congregation. He stood for a few moments, exchanging greetings in his
usual quiet, amicable manner. The parishioners rearranged their pews
around a table and Bernie poured out the coffee. After a few more words,
Bernie returned to the bar. "I suppose if I asked why it matters, you
wouldn't tell me."
"Don't ask."
"Hmm." Sam Dementieff, a grizzled old man moving slow but spry,
exchanged a gruff greeting with Kate, ordered a shot and a beer and took
himself off into a corner, to sit at a table alone and stare broodingly and
forbiddingly at nothing in particular that Kate could see. "Okay,"
Bernie said finally. Kate swiveled around to look at him. "Yes. She was
dealing dope."
"You catch her at it?"
He shook his head. "She was too slick for that. I don't think anything
ever changed hands in here. She knew enough not to shit in my nest, but
she made plenty of trips outside."
"Are you sure of the reason?"
The laugh lines at the corners of Bernie's eyes deepened. "I don't think
even Lisa had that many guys on a string at the same time."
"How many?"
He shrugged. "Depended on the night, the crowd, I imagine her supply. A
dozen, two. Never stayed out more than a few minutes."
"She keep it stashed outside somewhere?" "Must have."
"You ever look for it?"
"Once or twice. Never found it, though. She was good." Bernie gave Kate
a faint smile. "In more ways than one." Kate looked at him, at the
reminiscent quirk at the
corner of his mouth, and sighed inwardly. To simplify things, she might
as well assume that every man in the Park between puberty and senility
had slept with Lisa Getty. And suspect every woman of murder, and
thought of Enid, a funny, fiery brunette with a broad smile and broader
hips and a temper that could smelt steel. "What did you hear about her
as a dealer? Was it good dope? Did you get what you paid for?"
"I never heard any complaints."
"Nobody looking for her with a mad-on?"
"Not with a mad-on, no," Bernie said and grinned at Kate's expression.
Someone called for another round at the end of the bar and he strolled
off to fill it. Kate turned, leaning her elbows on the upholstered edge,
and surveyed the
room. To all outward appearances, it was a Wednesday like any other at
Bernie's Roadhouse. The crowd was nothing out of the usual: mushers,
quilters, parishioners, serious drinkers who bellied up to the bar at
8:01 A.M., homesteaders there to enjoy Bernie's flush toilet, Park rats
looking for company, fishermen like Sam Dementieff planning this year's
assault on the first run of salmon. True, the laughter sounded a trifle
forced, the conversation a bit stilted, and the attention seemed
unnaturally fixed. The whole scene felt unreal, as if the roomful of
people had joined together in an unspoken decision to repudiate the
horrible reality of the events of the Saturday before last. There was a
sense of gritted teeth behind the grins, a shaken but solid persistence
in the good cheer, a determined normality in action. In summer, their
ranks swollen double by the influx of fishermen, the population of
Niniltna, including all the outlying cabins and homesteads and mines and
fishing sites, usually ran at sixteen hundred-plus. In winter, the
numbers dropped back down to less than eight hundred, eight hundred
people bound together in the common struggle to survive the cold and the
dark, and to stay sane while they did. Nine of their neighbors were now
dead, and laid to rest beneath the scrub spruce and spindly birches in
the small, fenced cemetery on the hill in back of the town. These people
were gathered together today to seek and receive comfort from the
forced upon them from inside.
In the Alaskan bush it is a long summer day's journey into that winter
night, but the night is longer still, and very dark, and very, very
cold. Buried deep in the consciousness of every Park rat present was the
knowledge that the seeds of madness lay within each of them, seeds
which, bred on darkness and suckled on the frigid milk of a seemingly
endless winter, were all too capable of burgeoning forth into the
blood-red blooms of paranoia and dementia. The knowledge of the
possibility was there, in the eyes of
everyone present. The knowledge, as well as the determination to defeat
it. It was a good effort, Kate thought, and raised her glass in silent
tribute.
The door burst open and there flooded in what seemed like a mob of
people, which after a few noisy, confused moments settled into half a
dozen men and two women, dressed in down jumpsuits and parkas and bunny
boots, bulky garments that made them look bear-size. Their faces were
red with sunburn, none of them looked as if they'd had a bath in memory
of man, and as they came closer Kate's nose told her they smelled the
same way. Climbers. You could always tell, if not by the smell, then by
the exhausted exaltation on their faces.
This shouting, laughing, odoriferous human wave surged across the floor
and broke against the bar. "You Bernie?" the tallest, burliest and
smelliest man demanded.
"So they tell me," Bernie drawled.
The stranger drew himself up to his full height. "I'm Doug, and I just
climbed Angqaq Peak." A cheer rose up. "We all did," he said, looking
around at his companions. "You make the summit?"
"Damn straight we made the summit!" Doug whooped, and for a minute the
rafters rung with the deep-throated yells of the climbers. When the
noise died down, Doug turned back to Bernie. "George Perry told us that
before we're confirmed as bona ride Big Bumpers we had to stop in here
and have a drink called a Middle Finger."
"That's right," Bernie said, "you do."
"Well?" Doug looked around him. "Eight Middle Fingers, straight up,
barkeep."
"And keep'em coming!" one of the other climbers called, and his friends
whooped and beat him on the back.
Bernie waited for the hubbub to die down before saying, "Take off your
gloves."
"What?"
"Take off your gloves," Bernie repeated.
The climbers exchanged mystified glances but complied. They began to be
uneasily aware of the interest they were generating, the broad general
grin that sprawled across the expectant face of everyone in the room.
"All right," Bernie said again. "One at a time, step up, hold up your
hands and spread your fingers." He reached beneath the bar and produced
eight shot glasses. Turning, he took down a fifth of some clear liquor
sitting in the absolute center of the middle shelf, with the rest of the
bottles drawn respectfully off to the right and left, and set it down on
the counter next to the shot glasses.
Doug looked at the bottle. "What the hell?" Beneath its sunburn his face
lost color.
"Along about 1949," Bernie said, his voice pitched to carry, "some
surveyors made a trip up Angqaq to see what they could see. They
didn't
have a clue about climbing a mountain like the Big Bump, they didn't
have much equipment or anything in the way of survival gear, and what
happened was what you might expect: They got caught in a blizzard and
two of them froze to death. The third survived in spite of a case of
serious frostbite, which cost him three fingers off his left hand." He
paused and surveyed the sobering faces of the climbers. "Before I built
the Roadhouse, a guy by the name of Sneaky Pete had a kind of trading
post here, and the surveyor made it back this far and collapsed on his
front doorstep. Pete took off the guy's fingers, and he decided, as a
lesson to future climbers, that he ought to commemorate the cost of this
guy's survival. He dropped the guy's middle finger into a bottle of
Everclear. From that day forward it has been required of every climber
who successfully makes the summit of Big Bump, with all their fingers
intact, to toss back a shot of Middle Finger and toast to the memory of
those who don't come back, or don't come back whole."
Doug's face was a sight to behold, but he was game. He thrust out his
jaw and held up his hands.. "One," Bernie said, pointing to Doug's right
pinkie finger, "two," pointing to his right ring finger, "three,"
pointing to his right middle finger, and so on. By Doug's left thumb the
entire bar was chanting along, "six, seven, eight, nine, ten!"
There was an electric silence. Bernie uncapped the bottle in which the
surveyor's finger washed gently back and forth. Bernie had changed the
mix to Jose Cuervo Gold, and after forty-plus years of pickling, the
wrinkled skin of the Surprisingly well-preserved finger looked as if it
had been seasoned with saffron. It still sported a fingernail, Kate
noted, and, if she were not mistaken, what might have been a hangnail.
Bernie poured out a shot and waited. Doug took a deep breath, threw back
his shoulders, no doubt gave a fleeting thought to the sterilizing
effects of eighty-proof alcohol, and in one quick movement raised the
shot glass and tossed it off.
The bar thundered with cheers and applause. There was only a slight
hesitation before the next climber stepped willingly if
unenthusiastically forward, held up her hands, suffered the count and
choked back a straight shot of Middle Finger. Each of the climbers
followed, and each performance was counted down by the bar in a body,
witnessed with bated breath, and cheered with fervor.
The ceremony concluded, people crowded forward to treat the newly
inducted Big Bumpers to the Middle Finger chaser of their choice, and
the climbers began peeling off their down outerwear with a view to
settling in for the afternoon, and perhaps the night.
She'd missed his entrance in the pandemonium following the climber's
entrance, so she started when he spoke right next to her. "Kate. How are
you?"
Mutt lifted her lip in a perfunctory baring of teeth, not bothering to
growl, and Kate turned to see a man with a stiff red face and stiffer
red hair about a quarter of an inch
long all over his head. His sharp brown eyes looked less merry than
usual, and his stubborn chin jutted out with less than its usual
arrogance. His left arm was in a sling.
"Mac," she said, nodding at him. "I hear you got him," Mac said.
Kate nodded again. She didn't want to talk about it, and she hoped Mac
didn't either.
"You should have shot him when you had the chance." Evidently he did.
"So I've been told," she said wearily. "About ten times. Look, Mac, I
don't-"
"You don't want to talk about it, fine, you don't have to," he
interrupted her. "Just let me say this." He gave her a twisted smile.
"When I ran off into the trees with that nut blazing away at my back, my
arm bleeding a road map in the snow, I was sure he was following me. I
was sure he wasn't going to stop until he got me. His eyes-" Mac halted,
and for the first time in Kate's memory he seemed to be at a loss for
words. "Well, you saw his eyes. From what I hear, most of the folks he
shot at that day didn't get away. I was lucky, but I didn't know that."
Bernie set an open Heineken in front of him, and he paused for a long
pull. Wiping his mouth, he set the bottle down and regarded it. "I hid
out in the woods all night. Every time I heard an owl hoot, I thought it
was him. Every time a tree creaked, or the wind blew, or the ice
cracked, I thought it was him. I was cold and wet and hungry and tired,
but I stayed in the woods. I didn't have any food, or a tent, I wasn't
even wearing boots. I was pretty sure I'd heard his snow machine drive
away, but I stayed in those goddam woods. I stayed in those goddam woods
all that night, all the next day and all the next night, too. If I
hadn't seen Chopper Jim land at the mine the next morning, I might still
be there. I swear, when Jim told me that you'd caught him, I felt
someone reach around and pull the target off my back."
Mac drained his beer and set it down on the bar with a final ring of
glass on wood. "I owe you, Kate."
"I didn't save your life, Mac. You did."
"Yeah. But you gave me back my sanity. If you hadn't caught that guy,
I'd never have felt safe again." He stretched out a hand, and befuddled,
she took it. His grip was strong. "Thanks, Kate."
"You're welcome," she said automatically. A puzzled frown between her
brows, she watched his stocky figure thread its way through the crowd
and out the door.
"What'd he want?" Bernie's voice asked. She turned. "Nothing."
Bernie grunted, conveying boundless skepticism in that one sound. "If
you say so."
There was a burst of laughter and applause from behind a closed door.
"Who is that in the back room, anyway?" Kate asked, glad of a change of
subject. "Sounds like they're having some fun now."
"Bunch of belly dancers," Bernie said.
Kate held both hands up, palms out. "Okay, none of my business. Sorry I
asked."
"No, really, they rent the back room the first Wednesday of every month
to practice."
"Of course they do," Kate said and smiled at Bernie. One must humor
those less fortunately endowed than one self in their degree of sanity.
A small, slight man with Asian features elbowed his way through the
crowd. He didn't look like a climber-he wasn't wearing enough
clothes=and he didn't smell like a fisherman. It was too late for
caribou and too early for black bear. The bump of satiable curiosity
that had caused Kate to be an investigator in the first place was
roused. She watched him out of the corner of one eye. His look was
appraising, his movements furtive. He walked as if he should be wearing
a long raincoat, with pockets sewn to the lining filled with stolen
watches and dirty postcards.
When he spoke to Bernie, his English was American. "Hi there. Got any
draft?"
Bernie shook his head. "Sorry."
"What flavor?" Bernie indicated the row of bottles and cans lining the
back of the bar. "Oh. Okay. I'll have a Michelob."
"Coming ri
ght up."
He tossed a one-hundred-dollar bill down on the bar and looked around.
"Nice place," he observed to Kate.
"We like it," she said, eyeing the bill. "Your first time in the Park?"
He smiled. "First time in Alaska." Bernie set a bottle and a glass on a
napkin in front of him. "Can I buy you a drink?"
"Sure," Kate said, and Bernie nodded and went away with the bill. "Where
you from?"
"Honolulu." He drank thirstily straight from the bottle. Kate smiled.
"You're a ways from home. What brings you to the Park?"
He shrugged. Bernie came back with his change and Kate's Coke. "Business."
"Oh. Thanks." She raised her glass in the newcomer's direction, turning