Nothing Gold Can Stay

FOURTEEN

Newenham, September 4

Trooper Diana Prince walked into the post at precisely 8:00A.M. The phone rang at precisely 8:01. “Hey, Princess Di.”

She leaned back in her chair and smiled. “Hey, Nick.”

“Have I told you lately I love you?”

“Let me check my watch.”

He laughed, a low, rich, husky sound, and as sensibly and methodically as Prince had chosen her duty assignment, she did find occasion to regret it now and then, just the tiniest bit. Usually whenever she was on the phone with Nick Schatz, the head ballistics man at the Crime Lab. He’d lectured her class on the fine art of telling which bullet came from which rifle. It remained her favorite week out of the sixteen, although she’d come perilously close to losing her head-of-class standing due to lack of sleep.

“So when you coming to visit me in Anchorage?” he said.

“You still married?”

“Yep.”

“Then I’d better keep my distance.”

“Come on, Diana. You know you want to.”

“I don’t always give myself everything I want.”

“How about what you need?”

The purr of that deep, sexy voice was almost irresistible. Almost. “Sitka was one thing, Nick. Your wife was a thousand miles away. In Anchorage, she might as well be in the next room.”

A brief silence. “What if I came to Newenham?”

She sat up. What was this? “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“Maybe the best idea I’ve had all day.”

“And it’s only five after eight,” she said dryly. He laughed again, and she said, “Why did you call? Other than to whip me into a frenzy of sexual frustration.”

“Well, that was my first priority, but as it happens I also have news of an interesting professional nature to relate.”

“Relate away.”

“Those two shotguns you sent me yesterday?”

“Yeah?”

There was a smile in his voice that told her he heard the excitement in her tone. “The Winchester produced a splatter pattern pretty near identical to the pattern on the body you sent Brillo Pad the day before.”

“Yes,” she said, with emphasis.

“God, you’re just so sexy when you’re in hot pursuit.”

“Is it a positive match?”

“Could I swear in court that the Winchester you sent me is the weapon that killed Mark Hanover? Not without a shell casing, and you didn’t recover one from the scene, did you?”

“No.”

He sighed. “Then all I can say absolutely is that the shot that killed Mark Hanover came from a Winchester Field Model, probably a 16339.”

“Great.”

“Yeah, I know, there’s only about ten thousand of those floating around the Bush. Good duck guns. And they’re relatively cheap, I don’t think any one of the Field Models goes for over four, five hundred dollars. Hell, they’re all over Anchorage, too, people buy them for home defense every day. Quicker than calling the cops.”

“Ha ha.”

“Try to find me a shell casing.”

“There wasn’t one, Nick. We searched the area thoroughly.”

“We, that’d be you and Trooper Liam Campbell.”

She smiled at the opposite wall. “Yep.”

Another brief pause. “Good trooper, I hear, until that mess in Denali. He’ll do well in Newenham. Take the hoodoo off that post, Barton says.”

“Yep.”

“Good-looking guy, too. Pity about his wife and kid.”

“Yep.”

“Bitch,” he said without rancor.

She laughed. “Thanks, Nick. Talk to you soon.”

As she hung up the phone, the door opened and Jo Dunaway walked inside with three other people. Before Prince had a chance to stiffen into official press-repulsing mode, Jo said, “Wy and Liam didn’t make it home last night.”

Old Man Creek, September 4

Tim’s first year in Newenham had been fine. He stayed home mostly, except for school. He’d always liked to read, but his birth mother (he’d quickly learned the jargon of the adopted child, especially anything that might hurt his birth mother if she ever came to know of it) had never seen the need. “Go out and play,” she’d said, pulling the book from his hands and shoving his coat at him. Of course, that was usually when his uncle Simeon (or his uncle Curtis or his uncle Jeff) had come over and he was more than happy to leave the house.

The trouble was, he didn’t have a lot of places to go. It was a small village, to which his mother had come with her man thirteen years before. Her man had lived long enough to father a child and then been killed three months later when his snow machine had plunged through an open lead on the Nushagak River. He’d gone up the river to Bright’s Point, where there was a liquor store. This was the return trip. It happened all the time.

Back at Ualik, his grandmother washed her hands of Tim’s unwed mother, and when his grandmother washed her hands of someone, the whole village did, too. Tim was born after twenty-nine hours of hard labor, his mother alone in the shack that was all the worldly goods his father had left her.

His first memory was of being curled up on the cot jammed into one corner of the shack, trembling behind a length of worn chintz suspended from a string tied between two nails, as the shack jolted from the force of blows being struck, bodies falling, people screaming. His mother and his uncle Simeon. Or maybe it was Uncle Felix, or one of his other uncles, it was a long time ago and he couldn’t say for sure. There was a loud, smacking sound and another jarring thump that shook his bed, and silence. He gathered all his courage together and peered around the edge of his makeshift curtain. His uncle was lying stretched out full length on the floor, his head next to the honey bucket. The honey bucket was a tin pail with a sharp rim. It was overturned and the contents spilled across the floor, the piss and shit mingled with the spreading red pool beneath his uncle’s head.

He didn’t remember more than that, but that much he remembered in clear and vivid detail.

He couldn’t remember a time when his mother hadn’t drunk. At first it wasn’t so bad, an uncle would bring over a bottle and they’d drink it and then his mother would order him behind his curtain. But slowly it became more than an evening bottle, soon it became an afternoon bottle, then a morning bottle, then it was the first thing she reached for when she woke up.

The first time she hit him was when he didn’t get out of her way fast enough. The second time she hit him was for getting out of her way before she could hit him. Pretty soon his uncles picked up on it and joined in.

He developed habits of compulsive neatness. When he made his tea he never spilled so much as a grain of sugar, he never dribbled water from the teakettle in pouring, he disposed of the tea bag as soon as it was out of the mug, he never let his mug sit on the counter after it was empty. He made his bed with perfect corners, the edges of the tattered blankets neatly aligned. He folded his clothes into one Blazo box, kept his toys and books in another, the books on one side with their spines out, the toys on the other, biggest one on the bottom, littlest one on the top.

He washed the dishes every night and put them away. He swept the floor every morning before he went to school. He kept the top of the oilstove scrubbed clean. He lined the cans up in the cupboard according to size.

It didn’t matter. She hit him anyway.

After a while he started hiding under the sagging porch, even in winter, but when she found him she dragged him out and hit him for that, too.

When he was ten he made his first friend, an older girl who tutored him when he fell behind in class. Her name was Christine, and she had dark eyes and a merry smile. She was going to be a teacher, Christine told him, so she was practicing on him.

As soon as she got to know of it, the old woman, his grandmother, had tried to get Christine to stop tutoring him. He wasn’t worth it, she declared, this bastard son too stupid to learn what every other student could in school, this bastard son of an unwed daughter who didn’t even have the decency to move to Newenham, or Anchorage, even, somewhere far away where she could bring her decent, hardworking, God-fearing family no shame. Christine had heard the old woman out with an expression of polite attention fastened firmly to her face, and had tutored Tim anyway, staying after school to instruct him patiently in the mysteries of geography and history. They spoke English in the morning and Yupik in the afternoon at school, and you had to speak both fluently before they’d let you graduate. English was easy, his mother never spoke anything else and wouldn’t let him, either, not around her house. “It’s bad enough you got a brown skin in a white world, kid,” she’d said. “Don’t talk like you got a brown skin, too.”

Christine had taught him Yupik. But then she had gone away, one day she was there, the next she was not. Tim figured the old woman had gotten her way after all, and he retreated once again into solitude.

One day soon afterward his mother had been very drunk and the hitting had been very bad. Uncle Simeon had done other things to him, too. The counselor in the hospital had tried to get him to talk about them, but he wouldn’t. He never would, not ever.

Besides, that was all done now. He was with his true mother. Wyanet Chouinard had flown into Ualik that day when the hitting had been very bad, and when she had flown out again she had taken him with her. She had visited him in the hospital, she’d come every night and talked to him and read to him and brought him presents, and when he was well enough, she had taken him home. She had asked him if he wanted to live with her always and his throat had been so choked that he hadn’t been able to speak, to say, to shout, to scream out the word “YES!”

He had thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

Newenham wasn’t heaven, though, and getting used to the differences between Ualik and Newenham was a long and difficult process. Ualik, his birthplace, was a village of two hundred, Newenham a city of two thousand. Newenham had cable, and two grocery stores, and nine churches and two bars. Ualik had one satellite dish that acted as a conduit for the state-run channel, no churches and a bootlegger. Ualik was Yupik. Newenham was mostly white.

He tried so hard to fit into this new world, afraid that if he didn’t he’d be shipped back to Ualik. For a while he had thought fitting in meant wearing the baggiest jeans, smoking the most cigarettes, saying “fuck” between every other word and hanging with Eric Walker and his gang. He’d been lucky there; his mom, his adopted mom, had been watching too closely for him to follow Eric and Vasily into McLaughlin. He shivered. Liam had taken him down to the place in the woods and shown him Rudy’s body, what Eric and Vasily had done to it. It had looked like something out of the movies.

It had looked like something from the other side of the curtain in Ualik.

Now here he was at Old Man Creek. Old Man Creek sure wasn’t Ualik, and sure wasn’t Newenham, either. The old man, Moses, was sober for a change, although that wasn’t necessarily an improvement. Drunk, he was one tough bastard. Sober, he was a fiend from hell.

They’d been standing post for twenty minutes and Tim was afraid he was about to disgrace himself by falling flat on his face. Moses had gone up on the porch, where he’d pulled Bill to her feet, sat down in her place and pulled her into his lap. Man, those two were always hugging and kissing and patting each other’s asses-and other things, too, he was sure. Bill Billington had to be sixty years old, Moses had to be a hundred, old enough to act like respectable elders, for god’s sake. The chair creaked and all by itself Tim’s head turned to behold Moses and Bill in a liplock that involved more than just their lips. He forgot himself and stared. They were worse than his mom and Liam. At least Liam pretended to sleep in that camper, and Mom pretended to let him.

Bill gave Moses a last kiss and pulled back to see Tim staring. She had the audacity to grin at him. Moses put back his head and howled.

Tim’s head snapped around to eyes front. He stared hard at the red lengths of salmon drying on racks and hoped his face wasn’t as red as the salmon.

Next to him, Amelia moaned, a quiet little moan, as if she’d had practice in hiding it.

“Keep breathing,” he said in a low voice. “Keep breathing, steady, in and out, in and out.”

“My legs don’t stand up straight anymore,” she whispered.

“Mine, neither,” he whispered back. “We’ll be walking bowlegged by the time that old man is done with us.”

She was silent for a moment. “Like cowboys.”

He bit back a laugh. “Yeah. Like in the movies.” He felt her shoulders shake. “Like John Wayne.”

Moses, walking light-footedly up behind them, pounced, buffeting first one and then the other with rough but not brutal slaps about the head. “I see talking don’t help your standing post none, boys and girls. Let’s see if a little form will keep you quiet.”

He took them through the form three times, going from commencement to conclusion slowly, steadily, progressing inexorably from one movement to the next and the next, grinning evilly at Tim when he became completely lost between the second and third Fair ladies, barking his disapproval when Amelia nearly fell during Turn Round and Kick Horizontally.

It’s not fair, Tim wanted to say, you’ve been doing this for a hundred years, we’ve been doing it for a couple of days, you can’t expect us to be perfect this soon.

At the end of the third conclusion, when Tim was sure in his gut that Moses was going to go for a fourth form, the old man straightened up all the way to his five-foot-seven-inch height and brought his right fist in front of his face, snugging it into his left palm. Tim and Amelia mimicked him. The three bowed.

“I suppose that’s enough for now,” Moses said grudgingly. “ ’Course the two of you got about as much style as a rhinoceros at the ballet. Dismissed until this afternoon. Go on, take a dip in the river. There’s a backwater about a hundred feet up the bank, shallow and still pretty warm. Go on, git!”

They got.

It was a nice little pond, snugged into the curve of a short, smooth ridge of glacial silt and rimmed with tall reeds. Tim stripped down to his underwear and fell in face first. He surfaced to see Amelia standing on the edge, uncertain. “What?”

She blushed. “I don’t have a bathing suit.”

“Just do like me and keep your underwear on.”

She hesitated.

“It’s real nice,” he said. “Warm, and the bottom’s sandy.”

“Okay,” she said.

He tried not to look as she undressed, but as with Moses and Bill, he couldn’t help sneaking a peek or two. Her breasts were bigger than they’d seemed under her shirt, and she wore bikini panties he’d only ever seen on magazine models. Her bruises were fading, faint shadows on smooth skin.

She was up to her waist when she saw him looking at them. She didn’t blush this time.

“Your husband do that?” he said.

She nodded.

“You going back to him?”

She stood where she was, fingertips making circles in the water. On the opposite side of the pond, a lone brant honked at them and then was silent. “I don’t know. He’s my husband.”

“He shouldn’t hurt you,” he said, and he was filled with a sudden and welcome anger. “Nobody should hurt anybody.”

She looked at him then. “Somebody hurt you, too.”

“My mother.” He swallowed, and said as much as he could. “My uncles.”

She nodded, understanding without words.

“Nobody should hurt anybody,” he repeated, and he turned and dived, as if the water could wash away all the bad memories.

They paddled around the pool, quietly at first, until he accidentally splashed her and, after a moment’s surprise, she retaliated. The battle was on, and before it was over a good third of the pool had wound up on the bank. It was an hour before they came out, giggling and shoving like a couple of kids.

With her wet hair sleeked back from her face and her skin flushed and damp, she looked like she was barely old enough for the sixth grade. He finished dressing first and tapped her on the shoulder. “Tag, you’re it!”

“No fair!” she yelled, and charged after him.

They chased each other down the path, laughing, startling ducks out of the brush at the side of the river and an otter family into the water. She tagged him and surged ahead, and he pounded after her, skidding around a corner and running into her full tilt where she’d stopped abruptly at the end of the path. They both crashed to the ground at the edge of the trees.

“Shh,” she said, putting her hand over his mouth when he would have yelled.

He looked up and saw.

Bill and Moses. On the porch. Without any clothes on. Bill was on top, her hair a silver curtain around Moses’ face. His hands were on her hips, muscles flexing in his arms as they moved together. They were so caught up in each other they didn’t hear anything else.

Tim’s jaw dropped and he turned to Amelia. Whatever he had been about to say was halted by the look on her face.

She held one finger to her lips and crept backward, one noiseless movement at a time. Tim followed. She halted in a clearing, out of earshot of the cabin.

He stood still, hands dangling, awed, confused, aroused.

“Is that how it’s supposed to be?” she said, her face bright with wonder.

He told the truth. “I don’t know.” Liam had come into his mother’s life only five months before. He’d caught them a few times in an embrace that was more than a kiss, but nothing like this.

“She was really liking it.” Her voice rose to a squeak. “She was ontop.”

“Yeah,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say. He couldn’t get the picture out of his mind, the man and the woman doing the nasty, only it hadn’t looked nasty, or sounded nasty. It had looked-well, he didn’t know how it had looked. All he knew was that it was nothing like what he had grown up hearing from the other side of the curtain. His body stirred. “Yeah,” he said again, his voice husky.

She looked at him, suddenly aware.

They reached for each other at the same time. He was almost as tall as she was, and glad for it. She smelled good. She felt good. She tasted better than good, although their teeth kept bumping. He was afraid of hurting her, and she was afraid of being hurt. She looked a little like Christine, which helped him, and he was younger and smaller than she was, which helped her.

In the end, she stared up at him in amazement. “It doesn’t have to hurt,” she said.

He shifted on his elbows, careful not to let his whole weight lie on her, mindful of her bruises. “I guess not.”

She moved experimentally. “There’s something else, though.”

“Yeah,” he said, closing his eyes and adjusting his body to match with hers.

“Tim?”

He opened his eyes. “What?”

“Did you-?”

“Yeah,” he said, reddening.

“Was it-did it feel good?”

He tucked his hot face into the curve between her shoulder and her neck. “Yes. I think so. I don’t know.”

She was silent for a moment. “Tim?”

“What?”

“Could we do it again?”