A Fine and Bitter Snow

4

Jim Chopin had been an Alaskan state trooper for almost twenty years, most of it posted in Tok, a town of twelve hundred, which sat on pretty much the northern limit of the Park and sixty-odd miles short of the Canadian border. The Tok trooper post, consisting of one sergeant and two corporals, constituted the sum of state law enforcement for the entire Park, a vast area occupied by less than fourteen thousand people-Park rats and Park rangers, hunters and trappers and fishermen, homesteaders, a few farmers, pilots, miners. They were elders and babies, housewives and career women, doctors, lawyers, and thirty-four Indian chiefs. They were white and Athabascan and Aleut and Tlin-git and Eyak. They were Latino and Russian and Japanese and Korean. There was even one lone Frenchman from Toulouse, who had emigrated twenty years before and now had a cushy job pushing the grader down the road for the state, stationed at the road-maintenance facility at the Nabesna turnoff, from which he lay ardent siege to every woman with car trouble who drove or didn’t drive by. His optimism was much admired, although even the cynical had to admit his success ratio was amazingly high. “Of course his standards aren’t,” Bernie pointed out, and sage heads nodded around the bar.

Jim, an immigrant from San Jose, California, liked two things about the Park right away: Pretty much everyone knew everyone else, and the air was clear every day. Later, when he passed his check rides, he liked flying even more, so much so that after getting his license for fixed wing, he went on ahead and got it for rotor, as well. Responding to a cry for help a hundred miles away and getting there in under an hour while never, ever, being stuck in traffic added considerably to the bottom line of his “Closed Cases” column.

He liked the people, good people, mostly, although obstinate, opinionated, determined, capable, and, above all, independent, with the highest per capita ratio of Libertarians in the state. Of course, this was a state where the Democratic party had feared that Jimmy Carter was going to come in third in the 1980 election.

He liked the sheer beauty of the place, the mountains, the rivers, the valleys. He liked that he could fly hundreds of miles in every direction with only an occasional roof, painted dark green to blend in with the treetops, to remind him that he was still on the same continent he’d been born on.

He liked the job. He knew he was good at it. He was the first call for the village elder with a knifing on his hands, the first call for the mayor of the town with the sniffing problem at the high school, the first call for the Fish and Game trooper who had caught someone fishing behind the markers. He knew where all the dope growers lived and where all the dealers they sold to drank, and who took the black bear out of season and sold the parts on the black market to what Asian dealers, and what guides were likely to violate the wanton-waste law by taking the rack and leaving the meat. He was all the law many of the Park rats would ever see in their lives, and for some of them, the only government representative. In his time, he had helped kids fill out Social Security forms, flown the public health nurse into villages where the entire student body of the local school had been stricken with chicken pox, backed up a tribal policeman in way over his head in a hostage situation involving a drunk, the drunk’s best friend, the drunk’s wife, a pint of Everclear, and a.357. Most of the time, he was able to talk the situation into the clear. A few times, he’d had to pull his weapon. So far, he had never had to fire it, managing to restrain himself under the grossest possible provocation, such as someone shooting at him first.

He was on call twenty-four/seven and the ringing of the phone sounded to his ear like a bugler sounding a charge. He was the cavalry riding to the rescue of any Park rat who was under attack, and he didn’t care how politically incorrect the analogy was.

The phone rang constantly that morning in his office as he fielded calls from an irate father whose daughter had run off with her high school sweetheart, a distraught grandmother whose grandson had been beating her, a village elder reporting a shipment of 102 cases of vodka and whiskey into a dry village, a big game guide wanting to know what the summons was for and how the hell he was supposed to get to Ahtna for a courtroom appearance with his plane broken down. The next call was from a young man who had failed at fishing in Alaganik and who now wanted to go to the University of Alaska Interior in Ahtna to learn how to work a computer but didn’t know how to fill out the form. Jim ascertained that the eloping daughter was of legal age, dispatched one corporal to take the grandmother’s statement, dispatched another to intercept and confiscate the shipment of alcohol, hung up on the big game guide, and walked the fisherman through the application form.

The next call was from his boss in Anchorage. “Hey, Jim, how’s it hanging?”

Jim sat back and put his feet up on his desk, there to admire the immaculate shine on his black leather boots. “About six inches from the floor,” he replied.

A scoffing laugh. “Yeah, you wish.”

“No, you do.”

There followed the traditional exchange of insults and exaggerations so dear to the hearts of the male of the species, particularly those who were longtime friends and allies in the war on crime. Finally, his boss said, “We’ve been doing some thinking down here, Jim.”

Uh-oh. “Thinking about what?”

“About your workload.”

“What about it?”

A genial chuckle. “It’s kind of heavy, isn’t it?”

“So what else is new?”

“Well, we were thinking of lightening it up a little.”

Jim took his feet off the desk and sat up to look at the map of the Park tacked to the wall behind his desk. “Define ‘lightening up.” “

Another chuckle. “Breaking a chunk off your post’s area of jurisdiction, for starters.”

“What chunk?”

“The southern half. From, say, Niniltna south.”

Fully half of his command. Which wouldn’t do his career a hell of a lot of good. But then, he wasn’t bucking for promotion anyway. He had no ambition to retire in Tal-keetna.

On the other hand, he and his people were getting the job done. “What brought this on?”

A sigh. “You know we’ve got these bean counters running around down here right now, looking over our shoulders.”

The Outside auditors the state had brought in. “I’ve heard.”

The chuckle was not quite as genial this time. “Yeah. They’ve seen the amount of reports you file, the case load. They’re thinking you’re overworked, and that it’s going to cause problems down the road.”

“Why not just assign me another corporal?”

“I suggested that.”

“And?”

“They also looked at the response times. Hell, Jim, they’ve got a point. That’s the hell of a lot of territory you people cover. Some of that territory is a long way from where you’re sitting.”

Jim sat back and propped his feet on the windowsill this time, looking at the map of the Park. Niniltna was at its heart, when Ekaterina Moonin Shugak was still alive in more ways than one. Ahtna and Cordova were bigger, but Niniltna had the strong native association, with its solid leadership, and some legendary figures as shareholders. One in particular.

It also had a 4,800-foot airstrip, long enough to land a jet on-a small one anyway. Always supposing any pilot worthy of the name would put anything other than a Here down on gravel. “Just as a matter of curiosity,” Jim said, “have we got enough funding to create a new post?”

“Yeah, right.”

A brief silence as Jim surveyed the map again. “Gene,” he said, “are you satisfied with my work?”

A snort this time. “If I wasn’t, you would have heard so before now.”

“So if I come up with another way to set what passes for the bean counters’ minds at ease, you’d listen to it?”

“Hell yes. What is it?”

“Give me a couple of days?” He waited.

“Yeah,” Gene said finally. “Okay.”

“One more thing.”

“What?”

“You know Dan O’Brian?”

A brief pause. Jim could hear the Rolodex between his boss’s ears clicking. “Dan O’Brian. Right. Chief ranger your area. What about him?”

“He mouthed off about drilling for oil in ANWR. They’re trying to force him into retirement.”

“So? Should have kept his mouth shut.”

“Agreed, but otherwise he’s a good man. We work well together. I’d hate to have to break in some newbie. Can you call somebody, make some noise?”

“I can call several.”

“I owe you.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll see after the next time we talk.”

“Gotcha,” Jim said, grinning. He hung up, and grabbed his jacket and hat on his way out the door.

It was as clear and calm this morning as it had been the night before, the big high pressure system hanging over interior Alaska strong enough to keep it that way for the next three to four days. He had done preflight and refueled the Cessna with the shield on its side the night before. All he had to do was roll her out, and he was in the air five minutes later. He was on the ground in Niniltna in less than an hour, taxiing up to the hangar that served as headquarters for George Perry’s two-plane air taxi service. George was there, pulling the backseat from his Super Cub and loading the back with mailbags. “Thank God for the U.S. Postal Service,” he said in greeting.

A U.S. Postal Service mail contract had been the savior of more than one Bush air taxi running on duct tape and the owner’s sweat. “What’s with all the packages going out?”

George grinned. “Christmas returns.”

“Oh.” The only Christmas presents Jim sent were to his parents, usually something out of a catalog. In return, he got a card accompanied by a baseball cap with the logo of whatever sports team his father was currently following, and a box of his mother’s homemade fudge. The fudge, he ate immediately. The cap usually went to the first kid he saw in the next village he flew into. The card lasted longer than either of them.

“What’s up?” George said. “Somebody get uppity enough to require the personal attention of the law?”

Jim gave a noncommittal grunt. George had heard that grunt before, and he changed the subject. “See you at Bernie’s later?”

“I don’t know. Depends on if I have to make a run.”

“Try.” George grinned. “I hear somebody made a successful winter assault on Big Bump.”

“Ah. It’s Middle Finger time.”

“You got it.”

“George?”

“What?”

“Tell me about weather in the Park.”

George cocked a quizzical eyebrow.

“Pilot to pilot,” Jim said.

George’s take was that it was typical Interior weather-a lot of cold, clear days in the winter and a lot of hot, clear days in the summer, if you didn’t count the blizzards and the forest fires, respectively. “We’re in between the Alaska Range and the Chugach Range,” George told him, “with the Quilaks at our backs, and we’re far enough away from all of them to keep us CAVU more often than not. So what’s all this about?”

“Something in the wind,” Jim said. “I’ll let you know.”

“Will it be good for the air taxi business?”

“Yes. In fact, start figuring out how much you’d charge to haul prisoners to Ahtna, Tok, or Anchorage. And try to keep it below highway robbery.”

“Wilco.” George, not the most curious of men, tossed the seats in on top of the mail and cut the conversation short. “Gotta go. Got three passengers waiting on a ride into the Park, and it ain’t so often this time of year I got a full load coming back from a mail run.”

George took off and Jim walked around the hangar and down the road. His destination wasn’t far, but then, nothing in Niniltna was far from anything else. A block in that direction was the school, a block in the other the river, and in between was the airstrip and the mostly handmade homes of the town. The Niniltna Native Association building, prefabricated, vinyl-sided, and tin-roofed, stood on its own ground a little farther out and a little higher up, looking like a benevolent uncle with a fat belly, kicking back in the winter sunshine.

Ekaterina Moonin Shugak had ruled her kingdom from there. In her titular place was now Billy Mike, the association’s new president and tribal chief. But through a long and profitable acquaintance with the Park and all its residents, Jim knew where the real power lay.

He went to see Auntie Vi.

Auntie Vi lived in a big house that used to be filled with children and was now filled with guests who paid far too much for a bed, a bathroom down the hall, and an unvarying breakfast of cocoa and fry bread. It was good cocoa, Hershey’s, homemade, and superb fry bread, and Jim was lucky to be early enough to be offered some of both. He sat down next to a man in a nattily stitched denim pantsuit. The man took one look at Jim’s uniform and ate the rest of his meal with as much of the back of his head toward Jim as possible, and then sidled out at his earliest opportunity.

“A uniform does have a way of clearing out a room,” he said ruefully to Auntie Vi.

She laughed as she finished clearing the table. “This way, I didn’t have to serve him seconds. Ay, those bums, they eat me out of house and home if they have the chance.”

Just then, her other guests came in, a couple of state surveyors, who conversed in numbers, scribbling lines and formulae on a sheet of paper held between them. Jim wasn’t sure they’d even registered his existence. They left, too, after stuffing themselves and their pockets with fry bread, which immediately showed up in grease stains on the out-sides of their jackets. Jim noticed Auntie Vi made no objection, and he reflected on the state’s propensity not to dicker on a set price for Bush accommodation. Auntie Vi’s favorite customer, the state of Alaska.

Auntie Vi was about four feet tall and weighed maybe eighty pounds with her false eyelashes on. She was one of Ekaterina’s contemporaries and therefore had to be in her late seventies, if not her early eighties, but the years sat lightly upon her shoulders. She had her share of wrinkles around the eyes and mouth and the backs of her hands, but her spine was still straight, her step light, her hair as thick as a girl’s, although she had allowed the temples to go gray, giving her an elegant look that could only have benefited from a crown perched thereon. She had a wide smile filled with improbably square teeth, a pug nose, and bright brown button eyes that were naturally inquisitive.

She finished clearing the table and bustled the dishes into the kitchen, leaving him to enjoy the last piece of fry bread and the dregs of his now-lukewarm cocoa in solitary splendor. It was a rectangular room, big enough to hold a table that seated twelve, along with twelve chairs and a sideboard with a hutch on top of it. Flowery prints decorated the walls, which were covered with some tiny floral-print wallpaper in a delicate yellow. There were ruffles on the sheer white curtains hanging at the windows, and tatted tablecloths covered the surface of the table and sideboard and the backs of all twelve chairs. It was a very feminine room, but not so feminine that he felt uncomfortable in it.

He heard the hum of the dishwasher, and shortly Auntie Vi bustled back in. “Now,” she said, sitting down across from him and laying both hands flat against the table. On to business. “What you here for, Jim, eh?”

“Your cocoa and fry bread breakfast.”

She shook her head, although she couldn’t suppress her smile.

“It would have been worth the flight alone,” he said, “but you’re right, Auntie, I need your help.”

“Ah.” She folded her hands and tried to look impassive, but he was not deceived. Auntie Vi loved being asked for help, almost as much as she loved giving it. “With what?”

Her accent was that of a person who spoke English as a second language, a little heavy on the gutturals and a little light on the verbs, but she had no trouble understanding what he was saying. “Good idea,” she said when he finished explaining.

“What about office space?”

She shook her head. “Build your own.”

“Yeah, I was afraid of that.”

“Where you live?”

He met her eyes. “I’d be looking for a small place, probably.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “A cabin maybe.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Maybe not in village. Maybe down the road a ways.”

“Maybe.”

He got the hell out of there.

She waited until the door had closed behind him before allowing the wide, all-encompassing grin to spread across her face.

Ayah, that Katya, her life was about to get interesting again. Auntie Vi gave a sharp nod.

Good.

Jim went to talk to Billy Mike, implying without actually saying so that Billy Mike was the first person he’d come to. Billy was notoriously easygoing, but he had his pride. Billy’s first question was, “You bringing your clerk with you?”

“I hadn’t thought,” Jim said. “Pretty much up to her. She’s pretty dug in in Tok. I don’t know that she’s going to want to pull the kids out of school. And then there’s the housing. I didn’t see any for sale signs on my way here.”

Billy gave a short, satisfied nod. “Let me know. I’ll set you up some interviews.”

No doubt he meant with some of his many relatives, but then, the only person who had more relatives in the Park than Billy Mike was Kate Shugak. Jim just hoped that if Billy tossed any of his daughters into the mix that it would be Lilah, who was quick and bright, if a little sharp around the tongue, and not Betsy, who was a major whiner-it was always God or somebody else’s fault. Since Lilah was never out of work and Betsy was seldom in, he didn’t hold out much hope.

The next thing Billy said was, “You’ll have to build.”

“I know.”

“The Niniltna native association owns a construction company.”

“I know.”

As he left, Jim reflected that his plans were having unforeseen side effects, which, all told, put him on even more solid footing in the Park than he had been before.

He went to Bobby Clark’s next, borrowing Billy’s brand-new Ford Explorer (the Eddie Bauer model, this year’s Park vehicle of choice at permanent fund dividend time) to get there. The large A-frame on Squaw Candy Creek was set in a densely wooded glen next to a rocky, burbling little creek, the whole frosted with a thick layer of snow so white it was almost blue. It looked like a place you would see from the seat of a sleigh on the way to Grandmother’s house, and Jim paused to admire it before crossing the little bridge and pulling up in front of the deck that extended the width of the house.

Dinah had the door open before he got to the top step, one finger to her lips. He kicked snow from his boots and stepped inside, to see Bobby seated in front of a transmitter, in the middle of a broadcast.

Park Air was not what you could call a scheduled radio show. Nor was it a show licensed or, for that matter, even sanctioned by the Federal Communications Commission. It had a tendency to wander up and down the bandwidth, forcing its listeners to search for it up and down the FM dial. Which would have been easier had Park Air had a fixed schedule and a regular broadcast. It wasn’t like Bobby sat down every night at six o’clock to flip switches and send Creedence Clearwater Revival out into the ozone.

And that was another thing: His play list was, well, to put it kindly, somewhat antiquated. Bobby had been born in the fifties and his musical taste had matured in the sixties, and when the seventies came along and brought the Eagles with them, he slammed the door to the tape player in all their faces. Nowadays, when during a broadcast the Park rats heard some John Hiatt, or a little Jimmy Buffett, or sang along to Mary Chapin Carpenter, they knew they had Bobby’s wife, Dinah, to thank. Dinah, born in the seventies, now and then liked a little calypso poet in her airtime, and she was not averse to slipping the occasional rogue CD into the pile at Bobby’s elbow. Nor was she completely averse to the right bribe.

During the school year, Bobby broadcast advertisements for senior class car washes and junior high bake sales and the school lunch menu for the day, or maybe the week. During an election year, candidates for local and regional offices made the pilgrimage to Bobby’s house for an on-air discussion of what the candidate promised to do if he or she was elected, which, since Bobby never believed a word they said and did not hesitate to say so, could get pretty lively. During fishing season, businesses from Cordova, Ahtna, and Valdez advertised nets and impellers and boat hooks.

When someone had a boat, a truck, a band saw, a refrigerator, or a swing set for sale, or needed to buy a crib, a snow machine, a dogsled, or a sled dog, they came to Bobby, paying him with what they had, which was usually fish or game. The result was that Bobby hadn’t had to do any of his own hunting since the first year Park Air had gone on the air, and he fished only for the fun of it.

And then there was the Park Post. Bobby was reading from a fistful of scraps of paper, either hand-delivered or mailed to Bobby’s post office box in Niniltna. “Bonnie over in Loon Lake, Bonnie over in Loon Lake, Jake in Anchorage says he’ll be out this weekend. Hmm. I don’t think I’m reading the rest of what he says here, Bonnie, ”cause you might blush. Not to worry, it can be redeemed for a price, small unmarked bills in a plain brown envelope. And the bidding is open!“ Bobby crumbled the scrap he was reading from, tossed it over his shoulder, and read the next. ”Old Sam Dementieff in Niniltna, Old Sam in Niniltna, Mary Balashoff says for you to get your butt into town for the gun show. “Gun show,” that’s a good one, Mary. Old Sam’ll appreciate that.“ Next scrap. ”Mac Devlin in Nabesna, Mac Devlin in Nabesna, your sister Ellen in Omaha just had her first grandchild, a boy, seven pounds, nine ounces, mother Lisa and boy, named Mackenzie for his great-uncle, both doing fine. Congratulations, Mac, and may I proffer a piece of advice? As a much-married and much-fathered man myself, I suggest that you make plans to visit Omaha in about seven years, when little Mackenzie will have acquired at least the veneer of civilization.“

A box of Kleenex hit the back of his head and bounced off. Unperturbed, he said, “Also, you won’t have to change any diapers.”

This time, it was a disposable diaper-clean, fortunately. It bounced down to join the Kleenex.

“Excuse me, folks, I’m getting a little editorial comment from management. Stand by one.” He scooped up the diaper, turned in the same movement, and let it sail right back at Dinah. It fell short, but it was a good effort. He went back to the mike. “Christie in Niniltna, Christie in Niniltna, your lawyer wants to talk to you. He says you know the number. Well, that can’t be good. My condolences, Christie.”

The Park Post was the Park equivalent of jungle drums, putting the father in touch with the fisherman, the fisherman in touch with his banker, the banker in touch with the deadbeat, the deadbeat in touch with the Brown Jug Liquor Store. During cold snaps, when the mercury hit minus double digits and the wind howled down out of the Quilaks, forcing everyone to huddle inside around the woodstove, they turned on the radio to hear Bobby Clark tell them that George was holding their Costco mail order at the hangar until it warmed up enough to hitch the trailer to the snow machine, or that their husband had been weathered in on a caribou hunt (“a likely story,” Bobby’s invariable comment), or that their daughter had just become engaged, married, or pregnant.

“And last but not least,” Bobby said, tossing another crumpled scrap, “Billy and Annie Mike are throwing a pot-latch at the school gym this Thursday afternoon in honor of their new son, Cale. Everybody come on by and meet him and have something to eat, and there might even be a dance or two. Okay, time for some music, and none of that wishy-washy, weak-kneed, warbly boy band stuff we got going around today, no sir.” Bobby flipped open a case and put a CD in the player. “Here’s the Temptations’ Seventeen Greatest Hits coming at you, except I’m going to skip to the second cut. Why? Because it’s my favorite, and because I can! Bye!” He flipped off the mike and punched the play button, and the strains of “My Girl” came out of speakers almost as tall as Jim was, four of them, mounted one to each wall of the room.

“It’s enough to make you believe in stereo,” Jim said to Dinah.

Bobby wheeled around. “Jim Chopin! As your chopper didn’t fill up my show with a bunch of goddamn background noise, I have to assume you were reduced to driving in.”

“Yeah, I borrowed Billy’s truck.”

Bobby’s eyes widened. “Holy shit! He let you borrow his new Explorer?” He zipped to the window in his wheelchair, which, given the way he operated it most of the time, seemed like it was jet-propelled. Jim stepped nimbly out of the way of the wheels.

It was easy to remember that Bobby was black-all you had to do was look at him-and, as such, part of a minority measured in the single digits in the Park. It was, however, sometimes hard to remember that he had lost both his legs from the knee on down in a Southeast Asian jungle before he was twenty. His personal history was hazy in between his time in a veteran’s rehab clinic and the time he appeared on scene in the Park somewhere around 1978, but whatever he’d been doing in the interim had to have been lucrative, because he’d had enough cash in hand to stake a claim on Squaw Candy Creek, build his A-frame, stock it with enough electronic equipment to keep NASA in business, and buy a vehicle each for air, land, sea, and snow, specially modified, in Bobby’s exact phrase, “to get a no-legged gimp anywhere he wants to go in as short a time as possible.” He was now the NOAA observer for the Park, calling in weather observations twice a day. Other than that, he seemed to subsist on barter and air, a neat trick, since two years ago Dinah had moved in with him, and a year after that, she presented him with Katya. Dinah, a budding videographer, wasn’t pulling in a lot of money herself.

Jim had long ago decided that what Bobby had or had not done before he settled in the Park was none of his business. Bobby drank a lot of Kentucky sipping whiskey, he pirated a little radio wave, and, other than throwing an annual blowout for other Park survivors of the Tet Offensive, lived a quiet life.

And, Jim had enough of the outlaw in himself to recognize another outlaw when he saw one. “Hey, Bobby.” He doffed cap and jacket and accepted a mug of steaming coffee from Dinah.

“Goddamn, Chopin!” Bobby said, executing a perfect turn on one wheel with no perceptible traveling. Five point nine, all judges. “How the hell did you talk Billy out of his new wheels?”

Jim moved over to one of the couches surrounding the big rock fireplace set between the ceiling-high windows and sank into very deep cushions. “Well, it’s like this.”

Bobby and Dinah listened with absorption, and when he was done, they exchanged one of those glances married people give each other, the kind that exchanges a wealth of information without a word being said, and at the same time casts the uncoupled people in the room into outer darkness. “What?” he said.

“Nothing,” Dinah said, giving Bobby the look, it being another one of the shorthand methods of married communication.

“No,” Bobby said hastily. “Nothing. No wonder Billy gave you his wheels. Anything that brings jobs into the Park makes him happy.”

“Even if other people might not be,” Dinah said sotto voce, as if she couldn’t help herself.

Selective deafness was one of the more useful acquired talents in law enforcement, and Jim practiced it now. “Do you think it’ll work?”

Bobby stared at him through narrowed eyes. “Shit. Why ask us-you’ve already made up your mind.”

It wasn’t a question, and Jim let a grin be his answer. It was a wide grin, one that could and often did, variously, mesmerize, intimidate, terrify, annihilate, or seduce. Dinah had once heard it described as “the last thing you see before the shark bites” and again as “You know that snake in the movie The Jungle Book‘’ and most recently as ”When he’s going out the door for the last time, it’s like that Judy Garland song, “The Man That Got Away.” “

As a female down to her fingertips, Dinah had always been relieved that she had seen Bobby first. Especially since she’d never been one for three-way relationships, and it had been clear from the first time she’d met him that any woman sleeping with Trooper Jim Chopin would be sharing that bed with a third person. It was only recently that she had realized that the third person had never changed, and only in the last year that she had learned to see Jim Chopin as a man instead of a caricature Don Juan. “Hungry?” she said to him. “I was just about to fix us some lunch.”

He smiled at her, and she had to repress the instinctive urge to take a step back. Or maybe forward. “Sounds good to me.”

They sat down to moose salad sandwiches and ate to the accompaniment of Katya banging her spoon against the tray of her high chair, scattering pureed moose salad all over Bobby’s black T-shirt. “Goddamn!” he roared, dabbing ineffectually at his chest. “That’s the second shirt today. I thought we was only supposed to be going through diapers by the dozen around here.”

“Goddamn!” Katya said, and banged her spoon again.

“Goddamn!” Bobby said, a huge grin on his face. “Did you hear that?”

“Yes,” Dinah said.

Bobby saw Dinah’s expression and whispered to Katya, “Bad word, honey. Mommy pissed off. We’ll talk later.”

Katya laughed, a gurgled baby chuckle, and held out her arms. Her father swooped around the table and scooped her out of her chair, tossing her up in the air. Conversation deteriorated into Park gossip. Had they but known it a rehash of a similar conversation held not twelve miles down the road the night before, only Bobby had a lot more appreciation to express for Bernie’s new barmaid. Dinah gave him a halfhearted swipe and he tucked Katya beneath one arm and scooped Dinah up in the other for a humming, prolonged kiss, which Jim observed with professional approval.

Dinah emerged from the embrace blushing, breathless, and laughing, and Bobby, satisfied, said, “She’s a beauty, but cold.”

It took Jim a moment to realize that Bobby was talking about the new barmaid. “Oh yeah? What, she said no to you?”

“Cheese it,” Bobby hissed, jerking his head at Dinah.

“Sorry.”

“I’ll say. I don’t know, I just don’t warm up to her is all. She takes advantage. Dan walked into the Roadhouse the second day after she got there, and as soon as she got his job description, she made a beeline straight for him. Guy didn’t have a chance.”

“Poor guy,” Jim said.

Bobby looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

“Up yours, Clark.”

Bobby grinned. “Who else you talking to?”

Jim ticked down a mental list. “You, George, Billy, Auntie Vi. I think I’ll head out to Bernie’s, see what he says.”

“Give my love to the new girl in town,” Bobby said, and caught a wet sponge upside the head. “That does it, woman. Now it’s war!”