Peter Heller - Celine

They almost forgot what they had come for. They both scanned the crowded room for a handsome young man in a trimmed black beard. Celine counted four, but none were Mr. Tanner. When the waitress, who was muscled and corded like jerky, finally came to take their order, they were back on task. They asked for club soda with lime and Celine called out, “Are you Sitka?” The woman had been mid-wheel, balancing a tray of empties, and she caught her own momentum and wheeled back and didn’t tip a single longneck. Pretty good. Her hazel eyes flashed with alarm and swept them both, then came back for a closer study—exactly like the spotlight at a prison camp. Apparently she was not placated by what she’d seen because she tensed for a jump and said, “Who’s asking?”

Celine motioned the woman to bend down and she put her mouth right against the ear and its big hoop and said, “We’re not here for you. Not anything about you. Can you take a ten-minute break?” It would be just like Celine to ask in the middle of Blues Night, but she did not at all wish to wait until the next morning. She was feeling the heat of the chase and if she’d learned anything in investigative work it was that you struck while you had momentum. Because the universe, she came to believe, was composed of currents, just as a river or an ocean. When you wanted to go somewhere, and the cosmos wanted to pull you forward, you jumped. Especially if someone was chasing you.

And of course for Sitka, the sight of this elegant older woman in her fabulous felt jacket and gold scallop earrings inspired too much curiosity to say no. “Just a sec,” Sitka said. The band was in the middle of “Stormy Monday”: “Lord, and Wednesday’s worse, and Thursday’s all so bad…” The harried co-owner of the Beartooth slammed the tray on the bar, whipped off her stained apron. She tapped a younger woman in blond dreadlocks, who was drinking beer at a table with four rough men, and handed it to her. Easy as that. The girl shook her head and stood, dropping her unfinished cigarette into a mostly finished beer bottle and tied the apron on. Then Sitka nodded at the two and strode to the front door, grabbing a parka off a hook as she went through.

The night had cleared. There were stars and it was cold and the cold felt bracing and good after the closeness and smoke of the bar. Nobody else was out on the porch for the moment. Sitka sat her butt against the far railing and crossed her arms in the coat and steeled herself. Her cheeks were drawn and her eyes were large and heavily mascaraed. “Okay,” she said. “What can I do you?” Again her eyes traveled up and down the genteel older woman.

“We have some questions about Paul Lamont.”

At the words the face transformed. For an instant. It was as if the shadow of a large beast had moved fast through the forest behind her eyes.

“Who?”

Celine said, “You know who. We’re trying to find him. For his daughter, Gabriela. Who, I’m sure, you will also remember. She told us her father drank here often, with you and your husband, before he went missing. She misses her father terribly. She has never believed he was killed by a bear.”

“And who are you?” Mercifully she omitted the fuck. Celine listened for a trace of Afrikaner and heard the slightest flattening of the vowels. Barely there.

“We find missing people. On our own. Mostly we reunite birth families. We only take the cases that we feel have merit and we often work pro bono, for free. So mostly we work for people who can’t afford an investigator.”

“I know what pro bono means.”

Celine nodded. “Gabriela went to my alma mater and saw an article about our investigative work in the alumni magazine. She called and asked if we could help her. She is an orphan, as you know, and she has been tortured these last years by the thought that her father might grow old and die without seeing her again. That he might not know his grandson. You can imagine, it’s very hard.”

The suspicion in Sitka’s face softened. No one, probably, on earth, would disbelieve Celine in that moment. Anyone with half a working antenna would know she was speaking the truth. Pete looked on with mild approval, as if he were watching a German shepherd lick a kitten.

“We know that Lamont came into your bar often over the weeks he was here. And it’s a long time ago. But we just wondered, well, what he might have talked about when he was drinking at the bar. I know he was gregarious and sometimes voluble.”

Sitka dug a soft pack out of her parka pocket and turned her head and lit up, blowing smoke up into the corner of the porch.

“He talked a lot about the bears. The ones he was shooting. How they were much smarter than anyone gave them credit for, how they seemed almost like people at times. The way they cared for their young, the way they dealt with threats…” She turned and blew smoke. “He talked about what an asshole Ed Pence was, the bear biologist he was profiling. How he hogged the limelight whenever he could. How he was ambitious. He wanted his own TV show. I think he thought he was the next David Attenborough. Ha!” She coughed. Celine winced. She could hear a kinship in the hack, sisterhood of the scarred lungs.

Celine glanced quickly at Pete. “Anything else?” she said. “Did he talk about going anywhere after? Or for vacation? Or pine for a place?”

Sitka dropped the butt and found the half-crumpled pack again and lit another. Celine had the distinct impression that she and Lamont had been closer somehow than patron and barkeep. Well, he was as charismatic as they come and he was a ladies’ man. Sitka half turned against the railing and looked off down the street toward the deep woods and Yellowstone and Barronette Peak outlined against the starry sky. “When he got pissed”—there it was, the South African emerging—“he sometimes said he’d like to go to the Ice Mountain. The one in the fairy tale. I hadn’t a clue. He said there was a lake there, the color of his true love’s eyes. And a cabin where a man could find himself again.” She turned back to Celine and her eyes were wet. “My eyes are sorta brown, aren’t they? So I knew this lake, wherever the fuck it was, wasn’t going to be brown, was it?” She dropped the half-smoked cigarette and forced a smile. “Anything else?”

“Did he say that the lake sounded like a bird and the mountain was a king?” Celine asked.

Sitka flinched as if burned and looked up quickly. “Yes,” she said. “Like that. Just what he said.” Celine doubted he had told her that over the sanded wood of the plank bar. Across a pillow more like. Or from the warm plain of her own stomach.

“He said he would take me there. A day’s drive. He never did, did he? That it?” she said. “I better get back.”

“Yes, thank you.” Celine touched the woman’s forearm. “Thank you.” She was going to beg her to stop smoking, but thought better of it.

“Any time. The club soda’s on the house.” She sucked in one last long breath of night air and flung the door open and dove back in.

They walked back to the motel. They’d try to locate the artist Fernanda Muños first, and then call Gabriela who, in San Francisco, was an hour behind. No one shot at them and Celine had a feeling no one would. That had been a warning, stark as the clanging of a buoy in the sound.

The buoy. That had tolled each night through the screen of her open window at Las Armas. Singing out the temper of the sea. The thought of that relentless and lovely bell buoy gave her an immediate ache. Of nostalgia and also grief. How many nights had she gone to sleep to its angelus? Feeling that a hole had been torn inside her? She felt again what it was to miss a father. What if someone could have waved a magic wand for her ? So that they were together again, always?