“So, let’s say I wanted to pay a visit to this temple of healing out there at Peril Strait.”
“I got a pickup tomorrow, actually,” Kitka says. “Over to Freshwater Bay. I might be able to bend a little to the right on the way over there. But I’m not going to hang around with the meter running.” He grins a beaver-tooth grin. “And it’s going to cost you a hell of a lot more than a steak dinner.”
29
A badge of grass, a green brooch pinned at the collarbone of a mountain to a vast black cloak of fir trees. At the center of the clearing, a handful of buildings clad in brown shakes radiate from a circular foun tain, linked by paths and separated by quilted patches of lawn and gravel. A pitch at the far end, chalked for soccer, ringed by an oval track. The place has the feel of a boarding school, a backwoods academy for wayward young wealth. Half a dozen men circle the track in shorts and hooded sweatshirts. Others sit or lie prone in the center of the field, stretching before exercise, legs and arms, angles on the ground. An alphabet of men scattered on a green page. When the plane dips a wing over the playing field, the hoods of the sweatshirts train on its fuselage like the muzzles of antiaircraft cannon. From the sky it is hard to be sure, but in Landsman’s judgment, the men move and stand and stretch their pale long legs like youthful types in excellent health. Another fellow comes out of the folds of the forest in a dark coverall. He follows the arc of the Cessna, right arm crooked at the elbow and pressed against his face, making the calclass="underline" We have company. Beyond the woods, Landsman catches a flicker of distant green, a roof, a scattering of white clumps that might be piles of snow.
Kitka muscles the plane around with a shuddering and a rattling and a groan, and then they fall out of the sky all at once, then a little at a time; and hit the water with a final smack. Maybe it was Landsman doing the groaning.
“I never thought I’d say this,” Kitka says as the Lycoming engine drops into idle and they can hear themselves think. “But six hundred dollars don’t seem like quite enough.”
Half an hour out of Yakovy, Landsman decided to spice up their journey with a judicious application of vomit. The plane was harrowed by the smell of twenty years of rotting moose flesh, and Landsman by remorse at having broken his vow, taken after Naomi’s death, to repudiate travel by very small airplane. Still, the display of airsickness remains an achievement, given how little Landsman has eaten in the past several days.
“I am sorry, Rocky,” Landsman says, trying to lift his voice up out of his socks. “I guess I wasn’t ready to fly again yet.”
Landsman’s last trip by air was undertaken with his sister in her Super Cub, to no ill effect. But that was a good airplane, and Naomi was a skilled pilot, and the weather was fine, and Landsman was drunk. This time he risked the skies in a bitter condition of sobriety. Three pots of bad motel coffee forked his nervous system. He flew at the joint mercy of a stiff chop blowing in from the Yukon and a bad pilot, one whose caution made him reckless and whose self-doubt made him bold. Landsman swayed in the canvas webbing of the weary old 206 that the management of Turkel Regional Airways has seen fit to entrust to Rocky Kitka. The plane rumbled and juddered and shook. All the pins and bolts came loose from Landsman’s skeleton, and his head got turned around backward, and his arms fell off, and his eyeball rolled under the cabin heater. Somewhere over the Moore Mountains, Landsman’s vow backed up on him.
Kitka throws open the door and leaps with the mooring line onto the floatplane dock. Landsman staggers out of the cabin onto the graying cedar planks. He stands blinking, reeling, breathing deep lungfuls of the local air with its scouring smell of pine needle and sea wrack. He straightens his tie and settles his hat on his head.
Peril Strait is a jumble of boats, a fuel pump, a row of weathered houses in the colors of a rusted-out engine. The houses huddle on their pilings like skinny-legged ladies. A mangy stretch of boardwalk noses among the houses before wandering over to the boat slips to lie down. It all seems to be held together by a craze of hawser, tangles of fishing line, scraps of purse seine strung with crusted floats. The whole village might be nothing but driftwood and wire, flotsam from the drowning of a far-off town.
The floatplane dock appears to have no physical connection to the boardwalk or the village of Peril Strait. It is solid, well built, new-looking, white concrete and gray-painted beams. It boasts of engineering and the logistical needs of men with money. At the shore end, it terminates in a steel gate. Beyond the gate, a winding metal stair has been whipstitched up the hillside to a clearing at the top. Alongside the stairs, a perpendicular railway cuts straight uphill, with a railed platform to elevate what cannot go by stair. A small metal sign bolted to the railing of the dock reads BETH TIKKUN RETREAT CENTER in Yiddish and American, and beneath this, in American, PRIVATE PROPERTY. Landsman fixes his gaze on the Yiddish characters. They look out of place and homely in this wild corner of Baranof Island, a gathering of lurching little Yiddish policemen in black suits and fedoras.
Kitka fills his Stetson with water from a tap mounted against a post of the dock, and splashes down the inside of his plane, one hatful of nonpotable water after another. Landsman is mortified to have made this job necessary, but Kitka and vomit appear to be old acquaintances, and the man never quite loses his smile. With the edge of a plasticized spotter’s guide to Alaskan whales and fishes, Kitka squeegees out of the cabin door a compound of vomitus and seawater. He rinses off the spotter’s guide, gives it a shake. Then he stands in the doorway, hanging from the arch by one hand, and looks down at Landsman on the dock. The sea slaps against the pontoons of the Cessna and against the pilings. The wind blowing down from the Stikine River hums in Landsman’s ear. It stirs the brim of his hat. Over in the village, a woman’s voice rises, ragged, bawling out her child or her man. There follows the parodic barking of a dog.
“Guess they know you’re coming,” Kitka says.
“Folks up top there.” His smile turns sheepish, narrowing almost to a pout. “I guess we kind of made sure of that.”
“I already paid somebody a surprise visit this week; it didn’t work out so good,” Landsman says. He unpockets the Beretta, pops the clip, checks the magazine. “I doubt they can really be surprised.”
“You know who they are?” Kitka says, his eyes on the sholem.
“No,” Landsman says. “I don’t. Do you?”
“Seriously, bro,” Kitka says, “if I did, I would tell you. Even though you puked up my plane.”
“Whoever they are,” Landsman says, driving home the clip, “I think they might have killed my little sister.”
Kitka mulls this statement as if searching it for weak points or loopholes. “I have to be in Freshwater by ten,” he says with a show of regret.
“No,” Landsman says. “I understand.”
“Otherwise, bro, I would totally back you up.” “Hey, come on. What are you saying? This isn’t your problem.”
“Yeah, but I mean, Naomi. She was a fucking piece of work, though.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Actually, she never really liked me all that much.”
“She could run hot and cold,” Landsman says, dropping the gun back into the hip pocket of his jacket. “Sometimes.”
“All right, then,” Kitka says, kicking a splash or water out of his airplane with the toe of one Roper boot. “Hey, listen. You take care.”
“I don’t really know how to do that,” Landsman admits.
“You had that in common, then,” says Kitka. “You and your sister.”
Landsman clatters down the dock and tries the knob on the steel gate just for fun. Then he tosses his satchel to the other side of the gate and clambers up and over the grille after it. As he goes over the top of the gate, his foot gets caught in the bars of the grille. His shoe falls off. He tumbles and spills down to the other side, landing with a meaty thud. He bites his tongue, and there’s a salt spurt of blood. He dusts himself off and glances back at the dock to make sure Kitka got all of that. Landsman waves to show that he’s all right. After a moment Kitka waves back. He closes the door of the plane. The engine snaps awake. The propeller vanishes into the dark sheen of its own revolution.