Better To Rest

The phone rang, the business line next to the computer. “Nushugak Air Taxi,” she said into the receiver.

“I’ll be late tonight.”

She looked up at the clock. It was ten minutes to twelve. “You already are.”

“Surprised you noticed.”

She winced away from the force of his hang-up. Ouch. Was he really that angry about Gary Dunaway being in town? Liam had never struck her as the jealous type.

But then, how well did she really know him? They hadn’t had that much time together. A few months of flying him to crime scenes when she was on contract to the state’s Department of Public Safety, four intense days in Anchorage, and the last six months, during which they hadn’t exactly lived in each other’s pockets.

She knew he preferred single-malt scotch, read poetry and history, could tutor Tim at math. He had allowed himself to be browbeaten into learning tai chi under the direction of that fiery little tyrant, Moses Alakuyak. He loved wearing the uniform of the state trooper; he seemed to expand inside it, some mysterious alchemy transforming him into more than a man. Call it a manifestation of the law of the land.

And he was good at it. Even after six months of laying it down, even as new to the area and to the people in it as he was, in a place where the previous trooper had made himself despised by his indifference and his indolence, Liam had earned the respect of town dweller and villager, hunter and guide, fisher and fish hawk, white and native alike. The main difference, so far as she could tell, seemed to be that Liam loved the job. He seemed to love being a trooper the way she loved being a pilot, and in some way she had yet to explain to herself it was the reason Wy loved him most.

And, yes, she was in love with him-she knew that-madly, passionately in love with him, the love-story kind of love, the rip-your-heart-out-and-serve-it-up-on-a-platter-to-do-with-as-you-will, the Pyramus-and-Thisbe, Tristan-and-Isolde, Abelard-and-Heloise kind of love.

Although, come to think of it, most or all of those couples wound up dead. Or castrated. She placed the receiver in the cradle and pushed back from her desk. The screen of the computer went black, with points of light zooming into and then out of range. The traveling-through-space screen saver. She could wish for a little journey to the stars at the moment.

She got the Bushnells out of the desk and went out on the deck. The stars hadn’t gone anywhere, Orion and the Pleiades and the Dippers and Cassiopeia, Taurus the Bull, the Great Square of Pegasus. It was cold out, below freezing, according to the thermometer fastened to the frame of the living room window, but she put the binoculars down and went into horse stance and forced herself through the form, blowing through the Fair Ladies like she knew what she was doing. The second time it was easier; the third time she was sweating freely and her thighs were trembling. She went through it a fourth time just to prove she could, and when she reached Step Up, Parry and Punch she really let loose.

“That Liam you knocking on his ass?” a voice said.

She slid into Apparent Close-Up and Conclusion, brought her right fist into her left palm, and bowed, once and low, in Moses’ direction.

The old man was sitting on the top step of stairs leading from the deck to the edge of the cliff and the beach below. That beach was littered with shards of ice, which, in another snow and a few more high tides, would join together and reach out to the opposite shore, where the same process was taking place. In a month, perhaps less, the two would meet in the middle in a frozen handshake that would last the winter long.

“I didn’t know you were there,sifu. ”

“Yeah, well, there’s a lot of things you don’t know.”

His words were a little slurred, which meant he’d been drinking. Although she wasn’t sure he was ever entirely sober, and he had to drink a lot before it affected him in speech or gait. He claimed to drink to drown out the sound of the voices that afflicted him with prophecy. He could tell the future, could Moses Alakuyak, and it never brought him any joy. Perhaps it was because people had always done what they wanted to in the first place, regardless of the best advice given them, and always would. It didn’t help Moses’ disposition any to watch lives going down in flames all around him, when the way out of the inferno was so clearly seen only to himself. He was a prophet without honor in his own country.

Still, that was no reason to allow him to attack unchallenged. “Is this my night to get beaten up by every man in my life?” she wondered out loud.

“It’s sure as hell your night to get beaten up by me.” He didn’t sound like he was joking.

“Always a pleasure,” she said. “You want something to drink?”

“Got any scotch?”

Liam did, single-malt, and Moses knew it. “I was thinking of something more along the lines of a mugup. You have any more to drink this evening and you’re going to roll right off this deck.”

“Who gives a shit?”

“Pretty much anyone who knows you, though I’m begi

“I’m fine out here.”

“You be fine out here, then.” And she gave him the satisfaction of stamping back into the house and slamming the door behind her until the glass rattled in the frame.

He was still perched on the top step when she came back outside with two steaming mugs. This time she had her down jacket and her boots on, and she brought out a blanket, too, and wrapped it around his shoulders. It surprised her, and made her a little uneasy, when no scathing commentary followed on it being a fine thing when the wimmenfolks felt they had to swaddle up a grown man like he was some kind of baby too dumb to stay out of the cold.

They sat next to each other on the top step, if not in companionable silence then in silence. She’d made them tea and laced it well with honey. After an initial contemptuous snort, he drank without complaint.

Orion was well up in the sky, the Pleiades a bright cluster just out of his reach.

Wy loved flying on nights like this, when the stars went on forever and the lights on the control panel were a dim green glow, with no sun to create thermals to bounce over and the comforting drone of the engine the only sound. She hated to land on night flights, wanted to keep going as far as she could, as long as she could, wrapped in an immense cloak of warm, black velvet studded with bright, glittering rhinestones, just her, and the plane, and the night.

A meteor streaked across the sky, another, followed by a third. What day was it? That’s right, October 21st, the first day of the Orionid meteor shower. One day she wanted to be Outside in August during the Perseid meteor shower, maybe Colorado, high up in the Rockies, to see John Denver’s “raining fire in the sky.” Meteor showers were invisible in Alaska in the summertime; the days were too long.

Moses had been quiet for a long time, when his expressed intent in coming here had been to give her grief. “What’s wrong, uncle?” she said, using the honorific earned by every elder the length and breadth of the YK Delta just for outliving their contemporaries.

He raised his head and stared out across the river. “You asked me about your father.”

Wy forgot to breathe.

His voice was dry and without expression. “His father ran out on him before he was out of diapers, and his mother did the best she could, but the booze got hold of her and she wasn’t much use after that. Still, he was a cute little bugger, and smart, too. He managed to make it all the way through high school, supported them both working deckhand, and could have had a full-time job with just about anybody when he graduated. But he wanted to work the big boats, Alaska Steam, the ferries.”

Moses paused for tea, and Wy discovered her hands had clenched around her mug. She unclamped them, one finger at a time, cautious not to make it obvious, terrified that even the smallest movement would distract him, change his mind.