* * *
The race headquarters for the K300 were already in full swing when Trixie arrived with the veterinarian shortly after six o'clock. There were lists posted on dry-erase boards: the names of the mushers, with grids to post their progress at a dozen race checkpoints. There were rule books and maps of the course. Behind one table a woman sat at a bank of phones, answering the same questions over and over. Yes, the race started at eight P.M. Yes, DeeDee Jonrowe was wearing bib number one. No, they didn't have enough volunteers.
People who arrived by snow machine stripped off several layers the minute they walked into the Long House Inn. Everyone wore footwear with soles so thick they looked like moon boots, and sealskin hats with flaps that hung down over the ears. There were onepiece snowsuits and elaborately embroidered fur parkas. When the occasional musher came in, he was treated like a rock star people lined up to shake his hand and wish him the best of luck. Everyone seemed to know everyone else.
You'd think that in this environment, Trixie would have looked ridiculously out of place, but if anyone noticed her presence, they didn't seem to care. She wasn't stopped when she took a bowl of stew from the Crock Pot on the back table and then went back seconds
later for another helping. It wasn't beef - frankly, she was a little scared to find out what it was - but it was the first food she'd eaten
in almost two days, and at that point, anything would have been delicious.
Suddenly the woman behind the table stood up and started toward Trixie. She froze, anticipating a moment of reckoning. “Let me guess,” she said. “You're Andi?”
Trixie forced a smile. “How'd you know?”
“The other JVs called from Tuluksak and said you were new and you'd gotten snowed in Outside.”
“Outside where?”
The woman grinned. “Sorry, that's what we call all the other states. We'll get someone to run you to the checkpoint before the mushers arrive.”
“Tuluksak,” Trixie repeated. The word tasted like iron. “I was hoping to get to Akiak.”
“Well, Tuluksak's where we stick all the Jesuit Volunteers who work up here. Don't worry . . . we haven't lost one yet.” She nodded toward a box. “I'm Jen, by the way. And it would be really great if you could help me carry that down to the starting line.” Trixie hefted the box, which was full of camera equipment, as Jen pulled her face mask up over her nose and mouth. “You might want your coat,” she said.
“This is all I brought,” Trixie replied. “My, um, friends have my stuff with them.”
She didn't know if this lie would even make sense, since she hadn't understood any of Jen's comments about Jesuit Volunteers and Tuluksak in the first place. But Jen just rolled her eyes and dragged her toward a table covered with K300 merchandise for sale.
“Here,” she said, tossing her a big fleece jacket and mittens and a hat that Velcroed under the chin. She took a pair of boots and a heavy anorak from behind the headquarter tables. “These'll be too big, but Harry'll be too drunk later to notice they're missing.”
As Trixie followed Jen out of the Long House, winter smacked her with an open hand. It wasn't just cold, the way it got in Maine in December. It was bone-deep cold, the kind that wrapped around your spine and turned your breath into tiny crystals, the kind that matted your eyelashes together with ice. Snow was piled on both sides of the walkway, and snow machines were parked at right angles in between a few rusted trucks.
Jen walked toward one of the pickups. It was white, but one of the doors was red, as if it had been amputated from a different junk heap for transplant onto this one. Tufts of stuffing and coils sprang out from the passenger side of the bench. There were no seat belts. It looked nothing like Trixie's father's truck, but as she slid into the passenger seat, homesickness slipped like a knife between her ribs.
Jen coaxed the truck's engine into turning over. “Since when did the Jesuit Volunteers start recruiting on playgrounds?” Trixie's heart started to pound. “Oh, I'm twenty-one,” she said. “I just look way younger.”
“Either that, or I'm getting too damn old.” She nodded toward a bottle of Jagermeister jammed into the ashtray. “Feel free to have some, if you want.”
Trixie unscrewed the cap of the bottle. She took a tentative sip, then spit the liquor across the dashboard.
Jen laughed. “Right. Jesuit Volunteer. I forgot.” She watched Trixie furiously trying to wipe the mess up with her mitten.
“Don't worry, I think that it's got enough alcohol in it to qualify as cleaning fluid.”
She took a sharp right, turning the pickup over the edge of a snowbank. Trixie panicked - there was no road. The truck slid down an icy hill onto the surface of a frozen river, and then Jen began to drive to the center of it.
A makeshift start and finish line had been erected, with two long chutes cordoned off and a banner overhead proclaiming the K300. Beside it was a flatbed truck, on which stood a man testing a microphone. A steady stream of dilapidated pickups and snow machines pulled onto the ice, parking in ragged lines. Some pulled trailers with fancy kennel names painted across them; others had a litter of barking dogs in the back. In the distance was a belching hovercraft, one that Jen explained brought the mail downriver. Tonight it was serving free hot dogs, in honor of the race. A pair of enormous flood lamps illuminated the night, and for the first time since she'd landed in Bethel, Trixie got a good look at the Alaskan tundra. The landscape was layered in pale blues and flat silvers; the sky was an overturned bowl of stars that fell into the hoods of the Yup'ik children balanced on their fathers' shoulders. Ice stretched as far as she could see. Here, it was easy to understand how people once thought you could fall off the edge of the world.
It all looked familiar to Trixie, as impossible as that might be. And then she realized it was. This was exactly how her father drew hell.
As mushers hooked dogs to their sleds, a crowd gathered around the chute. All the people looked immense and overstuffed in their outside gear. Children held their hands out to the dogs to sniff, getting tangled in the lead lines.
“Andi. Andi?”
When Trixie didn't answer - she forgot that was the name she'd been given this time - Jen tapped her on the shoulder. Standing beside her was a Yup'ik Eskimo boy not much older than Trixie. He had a wide face the color of hazelnuts, and amazingly, he wasn't wearing a hat. “Willie's going to take you up to Tuluksak,” Jen said.
“Thanks,” Trixie answered.
The boy wouldn't look her in the eye. He turned away and started
walking, which Trixie assumed was the cue that she was supposed to follow. He stopped at a snow machine, nodded at it, and then walked away from her.
Willie disappeared quickly into the dark ring of night outside the flood lamp. Trixie hesitated beside the snow machine, not sure what she was supposed to do. Follow him? Figure out how to turn this thing on herself?
Trixie touched one of the handlebars. The snow machine smelled like exhaust, like her father's lawn mower.
She was about to look for an On switch when Willie returned, holding an oversized winter parka with black wolf fur sewn into the hood. Still averting his glance, he held it out to her. When she didn't take it, he mimed putting it on.
There was still heat trapped inside. Trixie wondered whom he'd taken this jacket from, if he or she was shivering now in the cold. Her hands were lost in the sleeves, and when she pulled up the hood, it blocked the wind from her face.
Willie climbed onto the snow machine and waited for Trixie to do the same. She glanced at him - what if he didn't know his way to Tuluksak? Even if he did, what was she going to do when everyone realized Trixie wasn't the person they were expecting?