Dana Stabenow: Nothing Gold Can Stay

The third book in the Liam Campbell series, 2000

As always, I have taken a high and free hand with the geography of Alaska. Some of the place names are right, but few of the names are in the right places. Storyteller’s privilege.

My thanks to Dennis Lopez, for teaching me the difference between boy trucks and girl trucks. My education is now complete.

My thanks to Mary Kallenberg, for so generously buying a Jayco popup for Liam.

My thanks to Jim Kemper, World’s Greatest Meteorologist, for the storm.

As for Uuiliriq, his is a story I first heard from Mary Ann Chaney, who spent seven years of her childhood in Manokotak, a Yupik village forty miles west of Dillingham. Her parents, Van and Alice, were Bush teachers who believed strongly in the incorporation of the local culture into the curriculum. Whenever Van had to leave town on school business, he asked Yupik elder Simeon Bartman to take over his classes. Simeon’s method of teaching was to tell stories, a medley of Yupik history and legend. The students didn’t know it then, but he was passing on an oral tradition that goes back centuries. So, my very special thanks to Simeon Bartman, whose memory casts a long shadow.

Newenham, September 1

A seven-foot Jayco popup camper perched unsteadily in the back of a Ford F250 truck is not the best of all possible beds for a six-foot-two-inch man. Even sleeping corner to corner, Liam’s feet still stuck over the edge. There was no toilet, no shower and no place to hang his clothes, in particular his uniform, which, to uphold the dignity of the Alaska State Troopers, maintain the authority of the judicial system and invoke the might and majesty of the law, should at least begin the day unwrinkled.

On the other hand, the Ford F250 was parked in the driveway of Wyanet Chouinard. He had free access to Wy’s kitchen, Wy’s laundry room and Wy’s bathroom. He had free access to Wy, when Tim wasn’t home, as the door to Wy’s bedroom was six feet down the hall from Wy’s bathroom. Even if the bed in that bedroom was smaller than the one in the Jayco popup, Wy was in that bed, and he didn’t really give a damn if his knees stuck out over one end of it and his head and shoulders the other.

Of course, Tim was home now, having returned from fish camp the day before to start school the day after Labor Day, so nights in Wy’s bed, comfortable or not, would be severely curtailed. She’d made that clear last night. “No hanky-panky with the boy in the house.”

“Is it hanky-panky if we’re married?”

“We aren’t married.”

“Then let’s get married.”

“Not yet” was all she would say. “Not yet.”

He rolled over on his back and stared at the ceiling fourteen inches from his nose, thinking of her less than fifty feet away, waking up in her bed. She slept in T-shirts, no panties. Handy, as he woke up with an erection pretty much every morning. He’d certainly put it to good use during the last month.

Not this morning. He cursed his way out of bed, stamped his legs into sweats and let himself out of the camper. He stretched and examined the southeastern horizon, where most of Newenham’s weather came from. Partly cloudy, looked like. He lowered his eyes and stood for a moment regarding the Ford F250. At least it was a boy truck.

“A boy truck?” Wy had said.

“As opposed to a girl truck,” Liam said.

“And a girl truck is-?”

“A smaller truck. Like a Ford Ranger, or a Dakota Sport.”

She looked from the big brown truck to the little gray truck parked next to it. “Like my truck, do you mean? My truck’s a girl truck?”

“No, your truck’s an old man’s truck.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s rusty and all the bumpers are dented and it needs a ring job and a front-end alignment and you have to hold the door on the canopy open with a bungee cord and add a quart of oil with every second or third gas tank, but it still runs. That makes it an old man’s truck.”

“Ah. So big trucks are boy trucks and little trucks are girl trucks, except for little trucks that need paint jobs, which are old men’s trucks.”

“Yes,” he said. “Except for any truck of any size painted banana yellow.”

“Oh.”

“Or lipstick red.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Then it’s a girl truck.”

“Right.”

Except for the subject matter, it had been a repeat of one of those nothing and everything conversations they had so delighted in when they had first met, three years and a lifetime ago. In the interim, he had lost his wife and his son to a drunken driver, and very nearly his job as well, and she had acquired a new home, an air taxi and an adolescent son. They were still getting to know each other, feeling their way, on a direct heading, he hoped, for a permanent relationship, formalized by the local magistrate and vows, the whole nine yards. Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made. Browning, not his favorite poet, but this time right on the mark.

The front door of the house was unlocked, and he padded down the hall.

Someone was already in the bathroom. He looked around and saw that Tim’s door was still closed. Employing the covert tactics taught him at the trooper academy in Sitka, he opened Tim’s door and saw the boy deeply asleep beneath a tangle of blankets, a book open on the floor next to his bed, noise coming from a set of headphones that had slipped from his ears.

He grinned and closed the door.

The bathroom door locked from the inside. “Tim?” Wy’s voice came from behind the shower curtain.

Liam stepped out of his sweats and pulled the curtain to one side. Wy blinked at him through the water running down her face. “Liam!”

He stepped into the tub and pulled her against him.

“You can’t be in here!”

He lifted her and kneed her legs apart.

“Tim is right down the-”

He kissed her and slipped inside her in the same moment.

“-haaaaaall,” she said. Her other leg came up to wrap around his waist. “Liam,” she whispered.

“Wy,” he whispered back.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” she said weakly, and arched her back to take him all the way inside her. “Tim might wake up. He could come in, he might-”

He paused. “Want me to stop?” He kissed her, the water running warm down his back. “I’ll stop,” he whispered.

“Noooooo,” she said, and after that they didn’t talk.

Liam and Wy were both late for work, and Wy was later because on a whim, she had reversed back into the driveway and run into the house to put on her gold hoop earrings. Liam had given her those hoops during a four-day trip to Anchorage three years before. The trip hadn’t ended well and she hadn’t worn them since. Today seemed like a good day to resurrect them. She was unaware of just how complacent the smile on her face was when she left home for the second time that morning, headed for Mad Trapper Memorial Airport and the headquarters for Nushagak Air Taxi Service, which business consisted of one Piper Super Cub, one Cessna 180, one small shack and Wy, owner and chief pilot.

Nushagak Air Taxi held the contract to deliver the U.S. mail north of Newenham, to settlements scattered along and to the west of the Nushagak River. Bristol Bay Air Freight held the contract for the east side of the river and for the communities south and west from Newenham to Togiak. Dagfinn Grant, the owner and operator of Bristol Bay Air Freight and Wy’s direct competitor, had been her nemesis ever since the United States Postal Service had decided to spread governmental largesse around and carved off a slice of Grant’s mail route to award to Wy. It was only ten villages, with mail service once a week year-round, but to Wy’s one-woman operation it meant the difference between paying attorney fees for Tim’s adoption or letting Tim be remanded to the custody of his mother, who had nearly killed him the last time he was in her care.