Dana Stabenow - So Sure Of Death

“God, no,” Bill said.

“Why not?” Liam said.

Bill took her time replying, polishing a couple of glasses with a bar rag and lining them up at attention. “I'm the laziest person on earth. I don't want to have to work that hard to get up to go.”

Moses gave a short bark of laughter.

“Somebody explain,” Liam said.

Bill picked up a glass that didn't need it and started polishing. “What do you see when you look at me, Liam?”

A brief but mighty struggle kept Liam's eyes from dropping to her breasts, today enfolded in the loving embrace of a T-shirt touting Jimmy Buffett'sBanana Windtour.

Moses growled. Liam felt the heat rising up the back of his neck.

“After that,” Bill said dryly.

“Magistrate,” Liam said. “Barkeep.”

“No,” she said. “First off, before everything else, I'm white. I'm as white as you can get without bleach. Before I'm a woman, before I'm a bartender, before I'm a magistrate, before I'm a goddamn Alaskan, I'm white. And because I'm white, I wasbornat go. I don't have to work my ass off just to get that far.”

“And Malcolm does,” Liam said to Moses.

Moses raised his glass in a toast. “I may have to change my estimation of your intelligence, boy.”

“Gee, thanks.”

Bill wasn't done. “People look at boys like Malcolm, they see Native and think Fourth Avenue. Outside, they'd look at you and see a nigger. In South Africa they'd see a kaffer; in India, a Muslim; in Pakistan, a Hindu. The color of your skin isn't an asset, it's something you have to overcome.” She gave the glass a final rub and held it up to admire the sparkle. “Whereas I, because my ancestors were so kind as to spend the last two thousand years terrorizing the people of color of this world into submission and servitude and too often downright slavery…” She shrugged, and repeated, “I was born at go.” She set the glass down and looked at Moses. “Only place in the world for a lazy person.”

She looked at Liam. “What's the charge on Larsgaard?”

“Who? Oh. Flight to avoid prosecution,” Liam said.

“Prosecution for what?”

“Mass murder,” Liam said, and Moses erupted again.

“Goddamn it, you are the worst I ever saw for jumping to conclusions! A son owes his father, goddamn it!”

Which reminded Liam that he had to get back to the post and call his father's office in Florida.

Moses stared at him. “He's no different that any other stick-uphis-ass officer I ever ran across in the service, and I wasn't talking about your father, anyway.”

In spite of himself, Liam felt his dander rise, enough to blot out Moses' last words. “He's a career officer,” he said, careful to keep any hint of defense out of his tone. “They are very…”

“Proper,” Bill suggested, and he gave a grateful nod.

Moses snorted. “ ‘Proper.’ Yeah, right. If you can't stick to the point, boy, you've gone as far as you'll go in your service.”

Liam stood up. “Moses, I never know what the hell the point is when I'm around you, and I'm not sure I want to go anywhere in my service anymore.” He tossed some bills on the bar. “Thanks for lunch, Bill. I'll be back in for dinner this evening, with my stick-up-his-ass dad.”

“See you then,” she said, unperturbed.

He walked toward the door, and behind him Moses said to Bill, “Malcolm won't ever come home, you know.

“He goes to school, he's gone for good.”

“Doctors are lousy pilots,” Wy said. “Pisspoor, actually. They don't listen worth shit. You can't tell them anything, they're used to doing the telling. Guy says he's a doctor, he's not driving my plane and I ain't riding in his.”

Tim committed this to memory, and handed her a socket wrench.

“Thanks.” Wy tightened down the nut, wiped her hands on the legs of her overalls and closed the cowling before descending the stepladder perched at the nose of the Cub.

“How about troopers?” Tim said.

Wy looked at him, and he grinned. “Yeah, okay, smarty,” she said, “it was fine, she didn't hurt our baby any.”

“She better not've.” Tim sounded cocky and threatening and very proprietary as he put the wrench back in the red upright toolbox.

Wy eyed his back for a moment. “You want to learn?”

He looked around. “Learn what?”

She hooked a thumb at the plane. “You want to learn to fly?”

He stood straight up, the toolbox drawer left open. “Learn to fly?” His voice scaled up and ended on a squeak of disbelief.

“Yeah.”

He stared from her to the plane and back again. He looked dazzled. “You'd teach me?”

“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.”