Better To Rest

Now there were fish farms from Scotland to British Columbia to Chile, and the North Pacific was being systematically fished out by processors with nets a mile, two miles long, ripping up the bottom of the ocean and every living thing with it, regardless of size or sex. The king crab had been the first casualty, then the herring, then the salmon. Now the fishermen were fighting over rights to fish the pollock, whose own population was already so low the Steller sea lion herds that fed on them were starving themselves out of existence. The fishermen’s associations vowed and declared that the pollock population had nothing to do with the sea lions, but hell, it was perfectly clear to anybody whose livelihood wasn’t on the line.

She wondered what was going to happen next. Alaska existed because of the exploitation of her natural resources: fish, oil, gas. What if she ran out? What happened then? And what happened to towns like Newenham, Togiak, Kodiak, Dutch Harbor, built on fish, whose continued existence depended wholly on the fishing industry?

Stan Tompkins was a fisherman-Lydia’s son, or one of them. Jerry was pretty much a waste of time, sad when you thought how far he’d fallen from the start he had been given, but Stanley Jr. was a capable and prosperous man. She wondered what he thought of what was happening in the bay.

Lydia hadn’t talked much about her children, although they had had some pretty raunchy discussions about sex, the seven of them. Sharon Ilutsik had blushed a lot on those occasions, Bill remembered, and Lydia would be inspired to more and better stories on the strength of those blushes. “You’re a dirty old woman,” Bill had told her once.

“And you aren’t?” Lydia had retorted. “You and Moses kind of set the bar pretty high.” Which, of course, had made Sharon blush more and the rest of them laugh harder.

The clock ticked up to ten and she unlocked the front door. The usual suspects were hanging around outside, waiting, and she stood back out of the way. Never get in between anyone and their first drink of the day. She could have opened up at eight and the same people would have been waiting. She got Chris Coursey a Miller without being asked, and took orders for a Salty Dog, a screwdriver, and a Bloody Mary, this last for Jim Earl, who looked like he needed it badly.

Eric Mollberg shuffled in and sat down on his usual stool. She brought him a bottle of Oly, and he shocked her by refusing it and asking for a diet Coke instead. She poured it for him, making a heroic effort to keep the inevitable commentary to herself. She remembered the arm flying out of the bag, the hand opening, the finger extending, the tip of it almost touching Eric’s nose, Eric’s eyes bulging with horror, and felt a laugh bubbling up inside her. To hide it, she went in the back to check on Moses.

He was sitting in front of her computer, frowning at the screen, and from the glow cast on his face he might actually be operating it. She couldn’t believe he even knew where the on button was. When she went around to see what he was doing, she suffered another shock. He was on the Internet, and had by some miracle known only to the angels managed to get on Google. “What,” she said faintly, “are you doing?”

“Doing a Net search, what’s it look like?” he said, raising his head to look through the half glasses perched on his nose.

Her half glasses, she saw, which happened to be fluorescent pink with white tiger stripes and rhinestones winking from the corners. “I always want to rip your clothes off when you wear those things,” she said.

He gri

“How valuable?”

“Well, now, that depends. This coin is a double eagle, a twenty-dollar gold piece.”

“So it’s worth at least, I don’t know, twenty dollars?”

Moses gave her a disapproving look and she subsided, for the moment. Those glasses did make him look awfully cute.

“They were the largest regular-issue gold coins ever made by the United States.”

“What’s a regular-issue coin?”

“I don’t know, exactly. I think it means like nickels and dimes and quarters are today.”

“Not commemorative.”

“I think so. Anyway, there were two basic designs. The first one was the Liberty Head, with Lady Liberty facing left on one side with the date and an eagle with sun rays and stars on the other side. The reverse,” he said, sitting up with an expectant look.

Knowing her duty, she looked suitably impressed.

“It was made from 1849 to 1907.”

She looked at their coin. “Did we figure out what the date was on this coin?”

“Nineteen twenty-one.”

“So not a Liberty Head.”

“The other design is called the St. Gaudens type, named after the guy who designed it. Lady Liberty is back, only she’s in full figure and standing, again on the dated side, and a flying eagle on the reverse.”

“And it was made-”

“From 1907 to 1933. And there’s something called a mint mark that is supposed to be right below the date.”

Bill squinted, but Moses had her glasses and she couldn’t see anything more than some indecipherable squiggles. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“Twenty-dollar gold pieces,” Moses went on in a professorial tone, “are the most commonly found gold coins today because people hoarded them when they were made. Each coin contains about an ounce of gold, and the price of the coin depends on the price of gold bullion. Gold is soft, so the coins that actually saw the inside of somebody’s pocket are pretty beat up. They can be worth anywhere between three hundred and four hundred dollars.” He sat back and said proudly, “This one’s in pretty good shape, so far as I can tell, so I figure it’s high-end.”

“Wow.” Bill looked at the coin with more respect. “I wonder whose it was?”

“Who belonged on the other end of that arm, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

He shrugged and pulled off her glasses. “You’d be amazed the kinds of things people haul around in their pants. I know a guy carries a big blue glass marble around-I mean it’s two inches in diameter. Says it’s his good-luck piece. Every time I see it I’m glad for him that it hasn’t broken. Ouch.” He winced at the thought of what kind of damage a broken marble in the pocket might do. “I know a woman carries an ivory carving of a sea otter everywhere she goes, changes pockets only when she changes her pants. It’s her, I don’t know, totem, I guess.”

“Like a good-luck charm?”

“Could be.”

“And you’re thinking this gold coin was a good-luck charm, too?”

He looked at the coin. “If it was meant to bring good luck to its owner, and the owner was attached to that arm, it sure failed of its purpose.”

“No kidding.” Because he seemed more contemplative than driven, she said, “You got a feeling about this?”

He thought about it before he replied. “No,” he said, seeming a little surprised by his own answer. “I think I’m just interested.” He slanted a glance up at her. “I’m allowed to be interested without its requiring me to prophesy, ain’t I?”

“You is.” Somebody shouted for beer on the other side of the door. “Don’t hurt the computer,” she said over her shoulder, and shut the door on his oath.

The customers had doubled in number and she took her first three burger orders. As she served the third she became aware of a conversation going on in a booth in the back, featuring Evan Gray. One of her minor frustrations was that Moccasin Man was as adept at getting out of jail as he was at getting into it in the first place.

“It’s true,” he was saying to the rapt audience gathered around him. “They were smuggling gold into the Asian theater, gold for the resistance forces fighting with the Allies. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth. Maybe even millions.”

“And you think it’s up there?”