Deadly Detail (18 page)
When I lugged the empty buckets, brush, and the extra oil into the lodge, Angie was in the kitchen. She and Debby seemed to be discussing something very seriously, the festive mood gone. Angie handed me a plate with two fried duck eggs, a hunk of reindeer sausage, and two biscuits. I carried it out to the table. I didn’t think they needed me at the moment. Angie’s ears are pierced, by the way. Now if I can just remember that.
Our leave taking was solemn, not sad. That is the bush way. The women hadn’t seen each other for ten years, and might not again for ten more, although I suspected I’d find excuses to drop Angie off at Fort Yukon now and then. No need to wait for or say goodbye to Joe. We wander in, we wander out. If we were back in a year or five it would be as though we’d never left.
Angie and Debby hugged long and hard, and Debby gave me a hug, but a little more tentative than usual. I don’t think she’d quite forgiven me for being of the wrong culture. She didn’t escort us out. She simply turned back to her baking.
We paused on the porch while Angie inhaled the fragrance of spruce. She was looking up at the trees and nodding. “Funny, Fort Yukon is just like Crooked Creek, but we’re above the Arctic Circle, aren’t we?”
“Yep, that we are. It’s the rivers that do it. They thaw the permafrost and you get real trees, only that doesn’t work for Bethel because the Bering Sea is too close and too cold.”
We came out of the trees next to the plane and Angie sniffed. “Smells like my kitchen sink.”
“Thought you might be getting homesick. Want to play tourist?”
“Sure. Now that I’ve crossed the Arctic Circle, all I have to do is sleep with a bear and wrestle an Eskimo to become a sourdough…or is it the other way round?”
“I think that part is optional. There is a certain biological connection you’re supposed to make with the Yukon, but maybe we can skip that one. Come on, something to show you.”
We turned toward the river and angled across the runway. The church gleamed white through the trees. Angie grabbed my hand and pulled me after her. The path from the airport was worn inches deep from a hundred years of the feet of the faithful, and was carpeted by spruce needles. The trees arching over us were already inducing the feeling of a cathedral.
“Alex, give me your handkerchief.”
“Huh?”
“Give me your handkerchief. I want to cover my head.”
“Angie, this church is Episcopal, not Catholic. Anglican, you know? Bishops, no Pope.”
“Shut up, Alex. God is inside and I need to talk to him. You go peddle your papers.” She took my handkerchief, draped it over her head and marched up the stairs. I felt I had been dismissed, so I sat down on the steps to wait.
A miniature altercation was in progress under one spruce tree. Two chipmunks seemed to be fighting over one cone, although there were a dozen under the same tree. I was just thinking how human that reaction was when the cone turned sideways. One ’munk was holding the cone and rolling it, the other busily digging inside and removing tiny white kernels. They made a pile, then gobbled them up, pouching out their tiny cheeks, and scampered back into the trees making a blurred series of McDonald’s arches.
They were back in a minute, and had attacked another cone, when a whir through the trees announced the arrival of an owl. That’s one good thing about owls, if you’re a chipmunk, bad if you’re an owl. They’re so heavy and short-winged that they don’t fly silently, at least not when they’re navigating through trees. The ’munks disappeared. They didn’t run away, they just vanished, like a conjurer’s trick. Now you see them, now you don’t. The owl perched on a large branch thirty feet up and sat there blinking yellow eyes. He looked too fat to be hungry.
When Angie came out twenty minutes later, her countenance did seem to be radiant. I think that’s the biblical terminology. She handed back my handkerchief and we turned toward the runway. “Thanks, Alex. That was really special. Have you seen that altar cloth? It’s unbelievable.”
“Yep, I’ve seen it. That’s what I wanted to show you. Did you…uh…find anything else inside?”
“You bet I did. I lit a candle for Stan and God told me Stan is fine but just a bit worried about me. God says that as long as I’m okay, Stan will be happy to wait for me. Stan knows you’re taking care of me and he appreciates that. He also says not to blame yourself about the bomb because you couldn’t have suspected it was there. ”
We turned toward the village and walked in silence. Angie wasn’t quite on this planet at the moment, and I certainly had no comments.
At the store, Angie stopped on the steps to speak to several of the old-timers and elicited a lot of grins, many of them toothless. I pulled her up the steps and over to the jewelry counter.
“Oh, Alex, look at those mukluk earrings, they’re darling.”
“Yep, and they were made for you. Kitty wanted them to nestle against your cheeks.”
“Kitty?”
“Kitty Carter.”
“Another old girlfriend?”
“Nope, but she did go to high school in Fairbanks and she stood out in the crowd. She was doing beadwork even then, and everyone knew she’d be famous someday. When you put on these earrings, her day will have come.” I took the little fur booties out of the case and carried them over to the checkout counter.
Angie had slipped them from the card and put them on so I was buying the small square of paperboard. The clerk was smiling. I looked at Angie, and we were all smiling. I turned back to the clerk. “When you see Kitty, would you tell her thank you from Alex Price?”
The clerk nodded and reached for the box of frozen strawberries the next customer was proffering. Angie and I turned back and walked along the side of the airport to the plane.
“Alex, are you a romantic, by any chance? That was a nice gesture for a hard-bitten, scruffy old bush pilot.”
I didn’t have an answer for that, so I pointed her up the steps. “Jump in, it’s off we go, into the wild blue yonder….”
“Are you colorblind? That sky is charcoal gray.”
“Give me twenty minutes.” I did take a little extra time running up the engines and exercising the props, but all systems were go. We blasted off and climbed like preachers during the rapture.
The cloud was only a thousand feet thick and as soon as we topped it, the Crazy Mountains were ahead of us, cloud packed against their northern edge, new snow gleaming in sunshine. I have no idea why those mountains are named Crazy, but someone was serious about it, even naming the East Crazy Mountains and the West Crazy Mountains. There is a plateau between them and the White Mountains, so maybe they deserve their own name. We were fifty miles east of our previous crossing, but the mountains were just as rugged. With two happy engines humming, the mountains were spectacular, not threatening.
Angie was fascinated again, and this time, by staying at six thousand feet, we had the whole panorama of mountains around the Tanana Basin. We left the cloud behind, the Crazies glistened in sunshine, snow fields almost too bright to look at, castellated by basalt or granite spires worthy of Sydney Lawrence. Snow-covered mountains ringed the entire horizon.
Angie’s neck was in serious danger from swiveling. “It’s so beautiful and so big. Can you imagine prospectors covering these mountains before they had airplanes and helicopters?”
“No, I can’t imagine it, but they did. There isn’t one creek down there that someone didn’t walk to and prospect. Remains of cabins are scattered all through those valleys.”
“Did they find gold, Alex?”
“About one in a hundred, maybe fewer. They hunted and trapped and lived off the land, but no. For every dollar that was invested in Alaskan prospecting, about eighty cents worth of gold came out. That doesn’t count the years of labor, sometimes whole lifetimes spent with nothing to show for it.”
“But you hear stories….”
“Yep, and most of the stories are true. A few people got fabulously wealthy, and those are the stories you hear. It’s exactly like Las Vegas. When someone wins a million dollars, the casinos are delighted and very happy to pay. Newspapers and local TV stations pick up the account, twenty million people read the stories, troop to Vegas, and lose their shirts.
“The people who really made money off the gold rush were in the support business, transportation and such. Have you heard of Cap Lathrop?”
“You mean like the Lathrop Building and Lathrop Theaters?”
“Yep, almost every theater in Alaska at the time, the Midnight Sun Broadcasting Network, Fairbanks Air Service, Usibelli and Suntrana coal mines, whatever, if it made money, Cap owned it.”
“And he got his start gold mining?”
“No, he got his start with fifteen one-room log cabins lined up along what is now Eighth Avenue, with a Jody in every one of them.”
“Stan spent a few years prospecting. Was that foolish?”
“Not at all. You know Stan spent two summers digging up the creeks between Flat and Crooked? Last year someone dug ten miles upstream from the last spot Stan tried and found what may be the richest deposit ever discovered. It’s a crapshoot, Angie. The gold is there, and so are the million-dollar jackpots in Las Vegas. You get lucky or you don’t, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Did I do a bad thing when I talked Stan out of prospecting?”
“No. He missed the big bonanza by ten miles. In another season he might have missed it by one mile. No, Angie, you were the best thing that ever happened to Stan. He wouldn’t have traded you for truckloads of gold. See that rise on the left with the highway running across it?”
“Where? Oh, yeah.”
“That’s the Steese Highway crossing Eagle Summit. It’s below the Arctic Circle, but because it’s high, you can see the midnight sun from there.”
“How far are we from Fairbanks?”
“Maybe eighty miles, but it’s a beautiful drive. What everyone does is set a camera on a tripod and starting around eleven at night in late June, snap a picture every fifteen minutes. You know, like a double exposure but eight or ten of them. They show the sun dipping right down toward the horizon and going back up again.”
“That’s neat. So there was no chance of Stan getting rich?”
“Sure, there was always a chance. We both knew it was a long shot. We never kidded ourselves, but if you don’t buy a lottery ticket, then you will not win the lottery. If you do buy one, you won’t win it anyway, but you tried. Oh, my gosh, Angie, look at that plateau.”
“It’s moving, what’s wrong? It looks like it’s covered with ants.”
“Not ants, hang on.” I chopped the power, did a wing over, and dived down to skim the plateau. Fifty thousand caribou made a river of horns, a hundred yards wide and no ends in sight, all trotting southeast toward their winter home in Canada. Angie’s mouth had dropped open and maybe, for a change, she was struck speechless. We swung back toward Fairbanks and climbed over the next ridge. Valleys ahead of us dropped away toward Fairbanks.
“Is that the Tanana Valley?”
“Yep. Fairbanks in twenty minutes.”
“Wow, eighty miles?”
“Not any more, that was five minutes ago. We’re descending under full power.”
“Never mind getting technical. Aren’t you supposed to radio in or something?”
“Not this time. Angie, someone in Fairbanks thinks we’re dead. Let’s keep it that way, and maybe they’ll stop trying to kill us. We can’t land at International without reporting the control zone on the radio, but Phillips Field is almost outside the control zone. We can get away with landing there with no radio, so let’s do it.”
“Phillips Field?”
“Yep, general aviation. Hawley Evans’ Fairbanks Air service, Horace Black’s flight school, Jess Goldstein’s repair facility, and about a hundred private planes tied down for half the price at International.”
“Then why do some people use International?”
“Lighted runways, instrument approach, radio control, all depends on what’s important to you.”
We passed the gold dredge at Fox, skimmed over the final hill low enough to be in the radar clutter. I backed off the power, slowed us down. We whiffed by the KFAR Radio tower on Farmer’s Loop Road, swung over the college, and I lowered the flaps to twenty degrees.
“So, where’s this airport?”
“Right there, beside College Road.”
“Alex, that’s not an airport, it’s a cow pasture.”
“Maybe you should read your book for a minute.” Landing gear came down with a satisfying clunk. At high RPM, the engines were straining but slowing us down. Fifty-foot spruce trees passed under us. Slam the flaps down full, chop the power, sideslip down to the end of the runway and lock up the brakes. Nothing to it. We taxied up to Jess Goldstein’s hangar.
The hangar’s sixty feet long with one big door that hinges out in the middle when it’s raised, so the effect is like the bill on a baseball cap, and serves about the same purpose. Four airplanes inside were works in progress: a Piper Cub with no fabric on the fuselage, a twin Beech missing one engine, a Cessna 180 in the process of receiving a new wing, and a Taylor Craft that probably needed everything.
Jess was at a portable workbench, rebuilding the engine from the Beech, but he wiped his hands on a rag and came out to meet us. He wears overalls and plaid shirts, so you’d take him for a farmer instead of the very fine mechanic that he is.
“Hi, Alex, what’s up?”
“Jess, need to flush the engines and change the oil. It might be contaminated.”
“Sure, but might be a couple of days. I’ve got to get that Beech out. Want to just buy the oil and do the job yourself?”
“Nah, a couple of days is fine, if you’ll rent us a beater.”
“Only thing I’ve got at the moment is an old Dodge Power Wagon. She ain’t pretty, but she’ll take you around town. Say thirty bucks a day?”
“Sold. Where shall I park the bird?”
“Leave it. Call me in a couple of days.” He sauntered over to the wall, reached up to pluck a key ring from among several hanging from nails on a sheet of plywood. He tossed me the keys and turned back to his engine repair.
Angie had been standing on the wing, not sure which way we were going, but climbed down and followed me around the hangar. The Power Wagon was parked beside the gravel road behind the hangar, and Jess was right. It wasn’t pretty. The khaki color was reminiscent of army surplus, and the body wasn’t quite straight with the wheels, so it had probably been rolled over, but the doors worked. We climbed in gingerly and sat on the old army blanket that almost covered the broken springs in the seat, but the engine caught instantly and purred.