“Yeah.”
“To fly?”
She grinned. “Hey. It's what I do.”
A warm wave of color washed up over his face. “You're just kidding,” he said gruffly. “Aren't you? I'm too young. Aren't I?”
“Younger than me when I started,” she agreed. “But then I started awful late. I was practically an old lady.”
“How old?” he demanded.
“Sixteen.”
“Do you mean it?” he said again.
He threw the question down like a gauntlet, a challenge to her to take it up. Promises had been made to him before, many promises over the twelve long years of his young life, promises made and promises broken. “Yes,” she said soberly. “I mean it.”
He still didn't quite believe her, she could see it in his eyes. “Next Sunday morning,” she said, turning back to the plane. “I don't have anything booked until four that afternoon. We'll take the Cessna up. She's got dual controls.” She thought about mentioning ground school, and left it for later. If she could get him hooked on flying, he wouldn't have a choice.
After a moment or two, she heard him wheel the toolbox back into the shed.
There was a shed just like it in back of every one of the light planes drawn up at the edge of the tarmac at Newenham General Airport, but theirs was the only one currently in use. The open door revealed shelves packed with tools and parts, as well as camping and fishing gear. A fifty-five-gallon Chevron fuel drum, cut in half, sat in one corner, filled to the brim with Japanese fishing floats made of green glass. Wy picked them up whenever she made a beach landing and sold them to tourists for as much as the traffic would bear.
“Wy?”
“Yeah?” Wy was in the shed, smearing Goop on her hands, trying and failing to get the oil that invariably migrated beneath her fingernails.
The possibility of slipping the surly bonds of earth had faded from his face. “You remember the Malones?”
Her hands stilled, and she looked over her shoulder. Tim had one hand on the Cub's right strut, watching an Alaska Airlines 737 bank left out over the river in preparation for landing. “You mean the people who were killed on the boat in Kulukak?”
“Yeah.”
Wy reached for a rag and went out to stand next to him. “I didn't know them, Tim. I don't think I ever met them. I don't think I ever flew them anywhere.”
The 737 lined up on final.
“I knew the boy. Mike.”
“Did you?”
“He played basketball.”
“What position?”
“Guard.”
“Like you.”
“Yeah. I had to guard him last time the Kulukak team was in town. Our last game of the season.”
“When was that, March?”
“Yeah.”
Wy thought back, in her mind trying to distinguish one adolescent from another on a court that seemed remarkably full of them. “Number twenty-two, right? Hands like catcher's mitts, arms that stretched from here to Icky, and a good sport?”
“Yeah.”
Mike Malone had guarded Tim like Tim was Bastogne and Mike was the entire 501st Airborne. “You played really well against him.”
Tim's shoulders rose in a faint shrug. “Have to, against a guy like that.”
“Did you meet his sister, too?”
“Yeah. He introduced me once.” A pause. “She was a cheerleader, traveled with the team.”
“Pretty?”
“Yeah.”
The 737 touched down just inside the markers in a runway paint job, the engines roaring immediately into reverse so they wouldn't miss the first taxiway. Hot dog, Wy thought. Definitely the sound of someone not flying their own plane.
“Liam says they're dead.” He looked at her.
Wy finished with the rag and turned to pitch it, accurately, in the wastebasket just inside the door of the shed. “Yeah.” She turned back. “When did you talk to Liam?”
“This morning. I went over to the post. When you left to take the mail to Manokotak.”
Bless the U.S. Postal Service, Wy thought automatically. A mail contract was the difference between red and black on the bottom line to a Bush air taxi. “Oh.”
“You didn't say I couldn't.”
“No,” she agreed. Did he ask about me? she wanted to say, but managed to refrain from anything that sophomoric.
“So they're dead,” he repeated.
“Yeah.” Her hand settled on his shoulder and squeezed, as the 737 popped its hatch and let down its rear air stair.
“It's-it's-itstinks,” he said, and his eyes when he raised them were dark and wounded.
“It stinks to high heaven,” Wy agreed. “Tim. Did you ever meet the rest of Mike's family? His mom? His dad?”
Tim shook his head. “No. Just Mike.” He hesitated.
“What?”
He colored, and looked at his shoes. “One time, it was like the first time we played the Wolverines, I remember Mike got benched for fighting.”
“What about?”
His color deepened and he wouldn't look up. “Somebody'd said something about his mother.”
“What?”
He said gruffly, “Said she slept around on Mike's dad. Called her a whore. So Mike beat him up, and the coach benched him.” He added wistfully, “That was the only time all year we beat them.”
“Who said that? Who did Mike beat up?”
“Arne. Arne Swensen. He plays guard, too. He's a senior this year, so he'll probably start even if he doesn't deserve to.” He looked up. “That stinks, too.”
Wy smiled and ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah.”
He pulled back and anxiously patted his glossy black locks back into their previous perfect order. The last person off the 737 was a big, bulky man wearing a parka and mukluks. In July. “Tourist,” he said.
“And how.”
“Mom?”
He'd called her Mom from the first day she brought him home from the hospital, a direct and determined repudiation of his birth mother. Now that he felt more secure, he used Mom and Wy interchangeably. She did notice that when he was particularly bothered about something, he usually called her Mom. She steeled herself. “What?”
He fidgeted. “They weren't-they didn't-Kerry and Mike… nobody, well, hurt them, did they?”
It only took Wy a second to understand. Tim had grown up among a succession of people who had regarded his body as their personal punching bag. “No,” Wy said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Wy said. “I'm sure.”
She wasn't, of course, she knew nothing about the condition in which the bodies had been found, but she was willing to lie herself blue in the face before she contributed one more scene to Tim's recurring nightmares. Imagining how Mike, a boy he'd admired, and Kerry, a girl he might have had a secret crush on, had been tortured before being killed was not going to lessen their frequency or ease their intensity.
The 737 started loading passengers for the return trip to Anchorage. First on board was a skinny little blond kid in a blue nylon jacket, jeans and sneakers, clutching a silver briefcase almost as big as he was. He looked purposeful, on a mission. Wy wondered what was in the suitcase.
A shout distracted her attention, and she looked around to see Professor Desmond X. McLynn bearing down on them. “I'm outta here,” Tim muttered, and he grabbed his bike and shot off. Wy didn't blame him.
“What can I do for you, Mr. McLynn?” Wy said as the professor came trotting up.
“Do? You can fly me out to my dig, is what you can do. Where have you been all day? I was here at nine o'clock and you were gone! You've contracted to be my air support for the summer, and then you disappear when I need to fly! Give me one good reason why I shouldn't hire another pilot!”
Wy, one of the more reliable pilots on the Bay, bit back an invitationfor Professor Desmond X. McLynn to do just that, didn't say that she'd contracted to fly him in and out once a week, not twice, and plastered a smile on her face. “I do have other contracts to fulfill besides yours, Professor McLynn, but”-she overrode his protest-“I'm here now. We can be in the air in ten minutes.”