Better To Rest

TWO

“Poor bastard.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Whaddya mean, you guess? He just lost his wife of fifty years a year ago. He’s allowed.”

“Accent on the year ago. He was getting better there for a while; I don’t know why he had to go off the deep end again.” Bill used the bar towel to mop up the vomit around Eric Mollberg’s head where it lay sleeping peacefully on the bar. “I oughta call Liam.”

“Cut him some slack, woman. He’s been picked up on D-and-D twice already this month.”

“Yeah, well. He sits on the city council, for crying out loud.”

“Guys on the city council can’t get blind drunk when their wives die on them? You wouldn’t get blind drunk if I died?”

Bill didn’t have an answer for that, but the fact remained that Eric Mollberg had gone from city father to public nuisance in a downward spiral that had been dizzying to watch. Still, it was something else they could fight about, not that they had lacked for bones of contention to growl over in the past month. The events at Old Man Creek had taken a toll on both of them, Bill because Moses had been shot and Moses because he had lived. Amelia Gearhart had died. Young, wounded Amelia, scarred by neglectful parents, abused by her husband. Moses had been on a fair way to rescuing her, to breaking the cycle of abuse and setting her feet however shakily on the path to a different life, and then she was dead, shot to death by the same man who had tried to kill him, just when she had begun to learn how to live. Bill and Moses had been snapping and snarling at each other ever since they got back.

As testified to by Evan Gray, one of Bill’s regular customers currently seated three stools down. He was also Newenham’s main connection for dope. If you rolled your own, you went to the Moccasin Man (so called because he wore beaded buckskin from head to toe) for the best grade of Thunderfoot from Wasilla or Kona Gold from Hawaii. “Gets kind of tiresome, cleaning puke off the bar,” he said. Evan was also a serious rounder, and he smiled at Bill Billington, happy to give her aid and comfort in her argument with Moses.

Moses Alakuyak, certified Alaskan old fart, only smiled, albeit his nastiest, dirtiest, most spawn-of-Satan smile. “Playing out of your league, sonny. She’d eat you alive.”

Bill’s spine stiffened and she glared at Moses. Never mind that they’d been lovers from the night of the day they had met. When he got proprietary she got her back up.

And even when he didn’t. “I beg your pardon?” she said, her tone frosty.

“You can make your apology horizontally,” Moses said. “Later.”

The other patrons sitting at the bar roared their approval, including the women.

Bill slapped the bar towel down. “That’s it, Alakuyak. Out. Out!”

He repeated his evil grin, only it was a lot more personal this time. He didn’t leave, either, instead swaggering over to the jukebox. Moments later, Jimmy Buffett was singing about a smart woman in a real short skirt. Bill, her eagle’s mane of white hair considerably ruffled, ignored him, and called Liam to come pry Eric Mollberg off her bar.

There was no answer. She left a message that should have melted down the voice-mail circuitry and slammed the phone into its cradle.

“Bad day?”

She looked up to see Wyanet Chouinard regarding her with a sympathetic eye. “Bad month,” she said, casting a sidelong look at Moses, now regaling a tableful of other old farts with some yarn about a duel to the death with a king salmon the size of Moby Dick.

Wy followed her gaze. “I hate men,” she said in agreement.

“Liam?”

“And Tim.”

“What’s wrong with Tim?”

Wy sat on a stool. “Nothing caning wouldn’t cure.”

Bill, startled out of her irritation, laughed. “Ship him off to Singapore, then.” She pulled Wy an Alaskan Amber and set it on the bar in front of the pilot.

Wy took a long pull and said, “I can’t do that. He’d probably start a war, and then I’d have the State Department all over my ass.”

They laughed together this time. “But seriously, folks,” Bill said. “What’s wrong with Tim? Usual teenage stuff?”

“That, too.”

“What else?”

“I’m letting his mom see him. He hates her. And he hates me for making him see her.” Wy took another long, soothing draft of beer, and regarded the mug with a weary kind of satisfaction. “The great thing about winter is that daylight decreases by five minutes and forty-four seconds a day and I can drink earlier every time I come in here.”

“Yeah, you’re such a heavy drinker, Chouinard.”

“Sometimes I wish I were.”

Bill looked at Moses over her head. “No, you don’t.”

Wy sighed. “No, I don’t.”

“How is Natalie behaving?”

“She’s still sober,” Wy said. “She’s staying in town, renting a room from Tatiana Anayuk. Got herself a job bagging groceries at Eagle.”

“She’s living with Tasha?”

“Yeah, I know, the oldest established permanent floating party in Newenham. But they’re cousins, and Natalie’s pretty much broke. And like I said, she’s still sober.”

“She must go straight into her room and lock the door.” Bill made Moccasin Man another margarita and sent a pitcher of beer over to Moses’ table. The place was in its usual lull between the people-getting-off-work crowd and the people-coming-in-for-their-after-dinner-drink crowd, and she was able to return to Wy in a few moments. “Why did you do it?”

“Do what?” Wy said, startled out of her absorption with beer suds.

“Let Natalie see Tim.”

Wy made a face. “I didn’t really have a choice. The judge ordered visitation. Limited, supervised, but still.”

“Bullshit,” Bill said, speaking with all the authority of the magistrate she was. “You could have run her off. You still could. Why haven’t you, if it’s making the boy so miserable, and you miserable with it?”

Wy drank beer. Bill waited.

“She’s his mother, Bill,” Wy said at last. “She’s got rights.”

“Just because you didn’t give birth to him doesn’t make him any less your son. Crying out loud, Wy, I could tell you stories from now until next year about cases I’ve had before my court, parents aren’t fit to keep a dog, much less a child. She’s one of them.”

“She is when she’s drunk,” Wy agreed. “Maybe if she stays here…”

“What? You going to give him back?”

Wy’s head snapped up, her eyes narrowing.

“I didn’t think so,” Bill said, her voice very dry.

“It was right to let her see him. It was right for him to see her, so that he doesn’t always remember her as the drunken monster who beat him. Damn it, Bill, it was the right thing to do!”

Bill sipped her Coke. “Want another beer?”

Wy looked at the bottom of her now empty glass. “No. I’m just trying to put off going home.”

“Want some takeout?”

Wy brightened. Tim was notoriously susceptible to Bill’s fatburgers and greasy fries. “Make it two, and a double order of fries for Tim.”

Bill raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, all right,” Wy said. “Three.” Not that Liam Campbell deserved any special consideration in the way of meals. Or a roof. A roof it looked like he wouldn’t be under for longer than it took to pack for a move back to Anchorage.

“Hey, big spender.”

Wy looked around and a smile broke out across her face. It was a good smile; it displayed white teeth saved from perfection by overlapping incisors, crinkled the corners of her brown eyes, and seemed somehow to make her bronze-streaked brown hair curl out of its long braid even more than it already did. “Jo!”

The two women hugged. “What are you doing in Newenham?” Wy said. “I can’t believe your editor let you come down again so soon. Is there some story going on around here I don’t know about that theAnchorage News is crying out for copy on?”

“No, I just grabbed a couple of vacation days ’cause I could,” Jo said. She was a chunky blonde with intense green eyes and a short cap of curls. A newspaper reporter with the wit of Dorothy L. Parker and none of the nastiness, she’d been Wy’s closest friend since college and, for a few months, her sister-in-law. “Gary’s back in Anchorage.”

“Is he?”

“Yeah, he came down with me.” Jo didn’t look at Wy when she said this, thanking Bill for the draft beer instead. “Don’t worry; we’re not going to land ourselves on you-we’ve got a room at the Bay View. But we were hoping you’d have time for us.”

“Sure,” Wy said, and managed a smile. “Always time for you, Jo. And you wouldn’t be landing yourselves on me, either one of you. So long as one of you doesn’t mind sleeping on the floor.”

Jo laughed. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

“How about I order up a couple more hamburgers?”

“How about we eat right here and have a steak?”

Wy cocked an eyebrow at Bill, who shouted a cancellation through the pass-through to the kitchen. Dottie, her fry cook, growled an acknowledgment and slammed the burger patties back into the fridge.

“Let me call Tim.” Wy went to the pay phone in the corner and dialed her home number.

“Yeah?”

“Hey, Tim.”

“Hi, Wy.”

He had been calling her Mom right up until the first time she’d admitted Natalie to their home. “Jo’s here, and her brother, Gary. We’re going to have dinner at Bill’s. I’ll be there in ten.”

She hung up and turned to Jo, standing just behind her. “Don’t worry; he’ll come. The combination of his favorite auntie and one of Bill’s steaks will offset having to sit next to me.”

Jo followed Wy out to her truck. “What’s the problem with Tim?”

Wy sighed. “It’s not just Tim.”

Jo went very still. “Liam?”

Wy nodded.

Jo bristled. “What’s that prick up to now?”

Wy turned. “Why do you always automatically assume the worst about Liam, Jo?”

“Let’s just say I stand on his record. He’s always beating up on my best friend.”

“He doesn’t beat up on me.”

“Emotionally he sure as hell does.”

Wy was silent. Jo’s fierce loyalty to the people she loved was one of her best qualities. It could also be one of her worst.

“What’s wrong this time? His wife is still dead, isn’t she?” Jo said in sudden suspicion. “He didn’t go and get married again just so the two of you could have another hopeless love affair?”

“No, no, no,” Wy said. “Cut him some slack, Jo, Jesus.”

“He hurt you,” Jo said. “What hurts you, hurts me. When I get hurt, I get pissed off. When I get pissed off, I get even. I’m not square with Liam yet.”

“That why you brought Gary to Newenham with you?”

Jo ignored the question with a dignity that didn’t look quite natural on her pugnacious face. “What’s up, Wy? What’s going on?”

Wy leaned back against the door of the truck. “You know this last case, the serial killer?”

“Hairy Man? Sure. He’s still in jail, so far as I know. It’s been a month. Got to be some kind of record.”

Jo Dunaway’s ideal Supreme Court would have had all the justices named Scalia, but then she was a reporter and had seen firsthand the evil that men do far too often. Had she but known it, Liam’s ideal Supremes would all have been named Rehnquist. Wy thought about making the obvious comment but her courage failed her.

“Anyway,” Jo said, “what’s that got to do with anything?”

“John Barton, Liam’s boss, called. Said Liam had done so well in Newenham that John was promoting him back to sergeant.”

Jo digested this. “Wow. That was quick.”

“It’s partly your fault. You wrote that story with all those quotes making Liam sound like a hero.”

Jo looked at her. “So you’re not just pissed at Liam, you’re pissed at me, too.”

“Shit.” Wy smoothed back the curls that had escaped the braid falling down her back. “I’m not, Jo. Really, I’m not. It’s just that things were… It’s not like we don’t have other issues to deal with, you know? And now we’ve got to deal with this, too.”

“Liam must feel like a yo-yo,” Jo said.

“Yeah, well, apparently you’re only disgraced in the Alaska state troopers so long as you’re not clearing cases. When you are…”

“You’re undisgraced. Back in favor. Back on the fast track,” Jo said in sudden realization. “Okay. Got that. What else?”

“John offered him his old job back.”

“His old job?”

“Uh-huh.”

“His old job, as in, his old job in Anchorage?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh.”

“So you see.”

“I sure do. Where can I buy a gun?”

“Jo.”

“If he dumps you again, Wy, I swear I’ll-”

“He didn’t dump me last time; I dumped him.”

“He could have left his wife, and he didn’t.”

“He had a baby son at the time. He couldn’t leave both of them.”

“He could if he’d loved you enough.”

“He could if he was a total slimeball, Jo, and that wasn’t the guy I fell for. Now knock it off. I’m done with that, and you should be, too.”

A brief silence while Jo battled her baser self. “So what’s he going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

Jo raised an eyebrow.

“What?” Wy said. She knew that eyebrow.

“You haven’t asked him.”

“He hasn’t said.”

“You haven’t asked him?” Jo said, making it a question this time.

“I don’t think he knows.”

“You haven’t asked him!”

Wy gave a quick glance around to see who was listening. “Stop yelling. He hasn’t given John an answer, okay? And John asked almost a month ago.”

“Ahuh. Well.” Jo put her hands on her hips and surveyed Wy from head to toe. “Things must be pretty tense around the Chouinard household. You let Liam move in yet?”

Wy hunched a shoulder.

“Right. Why not?”

Wy didn’t answer.

“Yeah,” Jo said. “So, getting so much in the way of solid commitment from you, naturally he would leap at the chance to blow off his boss’ offer of promotion and spend the rest of his life in Newenham.”

Wy was as affronted at this turnabout on the part of her first, best friend as she had been annoyed at Jo’s attack on Liam. “So now you’re on his side?”

“Somebody has to be, poor bastard.”

“Up yours, Dunaway.”

“Backatcha times two,” Jo said promptly. “Okay, enough with this. You go get Tim, I’ll go get Gary, and don’t worry, all will be well.” She waved all-inclusive hands. “Leave it to me; Auntie Jo will fix everything.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Wy said, but she was saying it to Jo’s back going away.

November 30, 1941

A C-47 came in today with the heat exchanger out. One of the passengers kept his feet warm with a blowtorch all the way from Watson Lake. Man Im glad I wasnt on board that flight.

The airstrip isnt even paved and everytime we land we kick dirt and ice up against the fuselage. I hope none of that stuff is making it up into the props or the engines.

To cold today to snow. Gray overcast about ten thousand feet. Saw a dozen moose laying next to a frozen river southwest of Anchorage. They looked like theyd laid down to die and I dint blame them but theres an old Eskimo guy who hangs around the base doing odd jobs for cash who says the moose are conserving energy and that they dont move around much in the winter.

He says hes a gold miner and that he sells it to Russians because their money is no good and they pay more than Americans will. He has to be careful because its illegal anymore for private citizens to own gold. Im wondering what the Russians buy the gold with if their money is no good but thats what he says.