A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (19 page)

“It’s all right. They’re not either,” she said, pointing to the way the small vehicles cut the corners at every intersection, their paths running across open yards and slicing very close to the buildings. The drivers wouldn’t slow down at all around these shortcuts. Burns cringed watching them disappear. They’ll be killed, he thought. They’ll crash head-on with someone coming the other way and be killed. He and Julie didn’t speak in the pressure of the cold. They stopped several times to pick things from the roadway: a scarf, a big leather mitten, and at the corner where they turned for the bar, a loaf of bread, still soft. He found such litter alarming, but Julie only smiled and told him simply, “Bring it along.”

The Tahoe was a large metal building which looked like a one-story warehouse. Julie led him up the iced steps and across the wide porch into the big barroom. Inside the door, in the dark, one booth was stacked high with miscellaneous gear: sweaters, hats, and gloves. Julie told him, “Put your treasures right there. It’s the lost and found.” The vast room was gloomy and crowded. As Burns’s eyes adjusted, he saw that the booths were full of Inuit, and though the room was warm and redolent of cigarettes and fur, few people had taken their coats off.

“What would you like?” Julie said.

“I’d like a vanilla shake,” Burns said. “This country has got me starved. But I’ll take a soda water, anything really.”

It was not an animated bar. Burns could see four school board members who were on his flight standing at the bar, talking, but they were the loudest group. The dark clusters of natives huddled around the tables and booths in the room spoke quietly if at all. Even the pool players moved with a kind of lethargy. Burns stood by the end of the bar, his stomach growling as he thawed. He’d been in lots of bars and this was possibly the largest. In the old days, after martinis at his club, he’d hit every hole in the wall on the way to Grand Central, eventually taking the last train to Connecticut, the ride as cloudy and smeared as the windows. He hadn’t been a sloppy drunk; he’d been a careful drunk. The word was “serious”—for everything he’d done, really. He was a serious young man, who had married seriously and become a serious attorney, who drank seriously and became a serious drunk. The mistakes he made were serious and now, in the Arctic Circle, he thought of himself in the Tahoe as a serious visitor on a serious mission who did not drink and took his not drinking seriously. He knew how he was perceived and it was a kind of comfort for Burns to have the word to hold on to.

“Welcome to Alaska,” Julie said, handing him a glass of sparkling water. “There are no limes.” She touched his glass with her own.

“I’d worry if there were.”

“You don’t drink,” she said, sipping her whiskey. “Smart man.”

“No. Alec I’m sure told you. I got smart a little late.” He sucked on his lip and nodded at her. “I’ve missed a lot. I’m an
old
man.”

“Not quite.” She smiled and touched his glass again. “And it is a world of accidents, believe me. Someone just dropped the bread, right? And on the way home we’ll find the peanut butter. Lots of things get dropped.” She looked at his face appraisingly. “You’re still a smart man.” Julie waved a hand out over the room. “How do you like the Tahoe, the hub of culture on the frontier?”

“It’s big. I spent a lot of time having stronger drinks in smaller places.”

“You’re a lawyer.”

“I am. I was a good lawyer years ago. Now I’m simply highly paid: probate on the Gold Coast. Did Alec say he’d forgiven me for it?”

“Alec always spoke of you in the best terms. You taught him how to sail?”

“One summer a long time ago. I wasn’t around much.”

Someone, a figure, fell out of a booth across the room and two tablemates stood and lifted the person back into place.

“Will you stay here?” Burns asked her. “In Kotzebue?”

“I’m a nurse. There’s a lot of call for that here. I’ve got a life—and I’ve got my students.”

The walk back to the trailer again awakened in Burns a huge hunger. He had the same feeling he always had when he spoke of his past, honest and diminished, but now he mainly felt hungry. The wind was in their faces and they leaned against it, talking, while Burns felt the chocolate bar in his pocket. Julie spoke of meeting his son their year at Juilliard. “I wasn’t their kind of musician,” she said, punching the words into the wind. “I was lucky. I’d been lucky with the competitions really. And I didn’t really care for all the work. It was nonstop.” They could hear dogs barking out in the fields where the teams were staked. Julie took his arm and turned into the narrow, icy lane where her trailer stood. “I like to play—I teach and I still play—but at Juilliard, well,” she faced him in the cold dark, her face luminous, “too many
artists.
”

Inside the trailer, Julie’s three students plucked at violin strings tuning their instruments. She introduced them to Burns: Tara, Mercy, and Calvin, native kids all about twelve. They sat serious and straight-backed in the living room for the lesson while Julie began leading them through the half hour’s exercises. Calvin’s eyes kept going sideways to Burns, and Burns could see they were all self-conscious, so he stood and started for his room. Julie stopped and came to him. “Can I get you anything?”

“No, thank you,” he said. Taking off his coat had made him impossibly tired. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

As he climbed into bed he could hear the sliding harmonies of the four violins rise and fall. Alec had started the violin when he was six, the year Helen had taken him and gone back to Ohio, and years later when Alec finished Juilliard, he had gone to Alaska to teach. Burns had never contacted his son when he was studying in New York. In those days guilt had slowed everything Burns did. He had moved his practice to Connecticut by then, and three times Burns had taken the train into the city and walked by the music school, slowing enough to hear the strains of piano or French horn from a window. And then as if scolded by the music, he hurried away. He couldn’t cross the street and go in. Now Burns cringed at his cowardice.

Under the heavy blankets in his room, as the wind moaned over the trailer, Burns listened to the violins. He’d eaten his chocolate and was tired to his bones. He could feel the structure moving in the weight of the gusts. It was like being aboard ship.

Later he had heard voices, their timbre, something almost angry, and then he felt the door shut, and the rushing quiet took him again.

BURNS WOKE
in the bright morning and heard the white wind. He was disappointed as he wiped at the frost on the inside of his window to see the storm outside, but there was something else: all this weather. He liked this odd place, big on the earth and full of weather. He’d had the same feeling on certain days sailing off St. Johns: the ocean could be a big, unknowable thing there, indifferent to anybody’s plans.

Julie had left him a map on the table, a pencil grid of the village with arrows to the sheriff’s office and his phone number. At the bottom it said, “I’ll be back at five—and then I’d better take you to the hospital party, so everyone can meet the mystery man. It’s at seven. J.” Beside it was a large sweet roll, which Burns wolfed down with a mug of the cold powdered milk from the fridge. Standing there in his pajamas in the kitchen drinking the thick, cold milk, Burns grinned. He felt like a kid. He was grinning. Powdered milk was better than he had imagined.

Outside, marching sidelong into the killer wind, Burns felt the cold only in his exposed forehead and then not as cold, but as a constriction, a tight band of pain. He walked with his head turned for protection into his parka hood, and the drivers of the snow machines who roared past also drove with their heads turned. It made him stop and move aside several times. He saw several more mittens in the snow, but didn’t pick them up. The day, the world, was all wind, even the rustle of his coat was lost in the gale.

The sheriff’s office was two long blocks past the Tahoe in a small complex of state and federal buildings, one-story brick cottages linked by covered walkways. The sheriff was waiting for him, but after they shook hands, Burns had to sit down for a moment and rub his forehead while the aching subsided. He’d sat behind his own desk just like this, rubbing his head, unable to talk to some client as a low wave of nausea rinsed through. In those days, while he tried to poison himself with it, drinking pernicious amounts of gin every night, his clients never knew, his business never quivered. When he went down, they didn’t find him for a week, and when Helen came to the hospital, she simply said to stop it, that she was fine and would be, but that killing himself would make it worse for everyone. “You’ve broken me,” she said. “I’m taking the baby and going home.” And that was that. He was two weeks in the hospital, having almost lost toes to frostbite, and when he came out, he moved the office to New Canaan, dropped everything but probate, and knew—essentially—and this had nothing to do with the drinking—that his life was over. Helen had already taken Alec back to Ohio, where her mother had lived, and a few years later she married Charley, an attorney in Chagrin Falls.

The sheriff’s name was Lloyd Right, a man all in khaki, whom Burns liked right away. “Mr. Burns,” he said, taking Burns’ coat and pointing out the easy chair, “now tell me exactly the objectives of your visit to the frozen north.”

He nodded through the tale, his jaw in his fist, and then when Burns finished, Lloyd Right stood and went to the three-drawer file in the corner and pulled out a folder. “It doesn’t appear as if Glen Batton or anybody else is going to be able to lift you out there.” Right went back to his desk and sat down, placing the folder squarely in front of him. “This weather has been tight for a week, and it’s a pity, not that there’s much to see, but I understand too well the importance of just being at the scene.” Right dialed the phone and then hung up. It rang and he picked up and said, “Jerry, bring us two coffees.” He looked at Burns. “You want some coffee, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“Anyway, Julie told me about you and about Alec’s mother. These things are always bad. What I can do for you is tell you what I know, let you read the file. It was an accident, you can tell his mother that. We don’t have any photos. But Julie had been by his place and she can describe it to you. You could tell the family that you went out there, that—”

“No, I couldn’t,” Burns said. “I couldn’t do that. You understand. I am the family. I could tell Alec’s mother I was here and saw this file and that I spoke to you.”

The deputy came in with the coffee, setting the two mugs on the sheriff’s desk and backing out. While the office door was open, another officer came in, the cold on him like an odor, a rifle in his hand. “Lloyd, they’ve seen the stray out at the foothills. You coming?”

“Take Bob. Call me in half an hour,” Right said. When the men had left, the sheriff sipped his coffee. “We’ve got one goddam stray left, and he’s a smart one. What a lone dog can do to a staked team. You don’t want to see it. Some of our teams are worth thousands; two teams are going down for the Iditarod next month. Do they hear about the Iditarod in Connecticut, Mr. Burns?”

“They do,” Burns said. “You don’t think I can get out to Kolvik?”

“I don’t. It’s too bad. I’ve been to the site. Alec lived about two miles from the village, south, in the low hills. The cabin had been totally consumed.” The sheriff stood and came around his metal desk, sitting on the edge of the short bookshelf near Burns. “You know, even before he left here, something had happened to Alec,” he said. “He had a breakdown or something. This is not in the report. But he began acting strange. You can ask Julie about it. We were sorry about it here. What he had done for the music program in the high school in two years was wonderful, and when he dropped out and moved out there sixty miles, well, everybody felt bad. But we see this kind of thing here. A guy moves out and then further out and moves, if he can, to what he sees as the end of the road, the edge, and either he lives there or he doesn’t, but he doesn’t come back.”

Lloyd Right went back and sat behind his desk, working his closed eyes with his fingers for a moment. He went on, “You figure it. He was a fine musician. So, he moves out to Kolvik and starts a trapline. It was just above the cabin in a draw. That’s where they found the body. It was a classic case of freezing to death, I mean, he’d taken off his clothes and they were scattered around. It’s very common, Mr. Burns, and I would think it’s important that you know this was an accident, not suicide. He misjudged the time and was out too long.” Lloyd Right stood again and drained his coffee. “We found the dog out there with him. Julie has her.”

ON THE
way home, Burns felt his mouth dry with hunger and he went into the small Co-op and bought a bag of chocolate bars. Outside a man had fallen on the steps and Burns and a woman helped the man climb back up. Burns took the back street to Julie’s, the wind now pushing him along the pathway. There were fewer close calls with snow machines here, and he ate the candy and walked slowly, his hands thrust deeply into his parka pockets. Then a strange thing happened that scared him so badly he involuntarily ducked and nearly fell. At first Burns thought something had hit him, but then he saw the light change, a sunflash that settled on the village for a second dropping thick blue shadows on the sides of things. It was painfully bright. The sun was out. In the sky Burns could see the contours of individual clouds. Stay there, he thought. Just stay there.

THE PARTY
that night was held in the hospital recreation room, a small square room lined with blue vinyl couches. The hospital was obviously an old wooden military building that had been superficially redone. There was a new checkerboard linoleum floor, but wooden-framed windows lined each wall. Julie took Burns by the arm and they went around to everybody in the room, thirty or so people: Julie’s head nurse, Karen; Lloyd Right and his wife; both deputies; several nurses and two doctors (both women); Glen Batton; the high school principal and his wife; a dozen teachers there; the school board members whom Burns recognized from his flight; a social counselor named Victor (the only Inuit at the party); some guys from the National Guard; and part of the airport staff. Burns wasn’t very comfortable. He’d slept all afternoon and his feet hurt and his face felt swollen. But he was keen, too, because the weather had changed—there was talk of a clearing. Jets were coming in from Nome tomorrow.