was shy and quiet. She wouldn't meet Kate's eyes directly, she didn't seem to look at anyone straight on. She set the table before dinner, she did the dishes and took out the garbage afterward, but she displayed no interest in Kate and very little in the conversation around the table. She ate her dinner with no real enjoyment, as if she was merely taking on fuel.

She was waiting, Kate realized, waiting to be dismissed from the family circle so she could take up her own life again, and the more efficiently she completed her chores, the sooner she would be free to do so.

Mutt liked her, though, more than anyone else in the room, and Kate trusted Mutt's instincts as much as and sometimes more than she did her own. Stephanie's room was directly across from the bathroom, and when Kate needed help to figure out how to use the chemical toilet Stephanie came willingly enough to show her.

On impulse Kate followed her into the girl's room, and hit her head on a model of the space shuttle Discovery hanging from the ceiling. "Whoa," she said, and put up a hand to steady the model.

The room was a shrine to space transportation and exploration. There were posters of the Mir space station, of the Saturn V rocket launching Apollo Eleven, of all other shuttles including the Challenger. There were other models hanging from the ceiling, from a Wright Flyer to an

3-16. A table made from an old door laid across two Blazo boxes was covered with nuts and screws and bolts and pieces of electronic equipment and tools and a lot of other parts and pieces Kate didn't recognize, some of them metal, some of them plastic.

There was also the terrific Star Wars poster of Anakin Skywalker standing in the sunlight of Tatooine, projecting the shadow of Darth Vader behind him. There were model ships of Naboo, the Imperial Senate, the Rebellion, and one lone starship Enterprise.

Kate didn't see any Barbie dolls. "So, my guess is you want to be Miss.

America and eventually go on to become the weather girl on the Today Show." The joke fell flat. "Or a pilot," Kate said, looking up at the models from real and imagined worlds. "You build all these?"

Stephanie cast a swift look from beneath her lashes, apparently checking to see that the hallway was clear in case she had to make her getaway from this nosy and uninvited guest. "Yes." "I'm impressed," Kate said, reaching up to touch the fuselage of some kind of jet. "I don't know anything about it, but these look well made. Very authentic. Like the real thing, only in miniature. You're very good."

Stephanie, sitting over an open book, said nothing.

"What are you reading?" Kate said, leaning over her.

The book was open to a diagram that looked like circuitry of some kind.

With seeming reluctance, Stephanie held her place with one finger and showed Kate the cover.

"Beginning Physics" Kate said.

"You work with the big man."

"I'm sorry?"

"The big man. Jim. He's a pilot. You work with him at the airport."

At something of a loss, Kate said, "Yeah, I do. How did you know that?"

"I saw you."

"Oh." Kate looked up at the model airplanes. "Maybe you take your model planes out past the airport to fly them?"

"Maybe. Is he going to be all right?"

"Who, Jim? Why, yes, I think so. They say so, at the hospital. I didn't--how did you know he'd been hurt?"

Shrug.

There were only five thousand people in Bering. It was impossible to keep anything secret in a small town, always assuming you wanted to in the first place, and there was no reason to hide Jim's assault. Take it as read that Stephanie had met Jim, had heard of his injury through the Bush telegraph and was concerned. Kate wasted a brief moment wondering if there was any age limit on Jim's conquests--she already knew there was no limit on species--and said, "I went up to visit him this afternoon. He woke up and recognized me, and the nurse said that was a good thing." "Huh," Stephanie said, and reopened her book.

Alice was pouring out after-dinner coffee in the kitchen. "That girl of yours is up there in her room studying beginning physics," Kate said.

"It is July, isn't it? School has been out for two months, right?"

"It's what she likes doing."

"Frightening. What did you say she was, ten?"

Alice, trying unsuccessfully to hide her pride, said, "The teachers say she could go all the way, college, graduate school, a Ph. D."

"What does she say?"

"She soaks it up." Alice looked around to make sure they were alone.

They were, but Kate noticed she dropped her voice anyway. "I can't offer her too much encouragement, at least not where anyone can see, you know how it is with us." "Yeah, I guess," Kate said. "Kind of. How do you mean, exactly?"

Alice put mugs on a tray. "You take milk? Good, so does everybody else."

She poured a healthy dose of Carnation Evaporated Milk into the bottom of all the mugs. "It's a Yupik thing, I guess. She has to get good grades to get into college, but the way we do things won't help her."

"Meaning?" Kate found the spoons and a saucer and put them on the tray.