Breakup. Part 5

"What about your wife!" Kate bellowed, shaking him. "What happened?"

"Bear," he said, pointing back in the direction from which he'd run.

"Grizzly attacked us. She's on the roof. Help her!"

"The roof of what?"

"One of the houAs! Help her!"

The memory of the grizzly female they had encountered on the road up flashed through Kate's mind. The hairs p.r.i.c.kling on the back of her neck, she cast a quick look around, saw no bears and stood to haul the man bodily to his feet. "Help me get him into the truck," she snapped at Mr. Baker.

Together they got him into the truck, Mrs. Baker close behind. Kate reached for Mandy's rifle. "You two stay here with him," she said, checking the chamber. "I'll go round up the wife."

"Ms. Shugak-" he began.

"Stay here!" she barked. Without waiting for a reply she pivoted on one heel and headed down the road between the mine buildings at a trot, head up, eyes alert, a fine sweat of nervous perspiration breaking out along her spine. She had the edge on vision and weaponry but the bear would have the edge on smell, size, strength, quickness and claws. She knew who she'd have put her money on.

Bears were odd beasts, she reminded herself; ninety-nine times 56 out of a hundred they'd pa.s.s ten feet in front of you, ignoring you, at most roaring a challenge or faking a charge to satisfy honor.

Yesterday morning at the creek had been the exception, the young male she'd run off from the meat cache far more the rule.

And the female with the stained muzzle? In which category did she belong?

Kate checked the safety a second time. It was still off. Good. She held the rifle in front of her, right finger inside the trigger guard. Always prepared. She and the Boy Scouts.

She cursed the couple who had picked this day to come up to the mine, cursed them for making her a hero, cursed herself for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and cursed them again for evidently coming unarmed into a region well known for its active bear population. Just the summer before, a grizzly had taken an eight-year-old boy in Skolai.

Didn't people read? Didn't they watch the news? Did they think all bears were funny and cuddly like Baloo? Like Charles II, Walt Disney had a lot to answer for.

The road turned right up the hill behind the mill. She followed it, mouth dry, into the cl.u.s.ter of houses the mine owners had provided for the manager and the senior staff and their families, ones with real running hot and cold water, electricity and plumbing. There were plenty of places all over America in 1911 that didn't have as much, but in 1911, with the price of copper what it was, money was no object, and Morgan-Mellon-Astor-Carnegie-Guggenheim- whoever had wanted to keep their upper-echelon employees happy and productive. The lower-echelon employees, i.e., the ones who got the copper out of the ground and loaded it on the railroad cars, stayed in the bunkhouse farther down the side of the hill and shared the bathroom with ninety-nine others.

The houses were small affairs built of the same faded, peeling red clapboard as the main buildings. There wasn't anyone on the roof of the first house in line, and the soft, slushy, rapidly melting snow hid what tracks there had been. She didn't hear the growl of an infuriated grizzly, either, and she was listening for it pretty hard. All that was audible was the roar of the Kanuyaq River, loud 57 enough to drown out the sound of an approaching bear until it was right on her.

"Lady?" she called. "Lady? I've got a gun, I'm here to help. Your husband's okay. It's safe to come down now." She walked forward.

One house. Around a corner and another. A cl.u.s.ter of scrub spruce and a third house, a fourth and a fifth without incident.

"Lady?" she called again, and cursed herself again, this time for not asking for the name. "Lady, can you hear me? My name is Kate Shugak.

I've got a rifle. Don't be afraid, you can come down now."

A sixth, a seventh, an eighth. The road wound around the ninth and Kate halted abruptly.

The woman lay in the middle of the road, soaked to the skin from the rapid melt of a winter's worth of snow, staring sightlessly at the sky.

Or she would have been, if she'd had any face left.

Her left arm was missing below the elbow, as was most of her belly and thighs. Betrs were notorious for exerting the least effort for the most result and went for the soft meat and the viscera first. The arm had most probably been lost in trying to fight off the inevitable.

Blood was everywhere, the salty copper smell of it strong in her nostrils, and the melting snow had kept it bright red, redder than the fading walls of the little house in the background. The resulting slush had mixed with the dirt track beneath and the area was a sea of churned-up mud in which the paw prints of a very large bear were prominent. The muddy, b.l.o.o.d.y prints led into the brush on the downhill side of the road.

She couldn't move.

This could have been me, she thought.

If I hadn't moved fast enough, gotten up the bank when I did, this could be me lying here. If the brush hadn't slowed her down coming after me, if Mutt hadn't been barking, if her cubs hadn't been bawling for her.

This could have been me.

58 She could almost see herself, sprawled on her back in the little swimming hole, sightless eyes staring up, the dark blood drifting out of the backwater to be s.n.a.t.c.hed into the swift, midstream current and washed downstream, into the river and the gulf beyond. How long before anyone would have known, if ever?

Her hands cramped, making her aware of how hard she was gripping the rifle. She swallowed and forced herself to move forward, focusing fiercely on one of the clearer prints, in which a puddle of reddish water was already beginning to form. About six or seven hundred pounds, she estimated, standing six to eight feet.

The pink shreds in the grizzly's claws had been human flesh.

She looked away, at the fading wall of the house, long strips of paint peeling from its sides, and swallowed hard. Dimly, her own words echoed in her head. It was that hundredth bear you had to watch out for.

She heard a sound behind her and spun around, rifle at the ready, to find Mrs. Baker retching emptily on one side of the road. Mr. Baker, white to the lips, was patting her shoulders soothingly.

"Oh great," Kate said before she thought. "Mandy is going to kill me."

59.

George Perry ground-looped 50 Papa on a short final into Niniltna.

Two circ.u.mstances contributed to this unfortunate occurrence.

One, there was a fourteen-inch rut halfway down the icy surface of the 4,800-foot airstrip, which the latest grader pa.s.s had missed and which the left front tire on 50 Papa had the misfortune to eaten precisely at touchdown.

Two, Ben Bingley was barfing down the back of his neck at the time.

Kate drove up with the Bakers and the bereaved husband in time to see the red and white two-seater pull sharply to the left, losing its center of gravity just long enough to lean over and catch the ground with the tip of the left wing. Newton and inertia took care of the rest as the plane completed a snap roll so perfect it would have brought tears to the eyes of an 60 Air Force flight instructor if only it hadn't been performed at zero alt.i.tude.

In short, the plane flipped over and pancaked flat on its back. Under the beneficent rays of the spring sun, the surface of the airstrip had been reduced to a foot of packed snow, submerged beneath an inch of water, providing a marvelous surface for a nice long gliding slide.

Five-zero Papa slid very well indeed, on a direct line heading for Mandy's truck as it pulled to a halt in front of the post office. It was a combination skid and spin; in fact 50 Papa was going around on its back like a slow top for the second time, the ripping sound of tearing wing fabric clearly audible to the stupefied witnesses in the cab of Mandy's truck, just as the plane ran into them. Kate looked down, fascinated, as one wing slid smoothly between the front and back tires, and looked up just in time to see the wheel of one landing gear hit the top of the driver's- side door with a solid thud that shook the cab and rattled the pa.s.sengers in it, although not as much as the grizzly had done earlier.

The window bowed inward but did not break. There was the unmistakable groan of bending metal, though. Kate, a little lightheaded, thought that Mandy might not notice the dented b.u.mper and the clawed finish and the need for a front-end alignment on her brand new truck after all.

Her second thought was to wonder how full the Super Cub's tanks were, one of which was at present resting directly beneath her a.s.s.

Foolishly, she grabbed for the handle and shoved. The door, the right gear of the plane jammed solidly against it, unsurprisingly did not budge. "Out!" she roared. "Out! OUT! OUT!" Mr. Baker fumbled with the pa.s.senger door and stumbled to the ground. Kate, not standing on ceremony, shoved Mrs. Baker and the husband out after him and scrambled out herself to run around the truck. She sniffed, tense. No smell of gasoline.

She went around to the Cub's right side and squatted to fold up the door. A smell hit her in the face like a blow, powerful 61 enough to knock her on her b.u.t.t. It wasn't gasoline, it was vomit.

She took a couple of deep, gasping breaths, m.u.f.fled her face with a sleeve and spoke through it. "George, are you okay?"

George looked at her, still suspended upside down in his seat harness, bits of brown something spattered across the back of his head and neck.

"I hate breakup," he said.

"Never a dull moment," Kate agreed.

A rustle and the snap of a buckle came from the seat behind him. "No!"

George said. "Ben, don't-"

But Ben did, releasing the buckle on his seat belt. He fell heavily on his head and shoulders against the ceiling of the fuselage. A cry of pain and some futile thras.h.i.+ng around followed, after which George contributed some acerbic commentary, because he now could not slide his seat back to get out. Matters did not improve when Ben threw up again.

"AUGGHHH!" said George. He braced his feet up against the dash, reached for the lever and shoved with all his might. The seat slid back and hit Befi in the b.u.t.t. Ben tumbled backwards in a corkscrew somersault into the pile of U.S. Postal Service mail sacks that had been piled on the floor in back of his seat and were now piled on the ceiling. It was too much for him and he threw up for the third time.

George braced himself on one arm, popped his harness buckle and was outside and on his feet a moment later. Thin-lipped and furious, he addressed the area in language suitable to the situation. George was an ex-helicopter pilot who had learned his trade under fire in Vietnam and perfected it on the TransAlaska Pipeline before deserting the rotor for fixed wing and starting an air taxi in the Park. He was also one of five ex-husbands of Ramona Halford, the right-wing state senator representing the area of Alaska that included the Park, which all by itself had been an education in expletive deleted.

Over his shoulder, Kate caught sight of the widower, staring down into the bed of the truck at the body, coc.o.o.ned in a blue 62 plastic tarp. A few feet away stood the Bakers, color back in their faces and by the wideness of their eyes evidently improving their vocabulary with George's able a.s.sistance.

Cravenly, Kate ducked down again to help Ben Bingley out of the plane.

This wasn't easy, as Ben had heard George's lengthy and comprehensive address and somehow received the impression that George might hold him in some small measure accountable for the ground loop. He was of course absolutely innocent of anything of the kind, but he had decided he would stay in the plane for a while, like maybe until George went home, or perhaps left the Park forever.

So he held on to the back of the pilot's seat, refusing to let Kate pull it forward, until she had to kneel down in the slush. The aroma of beer-based puke was gagging and Kate lost her temper. "Ben, stop being such a big baby and get your a.s.s out of this friggin' plane."

Ben was more scared of a mildly p.i.s.sed Kate Shugak than he was of George Perry at full volume and he wavered. "You promise you won't let him hurt me?"

"I'll kill you, you stupid little s.h.i.+t!" George said from above.

"I promise," Kate said, more temperate now. Somebody had to be. "Come on out, Ben."

"I don't know," Ben said doubtfully, "he sounds awful mad."

"He's just shook up from dinging the plane. Come on out, Ben."

"I'll rip your f.u.c.king guts out and use them for crab bait! "

"Maybe you could just bring me a beer," Ben said hopefully.

"I'll feed your sorry a.s.s to the first bear to come down the pike!"

Kate winced, and was glad that in her current position she couldn't see the expression on her three pa.s.sengers' faces.

George ran out of breath and threats and Ben finally did come out, standing so as to keep Kate between himself and the enraged pilot at all times.

Kate began negotiations toward a truce and was making some headway when Ben's wife appeared on the airstrip. It became immediately apparent that he had way worse problems to deal with 63 than a plane wreck, an enraged bush pilot and vomit down the front of his s.h.i.+rt.

Cindy had left the house without her jacket but not without her 9mm Smith and Wesson, which she held in a business-like grip with the business end pointed at Ben.

"Whoa!" George said, startled out of his wrath.

"You little p.r.i.c.k," Cindy said.

"Now, Cindy," Kate said, eyes almost crossed on the barrel beneath her nose, trying to see if the pistol was loaded. She could tell it was an automatic, but the way Cindy kept waving it around she couldn't tell if there was a clip in the b.u.t.t Might be one in the chamber anyway, so she wasn't safe whether she could see the clip or not, and stopped trying.

"Now, honey," Ben said, peering fearfully over Kate's shoulder.

"I hate breakup," George said.

"Get out of my way, Kate!" Cindy snarled. "That son of a b.i.t.c.h stole the kids' quarterly dividends and probably drank up every last d.a.m.n dime!

Why the h.e.l.l don't you people do something so he can't get his hands on the money!"

"I'm not on the board," Kate said.

Cindy dismissed this spineless and specious attempt at diversion with a contemptuous wave of the pistol that brought George into the line of fire. George took a hasty step backward, slipped and sat down hard in a puddle. "You're Ekaterina's granddaughter, you say jump, they say how high, who cares about t.i.tles! How am I going to feed the kids until the salmon start running? Huh? How?"

Kate had no answer for her, and Cindy's smoldering gaze fixed upon her cringing husband. "I told you, Ben, I told you if you ever did that again I'd kill you!"

She meant it, too. Bang! went the pistol. The bullet went into the driver's side door of Mandy's truck with a clang, missing the right tire on the Super Cub by an inch.

Definitely loaded, Kate thought, orchestrating a graceful swan dive.

64 "Hey!" George roared indignantly. "Watch out for my G.o.ddam plane!"

Bang! went the pistol again, and George decided better the Cub than him and dove after Kate.

Ben was left standing all alone, a sickly smile spreading across his face. "Now, honey-" he began. Bang! went the pistol again, and he broke and ran. Bang! Bang! and Cindy took off in pursuit.

Their thudding footsteps faded, followed by some cras.h.i.+ng of brush and yelps of pain. Kate, sandwiched between the Cub's wing and the pickup's differential, raised her head to survey the area. n.o.body shooting in her immediate vicinity. This was good. She looked over at George. His eyes were squeezed shut and he'd managed to jam himself almost all the way beneath the truck, the bed of which had been ventilated at least twice that Kate could see from her p.r.o.ne position. Kate wasn't worried. At this point Mandy would barely notice the bullet holes.

"So, George," she said, "you think we should go after them?"

"Nope," George said, opening his eyes.

"Me neither," she decided. It was breakup, and she had nineteen other things to do without adding the arbitration of Ben and Cindy Bingley's marital spats to the list.

Bang! went the distant sound of the pistol a sixth time.

Especially when Cindy was so well armed.

George gave a long, shaky breath and climbed to his feet. "She's empty, now, anyway."

"It was an automatic," Kate said, wriggling free and standing up. Her Nikes were wet, dammit. Kate hated getting her feet wet. It ranked right up there with turning her back on a bear.

Three more shots sounded in rapid succession, followed by a whoop of triumph from Ben, a snarl of frustration from Cindy and the snapping of tree limbs. "Now she's empty," Kate said, relieved.

"Unless it was a staggered clip," George said. "Staggered clips have fourteen rounds."

"s.h.i.+t," Kate said, with feeling. They both listened intently, but 65 there were no more shots. Kate bent to brush ineffectually at the mud clinging to her knees. "Let's just hope she didn't have a spare clip."

"Gee, thanks for sharing, Shugak. You're always such a comfort to me."