Дана Стейбнау - Spoils of the Dead

“Wy,” Wy said. “Wyanet Chouinard.”

“Wyanet, of course, dear. You’ll come to tea one afternoon soon, won’t you?”

“It would be my pleasure, Sybilla, thank you.”

Liz made a signal for Wy to wait and ushered Sybilla inside. Wy was checking her phone when she emerged again to knock on the passenger side window. “Thank you,” she said when Wy rolled down the window.

“What for?”

“First for the rescue and repatriation and then for the lunch.”

“I enjoyed it.”

“Come again, won’t you? Most of our residents would be all the better for visits from friends and family.”

“She’s the first friend I’ve made in Blewestown,” Wy said.

Liz smiled. “And now you have two.”

“What’s wrong with her? I know she’s old, but—”

“Dementia,” Liz said. “It manifests in forgetfulness, mostly.”

Wy raised her eyebrows.

Liz sighed. “To the point that sometimes she goes walkabout before she gets dressed, yes, but so far she has always returned to the here and now. She’s generally fairly cognizant and she is wonderfully healthy otherwise. It’s easy for her to fool us into thinking she’s fine, and then we turn our back for one minute and—” She snapped her fingers. “Sometimes it’s worse than keeping track of a two-year-old.” She hesitated. “She’s better when she has something to focus on. Like a visitor.”

At least they weren’t chaining Sybilla to her bed. “I’ll be back often.”

“Good.” Liz stood back and waved her off.

Halfway to Sourdough her phone sounded the opening bars of “He’s So Fine” and she pulled to the side of the street. “Hey.”

“Hey, yourself. I need a ride.”

“Where to?”

“Across the Bay. Kapilat.”

Wy remembered the tiny community, half old, half new, perched on the edge of the fjord. “Usual rates?”

“Usual rates,” he said grimly.

She didn’t laugh. “Meet you at the tie-down.”

Seventeen

Thursday, September 5

HE WAS STANDING NEXT TO THE CESSNA when she pulled up. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey.” He looked glum.

“I fueled up when I got back from Anchorage. Let me do the walk-around and we should be good to go.”

He grunted. Monosyllabicy, if that was even a word, was his chosen means of communication when he was forced to fly.

She did the walk-around, noting that he’d already untied the lines and coiled them neatly next to their cleats. Poor Liam. He did what he could. “Okay, climb on in.”

In the left seat she moved the yoke and the rudder pedals with her chin on her shoulder to check that the control surfaces were still working per spec. Next to her Liam buckled on his seatbelt and with both hands took a firm grip on his seat, preparatory to him helping her get and keep the aircraft in the air. Because she loved him she pretended she didn’t notice.

Five minutes later they were in the air and following the Spit out into the Bay. He had yet to move a muscle.

“Hey,” she said.

He sounded tense even over the headset. “Hey yourself.”

“Did you feel like this when I took you up as my spotter during herring fishing?”

She couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses when his head turned but the tension in his jawline said it all. “Every second.”

She was silenced for a moment. “God. I’m sorry, Liam.”

“I’m an Alaskan. Worse, I’m an Alaska state trooper. What am I gonna do?”

The three islands guarding the entrance to a pair of narrow fjords slid beneath them before she spoke again. “If I’d known…”

“Can’t be helped, Wy.”

What was courage, again? Being terrified of something and doing it anyway? By that definition Liam Campbell had to be the bravest person she’d ever met. “What does it feel like?”

“What?”

“Being afraid to fly.” She was genuinely curious, and a little ashamed that she had never asked him before. “Is it only mental or is it physical, or what?”

He thought about it, and out of the corner of her eye she noticed his grip relaxing on the edge of the seat. He didn’t go so far as to let go but his knuckles were less white. “It starts with the physical. I get this, I don’t know what to call it, this white flash up the back of my legs and up my spine when we lift off. It’s debilitating, like I’m not sure if I could walk if I stood up. Or even if I could stand up.”

“And you anticipate it.”

“Yeah, which is what wrecks me even before I get on the damn plane. And no matter how many times I park my ass on a plane it never gets better.” His sigh was heavy even over the headset. “I hate it.”

“The feeling, not the flying?”

“Yeah. I mean, look at that.” It was obvious it took an effort for him to turn his head to see out the window. “The best view in the world. Augustine and Iliamna and Redoubt. The Bay with all the boats carving those long, curving white wakes in it. Even on a cloudy day it’s amazing, and it was just as amazing in Newenham, and it was when I flew into the Park to talk to Jim about Grant’s murder.” His shoulders raised in a slight shrug. “I know it’s a privilege, this view, to see it. I know that. But…”

“You’ve always felt like this?”

“Always.”

He didn’t mention his father, the Air Force ace. He’d never said but she’d met the man and she could guess what his reaction would have been to his only son’s fear of flying.

To distract him she embarked on the history of the town they were heading for. Kapilat had at one time been the big town on the Bay, home to five salmon canneries, a king crab processing plant, a hospital, a hotel, three bars, and four churches with actual resident pastors and priests. There had even at one time been a sit-down, popcorn-selling theater. It had been the main port of call for the Alaska Steamship Company in Southcentral Alaska. Everyone from all the other Bay settlements had perforce come to Kapilat to buy fuel and supplies, pick up their mail, and get their hair cut and their broken bones set. The Coast Guard had stationed a patrol boat there and some of their onshore housing was still standing. Kapilat had even sent the first woman to the territorial legislature, Harriet Browne, a pilot, in fact. She’d needed to be one, since there were only four voting districts in Alaska at the time and hers had stretched from Kenai to Adak to Cordova, resulting in her logging thousands of miles on her Stinson Reliant. Wy had found a photo of Browne standing in front of it on the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame website, and approved of Browne’s choice of aircraft as she had no doubt that Browne would have taken advantage of constituent business trips by running freight on the side. Wy would have.

Even better from an admittedly Alaskan standpoint, Browne had married at least five times—“One way to secure a majority,” Liam said—and her constituents had nicknamed her High Drift Factor Harry Browne, or High Drift Harry for short. She boasted that she had been excommunicated from the Pennsylvania Ministerium (Browne was originally from Pennsylvania), the Catholic Church (her third husband’s religion), and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (her fourth’s). That didn’t seem to have lost her any votes, either, as she had been returned to office eight times and was still around to help lobby D.C. for statehood in the late fifties.

Wy descended to five hundred feet as unostentatiously as possible in the hope that Liam wouldn’t notice, banked right to follow the bay east, and soon they were over the mouth of Mussel Bay. While the leaves on the deciduous trees had turned they still clung stubbornly to their branches, brilliant splashes of yellow and gold against the lush green backdrop of the evergreens that marched determinedly up the sides of the mountains, checked only by the snow and ice marching as determinedly down. Standoff. A dark red undergrowth formed picket lines between the warring factions, fireweed that had topped out and gone to seed and rusty leaves.