“It's just what you do,” Willie said. “It's not like it means anything. My dad's stripped down naked with other guys, when they get stuck overnight.”
Trixie pictured her father doing this . . . but stopped abruptly when she got to the part where she had to imagine him without clothes.
“Last time it happened, my dad had to cuddle up to old Ellis Puuqatak the whole night. He swore he'd never leave home again without a sleeping bag.”
Trixie watched Willie's words crystallize in the cold, each as differentiated as a snowflake, and she knew he was telling her the truth. “You have to close your eyes first,” she said, hesitant. She shucked off her jeans, anorak, and sweater. She left on her bra and panties, because she had to.
“Now you,” Trixie said, and she looked away as he pulled off his coat and his shirt. She peeked, though. His back was the color of the outside of an almond, and his shoulder blades flexed like pistons. He took off his jeans, hopping around and making little sounds, like a person at the town pool who makes a big deal when he finally manages to get into the cold water.
Willie spread some grass on the ground, then lay down and motioned for Trixie to do the same. He drew their jackets over them, like a blanket, and then covered these with more grass. Trixie squeezed her eyes shut. She could feel the rustle of the straw as he moved closer and the itch of the grass on her bare skin as it caught between them. Willie's hand touched her back, and she stiffened as he came up behind her, curling his knees into the hollow bowl made by the bend of her own. She took deep breaths. She tried not to remember the last boy she'd touched, the last boy who'd touched her.
The inferno began where his fingers rested on her shoulder and spread to every spot where their skin was touching. Pressed up against Willie, Trixie didn't find herself thinking about Jason, or the night of the rape. She didn't feel threatened or even frightened. She simply felt, for the first time in hours, warm.
“Did you ever know someone who died?” she asked. “Someone our age?”
It took Willie a moment, but he answered. “Yes.” The bitter wind beat against their tarp and made its loose tongue rattle like a gossip's. Trixie unclenched her fists. “Me too,” she said.
* * *
Bethel was technically a city, but not by any normal standards. The population was less than six thousand, although it was the closest hub for fifty-three native villages along the river. Daniel turned to Laura. “We can get a taxi,” he said.
“There are taxis here?”
“Most people don't have cars. If you've got a boat and a snow-go, you're pretty much set.”
The cab driver was a tiny Asian woman with a massive bun perched on her head like an avalanche waiting to happen. She wore fake Gucci sunglasses, although it was still dark outside, and was listening to Patsy Cline on the radio. “Where you go?” Daniel hesitated. “Just drive,” he said. “I'll tell you when to stop.”
The sun had finally broken over the horizon like the yolk of an egg. Daniel stared out the window at the landscape: pancake flat, windswept, opaque with ice. The rutted roads had houses pitted along them, ranging from tiny shacks to modest 1970s split-levels. On the side of one road sat a couch with the cushions missing and its overstuffed arms dusted with frost. They drove past the neighborhoods of Lousetown and Alligator Acres, the Alaska Commercial Company store, the medical center where Yup'ik Eskimos received free treatment. They passed White Alice, a huge curved structure that resembled a drive-in movie screen but that actually was a radar system built during the Cold War. Daniel had broken into it a hundred times as a kid - climbed up through the pitch-black center to sit on top and get drunk on Windsor Whiskey.
“Okay,” he told the cab driver. “You can stop here.” The Long House Inn was covered with ravens. There were at least a dozen on the roof, and another group battled around the remains of a torn Hefty bag in the Dumpster off to the side. Daniel paid the driver and stared at the renovated building. When he'd left, it was on the verge of being condemned.
There were three snow machines parked out front, something Daniel filed away in the recesses of his mind. He'd need one, after he figured out what direction to head to find Trixie. He could hotwire one of these, if he still remembered how, or take the honorable route and charge one to his MasterCard. They were sold in the Alaska Commercial store, at the end of the dairy aisle, past the $6.99 gallons of milk.
“Did you know a group of ravens is called an unkindness?” Laura said, coming to stand beside him.
He looked at her. For some reason, the space between them seemed smaller in Alaska. Or maybe you just had to get far enough away from the scene of a crime to start to forget the details.
“Did you know,” he replied, “that ravens like Thai food better than anything else?”
Laura's eyes lit up. “You win.”
A banner had been strung across the doorway: K300 HEADQUARTERS. Daniel walked inside, stamping his boots to get the snow off. He'd been a kid when this dogsled race was just getting organized, when locals like Rick Swenson and Jerry Austin and Myron Angstman had won the pot of a few thousand dollars. Now the winnings were
$20,000, and the mushers who came were stars with corporate backing for their dog kennels - Jeff King and Martin Buser and DeeDee Jonrowe.
The room was crowded. A knot of native kids sat on the floor, drinking cans of Coke and passing around a comic book. Two women answered phones, another was carefully printing the latest splits on a white board. There were Yup'ik mothers carrying moonfaced babies, elderly men reading the scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, schoolgirls with blue-black braids giggling behind their hands as they helped themselves to the potluck stews and cobblers. Everyone moved pendulously in layers of winter clothing, astronauts navigating the surface of a distant planet.
Which, Daniel thought, this might as well be.
He walked up to the desk where the women were answering phones.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I'm trying to find a teenage girl. ..” One woman held up a finger: Just a moment.
He unzipped his jacket. Before they'd left, he'd packed a duffel full of winter gear; he and Laura were pretty much wearing everything they'd brought all at once. It was cold in Maine, but nothing compared to what it would be like in the Eskimo villages. The woman hung up. “Hi. Can I . . .” She broke off as the phone rang again.
Frustrated, Daniel turned away. Impatience was a trait you developed in the lower forty-eight, an attribute that a child who grew up here didn't possess. Time wasn't the same on the tundra; it stretched to elastic lengths and snapped back fast when you weren't looking. The only things that really operated on a schedule were school and church, and most Yupiit were late to those anyway.
Daniel noticed an old man sitting on a chair, staring. He was Yup'ik, with the weathered skin of a person who'd spent his life outside. He wore green flannel pants and a fur parka.
“Aliurturua,” the man whispered. I'm seeing a ghost.
“Not a ghost.” Daniel took a step toward him. “Cama-i.” The man's face wrinkled, and he reached for Daniel's hand.
“Alangruksaaqamken.” You amazed me, showing up unexpectedly. Daniel had not spoken Yup'ik in fifteen years, but the syllables flowed through him like a river. Nelson Charles had, in fact, taught him his very first Yup'ik words: iqalluk . . . fish, angsaq . . . boat, and terren purruaq . . . you suck the meat off an asshole, which is what Nelson told him to say to kids who made fun of him for being kass 'aq. Daniel reached for Laura, who was watching the exchange with amazement. “Una arnaq nulirqaqa,” he said. This is my wife.
“That kind's pretty,” Nelson said in English. He shook her hand but didn't look her in the eye.
Daniel turned to Laura. "Nelson used to be a substitute teacher.