Nothing Gold Can Stay

TWELVE

Wood River Mountains, September 3

She was so tired.

Tired and numb to anything but putting one foot down after the other.

That morning there had been planes flying overhead, and he had kept them both in the rough shelter of spruce boughs he had built the night before. He wouldn’t allow a fire, and she was as cold as she was tired. He had insisted she put on every article of clothing she had, and still she was cold, shivering, teeth chattering, she couldn’t seem to stop them.

It didn’t matter, because none of it seemed real, not from the moment she had heard the shots and come running down the path from the creek to see him standing over Mark’s body.

Mark, already dead. Mark, to whom she would now never be able to say she was sorry.

Somewhere deep inside, the pain and the grief stirred once, stilled again. To feel pain, to feel grief, one must think, and she would not allow thought.

She would not think of how he had stood looking at her as seconds passed, then minutes, as she did nothing, said nothing. No protest, no scream for help, she hadn’t tried to run, nothing. He’d told her he was hungry, and she’d made him the lunch she had planned for Mark. He’d admired her beadwork, and she’d said thank you. He’d told her to take her clothes off, and she had. He’d told her to lie down on the bed, and she did. He had raped her, and she had endured it, motionless, unprotesting, her husband’s body cooling in the creek not fifty feet from where they lay.

She didn’t know where they were, except that they were in the mountains, tall ones. He seemed to know where he was going, and she was aware enough to see the sun rise in the east and to see that they were traveling in a southeasterly direction.

They had seen grizzlies feeding on salmon in the creeks they crossed. They had seen moose standing in still ponds, up to their shoulders in water and with their heads submerged as they rooted for forage. They had seen rabbits beginning to shed their brown summer coats and replace them with winter white. They had seen no other people.

He carried a backpack, and they ate food cold from cans. They couldn’t risk a fire, he said, not now that they were so close to home. When they got home, he said, he would build her a fire in the stove and she would be warm again. He’d missed her, he said, he’d had no one to cook for him, to clean for him, to put the buttons back on his shirts, to help him tan the hides of the mink and the marten and the beaver he trapped during the winter, to help him dress and butcher the caribou he shot in the fall, to plant the garden in spring. He smiled at her, his odd light-colored eyes serene with happiness.

He waited for an hour after the sound of the plane engines died away before he crawled out of the shelter. He stood at the opening for a long time, listening. She stared at the backs of his knees.

He turned and bent down to hold out his hand to help her to her feet. She came out clumsily, her hair catching on a spruce branch, a lost bead, red as a drop of fresh blood, spilling from her pocket. He brushed the twigs from her jacket and jeans, plucked a spider from her collar, adjusted the straps of her knapsack. He stood looking down at her, smiling. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” he said, “and now I’ve found you.” He traced her cheek with a finger and smiled. “And now we can go home.”

She shouldn’t have run off, he had told her reproachfully during the night. She was safest with him, he would protect her, watch over her, and their children. She almost came alive at that, but then he spread her legs and raped her again, and again she went numb.

It was all happening to someone else, anyway. She, Rebecca Hanover, had a husband and a home and a job. She, Rebecca Hanover, lived in Anchorage, and went ice-skating on Westchester Lagoon during the winter, and bicycling on the Coastal Trail in the summer, and took beading lessons at Color Creek Studio, and had coffee with Nina on Saturday mornings at City Market. She, Rebecca Hanover, did not hike through the backwoods, cold and tired and hungry and terrified. She, Rebecca Hanover, was not raped in those woods by a stranger who had murdered her husband.

So of course none of this could be happening to her. It was a dream, a bad one, from which she would soon wake up, warm and safe in her own bed.

All she had to do was wait.

Old Man Creek, September 3

The second morning began the same way the first had, with tai chi and a sweat. Afterward, Moses put Tim and Amelia in the skiff and took them down to his favorite fishing hole.

Bill sat on the front porch with a lap full of files that needed closing after the latest spurt of infractions during the most recent fishing period. She regarded the thick pile with some disfavor, wondering if perhaps she wouldn’t rather be hip deep in fish gurry after all.

Bill was in the business of justice, not retaliation, and she evaluated every case brought before her with the same care and attention. The problem was, the fishermen against whom fish and game trooper Charlene Taylor swore out complaints kept saying the same things, over and over again, until they sounded like a sixth grader excusing the loss of his homework. The engine broke. The trooper didn’t give us the signal. My clock stopped. The bilge pump went out. The engine broke. The mechanic got seasick. The net got caught in the prop. The engine broke.

So far Bill had heard every excuse except “My dog ate it,” and it was difficult to summon up the necessary compassion to temper the letter of the law and still enforce it. Her problem was she had no tolerance for fools, and after sitting on an average of three hundred such cases every summer, along about August most of the fishers looked pretty foolish.

First file, Gary Samidia, fishing over the line, two-thousand-dollar fine, four points on his fishing license. Another four and he wouldn’t fish next year. Eric Redden, nets in the water before the period started. It was his second time before her that summer and the third time in two years, and she was tired of smelling his unwashed self in her courtroom, which was very small and lacked ventilation. Three thousand dollars, five hundred suspended, and six points. Silas Wood, spotted from the air with his nets in the water a good hour after the period on Friday before last. He’d pled a burst hydraulic line, and had held up a length of tubing that he swore was the guilty party. Silas, Silas, Silas, you dumb son of a bitch, if you take all the fish before they hit the creeks, there won’t be any left alive to spawn and send chilluns back out to sea.

Still, Silas had lost his wife two years before and was now the sole support of seven children, all under twelve years of age. One thousand, seven hundred fifty suspended, no points, and forty-five hours of community service. Bill had already talked to the high school principal. Silas would serve out his sentence in the computer lab there, proctoring the fall semester’s students during the day and at night receiving some tutoring in the finer arts of data entry. Mayor Jim Earl was chivvying the town council into hiring another clerk for City Hall, and Bill was pretty sure he would succeed.

She put aside the stack of fishing violations with relief and made herself a cup of coffee. By the time she came back out on the porch, Moses had returned with the two kids and a boatload of fish, and they were unloading down at the dock. She stood watching for a few moments, sipping at her mug. Tim liked cleaning fish and he was good at it, the tip of the knife inserted in the anus, the quick slit up the belly, the efficient scooping out of guts. Amelia was equally efficient, if a little slower. Lack of practice, probably. She hadn’t been out to her family’s fish camp this summer. Her husband wanted her home. Probably to use as a punching bag.

Bill sighed and sat back down, setting the mug on the railing and picking up a single legal file sitting separate from the others.

It was the record of a presumptive death hearing, the results of which the parents of the deceased were challenging. A young man, one of a youth group affiliated with a Presbyterian church out of Akron, Ohio, who had come to Alaska for a lesson in wilderness experience, had gone hiking with three friends on a glacier in the Wood River Mountains. The young man had gone for water and disappeared, and after four days Liam Campbell had called off the search and requested a hearing on the presumptive death of the young man.

At the hearing, he had displayed photographs of the area, photographs of the pot lying on its side next to a sluggish stream of meltoff, a map with distances penciled in showing a narrow, easily overlooked and seemingly bottomless crevasse a few feet away from which Liam reported the sound of a lot of water running hard, and SAR’s report of lowering a fiber-optic cable down the crevasse and finding no body. The trooper’s best guess was that the boy had gone for water, slipped and fallen into the crevasse, and immediately been caught up in the subglacial river. The location of the boy’s disappearance was near the mouth of the glacier, and the force of the subsurface meltoff swift and strong, but given the slow rate at which glaciers melted, it would be a long time before the body could be recovered, if ever. With luck the glacier would calve quickly and in ten or fifteen years one of the slabs that fell from its face would yield up the body of the lost boy.

The parents had flown up from Akron, and they fought Bill’s finding of death by misadventure every step of the way. They reported quarrels between the hikers, a grudge held against their son by another of the hikers, whose girlfriend their son had taken, and even floated the idea that the instructor had harbored feelings of animosity and possibly homicide toward the boy because of some disagreement over grades back in McKinley High School.

Bill understood; it was difficult to accept the fact that your golden boy had tripped over his own feet and fallen headfirst into a glacier, never to be seen again. There was no sense in that kind of death. Better foul play, a murder, an event that would give them someone to blame, to punish.

Presumptive death hearings were Bill’s least favorite duty. When a fisher was lost at sea, when a climber died on Denali, when a plane was lost in the Bush, and when the bodies of the fishers and the climbers and the fliers were unrecoverable, a presumptive death hearing was held. Most of the time the procedure gave the families some closure, the insurance companies the go-ahead to pay off policies and the lawyers permission to file for probate.

Sometimes, though, the families could not or would not accept the inevitable.

Like Lyle Montgomery. The first of the month, every month, he called, looking for his daughter. He didn’t weep anymore during his phone calls. Bill couldn’t decide if it was worse now than when he had. You wanted to do your best for the families and especially the parents. You wanted to give them a way to put their missing children to rest and a chance to get on with their lives. Some accepted your help. Some did not.

They’d never found Ruby Nunapitchuk, either, lost on a hunting trip eight years before. Opal and Leonard had handled their loss better than Lyle Montgomery had his, though. Probably helped that they lived in the Bush, and knew the risks inherent in a Bush lifestyle. Probably also helped that they’d had three other children, and grandchildren shortly thereafter.

A hand grabbed her hair and pulled her out of her melancholy reverie. She saw daylight for approximately one second before it was blotted out by Moses’ grin. He kissed her, completely and thoroughly, and as always she felt the world go a little fuzzy around the edges, as if everything else went out of focus when he stepped into the frame.

He pulled back, inspected her and seemed satisfied. “You looked sad.”

“Do I now?”

“No,” he said smugly, and she had to laugh.

He took the file from her hand and tossed it behind him without noticing where it fell. “You can either work on your trip to New Orleans, or you can help us get the fish into brine. Your choice.”

Her smile was sweet. “I don’t do fish.”

“Bourbon Street it is,” he said, and kissed her again before swaggering back down into the yard. “Get a move on, you lazy little shits, before I boot your behinds up around your ears! We’ve got form to do before lunch!”

Nenevok Creek, September 3

They were on a short final into Nenevok Creek to scratch Liam’s itch when the throttle cable on the Cessna broke.

They’d had to go around at the last moment, about ten feet off the deck and fifty feet off the end of the airstrip, when a bull moose wandered out of the trees. He looked up at them, startled, and then lunged across the strip and into the brush on the opposite side, at the same time Wy grabbed for the throttle and shoved it all the way in.

Liam, sitting in the right seat and cursing steadily and colorfully, didn’t notice anything else wrong at first. It helped that he had his eyes screwed shut. He opened them when he heard her voice over the headset.

“Oh, shit.”

Of all the words in the world that someone who is deathly afraid of flying can hear in the air, “Oh, shit” are the two you least want to hear, and the two most productive of sheer terror. “What!”

“Shut up!” she yelled back. “I’m busy!”

Of all the words in the world that someone who is deathly afraid of flying can hear in the air, “Shut up, I’m busy” are the four you least want to hear, ranking right down there one notch above “Oh shit.” He didn’t shut up, although he did try to remain calm. He gulped, trying to get his heart out of his throat and back down in his chest where it belonged. “Wy, what’s wrong?”

“The throttle cable broke when I put on power to go around,” she said. She seemed very calm, lips pressed together in a prim line, face set. She was wearing sunglasses, so he couldn’t see her eyes.

It had finally happened, his worst fear: the plane had broken while they were in the air. “I love you, Wy,” he said, and bravely prepared to meet his death.

“Give it a rest, Campbell,” she said, irritated. “All I have to do is fly the plane. We’ll be fine.” She glanced at him and saw the fear writ large upon his countenance for all to see, but it was only her in the cockpit with him, and only she could get him down in one piece. He needed reassurance, but she didn’t have time to give him any.

Maybe she could talk him down.

She began to speak, keeping her voice steady, her tone casual. “I felt the cable go when I went full ahead to get altitude for the go-around. It’s stuck in the full-throttle position, all the juice, full-ahead go. We need low power to land, not full power.”

The plane’s engine seemed louder and fiercer at this moment than any Liam had heard before. The Cessna was at a hundred feet and in a shallow right turn, Nenevok Creek, the tops of the spruce and birch and a small but rugged outcropping of rock passing in rapid succession beneath the right wheel. The single wheel of the landing gear visible to him was shuddering beneath the vibrations of the RPMs, and to Liam’s fascinated eye looked as if it were ready to launch out on its own.

Over the headset Wy’s voice came, unruffled, no hint of panic, a throttle cable could have broken in flight every day of her flying career for all the emotion she put into the words. “I’m going to pull the carb heat, that will slow us down some.” Her hands moved to another control. “Now I’m going to trim the nose down, to keep from climbing. That will slow us down some more.”

It did seem like they were slowing down. It took a long time to get on the other side of that rock outcropping, which seemed more threatening the longer Liam looked at it. “I love you, Wy,” he repeated.

“Now I’m going to lean the mixture. That cuts the gas going into the engine, slows it down even more.”

What if the engine quit completely? It took everything in him not to ask the question out loud. He could no longer watch the ground rush up at them and lowered his gaze to the control panel. The first thing to meet his appalled eyes was the altimeter. Fifty feet. Thirty. The tail of the Cessna came up. Twenty.

“Okay,” Wy said serenely, “we’re looking good. Now I’m going to pull the mixture all the way out. That means that the engine will be getting all air and no fuel, and that means that-” Wy’s hands went to a knob and pulled it all the way out.

The engine died.

There was no sound but the rush of air past the plane. The prop slowed and then came to a stop, the blades straight up and down in front of the windshield.

They touched down easily, smoothly, connecting solidly on all three wheels all at the same time, as if they’d done it a thousand times before and, praise be, would live to do it a thousand times again.

The plane rolled to a stop well before the end of the strip, plenty of room to spare.

The two in it sat for a moment, silent, staring forward.

Wy moved first, removing her headset and tossing it on top of the dash. She took a deep breath and turned to smile at Liam. “That’s what we call a deadstick landing. No power. All up to lift and gravity.”

His mouth was so dry he couldn’t speak, could only nod to let her know he had heard.

They got out of the plane, moving with exaggerated care, as if the return to terra firma was still a tentative thing.

A loud squawking caw came from the top of a nearby spruce tree, and Liam squinted up to see the raven sitting in its very top. It squawked again and launched suddenly, sailing over their heads on shiny black wings. It swooped and dived, climbed and banked, did snap rolls and Immelmanns in an aerial exhibition of consummate grace and power that mocked the rigid form of their own craft.

Liam watched with a kind of numb incomprehension, Wy with envy. “God, to fly like that,” she said. “It’s all we want when we take to the air, to master it, to make it our own. And we never even come close.”

She looked at Liam, still mute. She looked at the Cessna, planted placidly on its gear. “We were never in that much danger, Liam,” she said gently. “Yeah, the throttle cable broke, but there’s a way to handle it. There’s a way to handle pretty much everything in the air, as long as you don’t get excited. Bob DeCreft used to say, no matter what happens, don’t panic, just fly the airplane.” She took another deep, careful breath. “He was a good teacher, old Bob.”

Finally Liam found his voice. “Yeah. He sure was. Wy?”

“What?”

“I love you.”

It was her turn to look shaken.

“I love you, Wy,” he said again.

“Liam,” she said with obvious difficulty, “we have to talk.”