Breakup (11 page)

Bobby raised his eyebrows, not averse to making a good story even better. "Why, I do believe it did, Mac."

Mac Devlin was a short, barrel-shaped man with a red face and redder hair that stood up straight in the standard ex-marine's crew cut. "Jesus! I hear over a hundred people got killed."

Kate leaned farther back into Bernie's shadow, and obligingly he leaned forward on his elbows, the better to keep her hidden. The Bush Telegraph had never been known for its strict adherenc e to the facts, and it appeared that today it had been working overtime. Bobby was thoroughly enjoying himself, and no one at the table gave him or Kate away. "At least."

"Jesus!" Mac Devlin said again. "I heard Kate was hurt, too."

"Intensive care at Providence in Anchorage," Bobby said.

"Serious," Bernie said solemnly.

"Critical," Dinah said, getting into the act.

"Near death," Bobby said, shaking his head mournfully. Dinah wiped away a tear. Bernie gave a heartfelt sigh. Mr. and Mrs. Baker drank single malt and kept their mouths shut, going up another notch in Mandy's friends' opinion poll.

Mac Devlin thought for a moment. "Listen," he said, dropping his voice to a confidential murmur, "you don't happen to know who Kate's heirs are, do you?"

"I don't believe so," Bobby said gravely. "I'm not sure she had any."

"Other than us," Dinah said, and slid her hand into the crook of Bobby's arm.

"Because then I could approach them about subsurface mineral rights on her homestead," Mac said.

Kate felt Bernie shake next to her, and a responding laugh bubbled up to the back of her throat. She pinched his arm in warning. He pinched her back.

Bobby almost forgot his part. "I've got to hand it to you, Mac, you never give up."

Mac's ruddy skin became even ruddier. "Because you know I've been after Kate for the mineral rights to that ridge above the creek back of her cabin ever since I came into the Park."

Dinah eyed him, enthralled by his every word. "What do you think is there?"

"I think it's where the silver vein that played out in the Lost Wife Mine reappears." Mac's chest puffed out. "I can show you the maps, and the geologic charts."

"Gee," Dinah told Bobby, all earnest persuasion, "maybe we ought to let him take a look."

Kate leaned forward into visual range and raised her voice. "Like hell. I've seen what Mac can do with that D-6 of his. He could move all hundred and sixty of my acres five miles west if he was of a mind to." She met Mac's astounded gaze and smiled. "Thanks, Mac, but no thanks. I'll pass."

Mac's jaw dropped, and the table erupted into laughter. He regained enough self-control to curse them all roundly and bulled off in the direction of the bar.

Still laughing, Bobby said, "There might be silver in them that hills, Kate. Aren't you even a little excited at the prospect?"

"Oh," she said politely, "you think I don't get enough excitement out at the homestead already?"

"Lay off, Bobby," Dinah said. "Not everybody's in the market to moil for gold."

"I'll moil it for her," Bobby said promptly.

"Thanks anyway," Kate said. "I don't think so."

"Are you sure you're really okay, Kate?" Dinah said, sobering. "Sounds like one heft of a close call to me."

"It was, but I'm fine."

"And may be richer for the experience," Bobby said, lifting his beer in a toast.

"I'd better be," she said gloomily. "The damn thing flattened my truck."

"Not old Ichiban?" Dinah said in dismay.

"Stewart?" Bernie said suddenly. "Did you say Mark Stewart? Kind of looks like Robert Redford, only with black hair?"

Kate blinked at him, lost for a moment. "Who?"

"The guy whose wife got eaten by the bear," Bernie said.

"Sounds like a book by John Straley," an irrepressible Bobby observed.

Bernie ignored him and persevered. "Does Stewart look kind of, I don't know, not Redfordy exactly, but, I guess, sort of deliberately movie star-ish? Lean, black hair?"

She paused with her glass halfway to her lips. Now that she thought about it, she couldn't remember the color of Stewart' s hair, the jolt of awareness when their eyes met obscuring everything else. She had been trained to observe, and she couldn't come up with something as basic as a physical description. And she had at one time called herself an investigator. She was even more disgusted with herself.

"Jesus, Bernie," Bobby said, unknowingly coming to her rescue, "you sound like you're in love with the guy."

Bernie shot him the finger, and Kate was able to say with a laugh, "Now, now, gentlemen. I happen to know the proprietor of this establishment, and he frowns on fisticuffs. Yes, Bernie," she said, turning to him, "that sounds like the guy. Why?"

"They were in here last night."

" "They?" Bobby said. "You mean the widower and the deceased?"

"Yeah," Bernie said. "They were really lovey-dovey." He paused, and added, "Or at least he was. She didn't look like she was all that excited to me."

Bobby made a rude noise. "Wishful thinking."

"Hey," Bernie said, wounded. "I'm a married man."

Kate was distracted by a burst of noise from the television screen, where a little old Native man was being roughed up by a bunch of big ugly oil field workers in what passed in Hollywood for a bar in the Bush, which was about as accurate as the rig fire scene. Steven Seagal entered the frame. Old Sam Dementieff, who was twice as old and twice as decrepit as the little old Native man on the television screen, raised up a thin, twittering voice. "Oh, please, Mr. Big Strong White Man, save poor, weak, drunk little me from the Big Bad White Guys!" Obediently, Seagal did, with the requisite amounts of testosterone and karate. "Oh, thank you, thank you, Mr. Big Strong White Man!" Old Sam cried. "You saved me! You shall be made a member of my tribe! Forever after you shall be known among us by your secret tribal name, Biggest White Prick!"

Chuckling, Kate turned back to the table.

"He's a big-time Anchorage contractor," Bernie was saying.

"He built the Roadhouse for me. Back when we were both just starting out. He cut his expenses to the bone, I'll say that for him, but he sure was hard on employees. He paid them ten bucks an hour-for Bush work, no less-and made 'em sleep in tents. Oh, and he refused to hire a cook."

"What'd they eat?"

Bernie grinned. "Surplus MREs."

"No fucking way!" Bobby roared in outrage.

"So," Kate said, with a quelling frown in Bobby's direction, "Mr. and Mrs. Baker, how long will you be visiting? Mandy didn't say."

"The jet will be back in Anchorage for us next Saturday," Mr. Baker said, and drained his glass as if it were the last drop of liquid between him and the day of departure. Mrs. Baker wasn't far behind. Bernie signaled for a second refill, as a brief silence, respectful of a private jet, fell.

"It's great that you came up," Kate said. "I know Mandy's been wishing you would f8r a long time."

Mrs. Baker's lips tightened ever so slightly. "We've been trying to talk her into coming home for a visit for years."

Obviously dangerous ground, and Bobby said briskly, "Enough with the small talk." He straightened in his chair, adjusted the set of the wheels, brushed an imaginary speck of dust off his T-shirt and demanded, "Ask me how my winter was."

"How was your winter?" Kate said obediently.

Bobby stroked his chin and seemed to consider. "Productive," he decided finally. "Yes, I'd say productive was the appropriate word." Dinah smiled again, the same dreamy smile as before. The rest of them sensed a story, and waited in expectant silence. Bobby did not disappoint them. "In fact," he said, regarding the level of beer in his glass with a critical frown, "I'm glad you came in today, Kate, I need to ask you a favor."

"Name it," Kate said, raising her glass.

"Will you be our best man?"

The Coke went down the wrong way and she choked and coughe d and Bobby, a huge grin on his face, wheeled around the table to pound her on the back with more force than was absolutely necessary but she couldn't catch her breath to complain. Meanwhile, Bernie exclaimed, Mr. and Mrs. Baker added dignified congratulations and Dinah smiled her dreamy smile. When Kate got her breath back she said, eyes watering, "You're actually getting married?" She looked from Bobby to Dinah and back again.

"Yeah, I know, sounds a little precipitous, don't it? We haven't even been living together for a year yet. But, well, you know, we thought it best, what with the baby coming and all."

This time the Coke came out her nose. Bernie was rendered speechless, an event so rare it ought to have been recorded in the Park annals, if there had been such a thing. Again, Mr. and Mrs. Baker leapt into the social breach, not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash indicating any disapproval of the sequence of events, or of anyone's relative age, or of the color of anyone's skin, either, which made Kate wonder if perhaps Mandy hadn't misread her parents' reaction to Chick. When she got her breath back the second time, she said, "I'll be best man only if I get to be godmother, too."

"Deal." Bobby stuck out a hand.

She took it and yanked him into a hug. "You lucky bastard," she said into his ear.

He hugged her back hard. "I know." They both admired Dinah, who sat in her chair looking positively angelic, which she was not. "I know," he said again.

She watched him watching Dinah. Bobby's face was square and smooth and black as coal beneath a tight cap of frizzy curls going gray at the temples, his eyes brown and shrewd, his smile in turn charming, seductive and downright wicked. Bobby Clark was a hillbilly turned Park rat from Tennessee who had come to Alaska by way of Vietnam, where he'd left both legs from just above the knee. What he didn't know about surviving in Bible Belt, jungle or Bush wasn't worth knowing. He and Kate had been lovers once and were friends now, and Kate was happy for him and a little sad for herself, although she couldn't have said precisely why.

They discussed names for the baby-Bobby favored Clyde, for Clyde McPhatter, or maybe Chuck, for Chuck Berry, or, alternatively, Ronette, Shirelle or Chiffon. Kate caught Dinah's eye, who shrugged resignedly and said, "He could want to call her Dixie Cup."

"Or Supreme," Kate suggested, getting into the spirit of things.

"Or Jelly Bean," Bernie said with a grin.

They all considered that one for a moment, before saying in unison, "Nah."

Bernie six-packed the table (apple juice for the expectant mother, Coke for the teetotaler) and rose to his feet to toast the imminent arrival of the newest Park rat. They drank, and in the absence of a fireplace to hurl the glasses into thumped them all down onto the table and raised a ragged cheer.

"Katya!" She turned to see Auntie Vi waving at her again. There was no ignoring the summons a second time, and she excused herself temporarily from the celebration.

Auntie Vi was a tiny woman with defiantly pitch black hair cut short and permed into a thousand tiny corkscrew curls around a face like an old apple, red-cheeked and wrinkled but with plenty of juice still left beneath the skin. Widowed, Auntie Vi fished subsistence during the summer and ran a bed-and-breakfast out of her home the rest of the year. She lived in a rambling cabin just outside Niniltna on the road to the Kanuyaq mine. Since hers was the only noncamping place to stay between Bernie's cabins and the pipeline-camp-converted-into-a-hotel in Ahtna, she did a brisk business with hunters, climbers and other assorted phenomena. In the past the latter had included an itinerant art collector scrounging old ivory carvings and baskets and button blankets and halibut lures and fishing visors and glory hallelujah, one time even an entire kayak in astonishingly good condition, which nobody told the collector had been made the previous summer by Gordon Tobeluk and sunk in the river to age for a year, as well as a Stanford sociologist writing his Ph.D. dissertation on the dynamics of subsistence survival in an adulterated rural lifestyle, who jumped a foot in th e air every time a twig snapped and refused to go any farther from the village than the last house, and a television reporter from ABC's L.A. affiliate looking for the definitive story on the effect of the RPetCo Anchorage oil spill, which he hoped would but did not get him an offer from national.

Auntie Vi rented them all beds made with clean sheets, served up caribou sausage and eggs, homemade toast and nagoonberry jelly the following morning, and charged on a sliding scale according to what she perceived to be her guests' net worth. She was the closest the Park had ever gotten to having their own homegrown entrepreneur. Mac Devlin wasn't even in the same class.

She was also an expert quilter. Close up, the quilt the circle was working on looked even more beautiful than it had at a distance, an organized swirl of shades of blue and white, with flowers made of a combination of embroidery and applique spaced at regular intervals. "Forget-me-nots?" Kate said. "My favorite flower."

"You hinting, Katya?"

Kate batted her eyes. "Who, me?"

Enid Koslowski, Bernie's wife, scowled at both of them. "She's not married."

"Nor about to be," Kate agreed, and nodded at Dinah. "She is, though."

"And Bobby's been here a long time," Auntie Joy said happily, knotting a thread.

"I didn't know you were in town, Auntie," Kate said to her.

Auntie Joy heaved a gusty sigh. "I get hungry for family, so I come." Over the tops of her half-glasses, she fixed Kate with a severe eye. "How is it this is first time I see you, Katya? You too good, or maybe just too lazy to come to town to visit your auntie?" Not waiting for Kate to answer the unaswerable, she said, "Break time, Vi?"

Grinning, Auntie Vi nodded and the other five exchanged thimbles and needles for mugs. Auntie Vi rose and stretched and took a few steps from the table, nodding at Kate to follow her.

"So," she said, looking over Kate's shoulder, "I hear you give Mandy's mom and dad the grand tour?"

"You could call it that."

Auntie Vi's eyes twinkled. "Mandy probably never let her folks back in the state, much less the Park."