Better To Rest

“I’m sorry,” he said, and shifted his weight to his elbows.

She smiled without opening her eyes. “Don’t be.”

“Okay.” He nuzzled her neck.

He felt a laugh catch in her breast.

“The only time a man is sane,” he said, belatedly going for a little foreplay with her ear, which he knew she loved, “is the first ten minutes after orgasm.”

She laughed out loud this time.

He raised his head and smiled down at her. “It’s true.”

“Says who?”

“Says Dapper Dan.”

“And who, may I ask, is Dapper Dan? Not that I’m contesting his thesis.” She raised her hips and exercised a muscle or two.

“Oh, man, I’ll give you a week to quit that.” He gave her a hickey, just to reestablish his supremacy. “Dapper Dan was a friend of Damon Runyon’s.”

“Why’d they call him Dapper Dan?”

“Because he was very dapper, and a very successful ladies’ man.”

“Not unlike someone else we might name.”

“The only woman I want to be successful with now is right here. Lying under me, as a matter of fact.”

She raised a hand to trace his eyebrow, nose and lips. He sucked her finger into his mouth. She shivered, and he smiled.

But when they managed to pull themselves off the deck, get dressed and go back inside, the constraint came back. “I’m supposed to meet Dad for di

“Tell him to come here instead.”

“He wants to talk about that wreck on the glacier, and he doesn’t want civilians around when he does.”

She grimaced. “Okay.”

“Wy?”

“What?”

“You seemed a little out of it when I got home. What’s going on?”

She made a wry mouth. “So much for my powers of concealment.”

“I love you.” He said it simply, without flourishes. “I’ll always see more than you want me to.”

Her eyes softened. “Oh, Liam.”

“There is something, isn’t there?”

“Yes.”

He took a deep breath. Damn the torpedoes. Remember theMaine. Tora, tora, tora. “Is it about the job John offered me in Anchorage?”

She looked as relieved as he did to finally open up the subject to discussion. “No.”

“All right, then.” He had not spent so many years walking through the fire to get to her to give up without a serious fight. He’d go to war for Wyanet Chouinard. He just didn’t know if he’d live in Newenham for her.

She seemed to make up her mind about something. “I’ll banish Tim to his room the minute he gets back. We’ll talk then, really talk.” A half smile. “Don’t be late.”

When he was gone the house seemed very empty. She checked for messages on the answering machine. A teacher in Togiak wanted a competitive bid for bringing four students and herself into Newenham over the Thanksgiving weekend for the Bristol Bay Academic Olympics. Dagfi

Ronald Nukwak had called from Manokotak, needing a ride for his family to Newenham for a wedding. That one she let go, reluctantly, because Ronald already owed her for seven round-trips, Manokotak to Newenham and back again. If one of the kids had been sick, she would have rolled out the Cub, but this wasn’t an emergency. She hated losing Ronald’s business, not to mention pissing off the half of Manokotak to whom Ronald was related, but she had bills to pay, too.

She heard enough of the next message to understand the speaker was calling from Ualik, but they were on a cell phone that faded in and out. Somebody wanted a ride, but she didn’t know who and couldn’t figure out when, so she let that one go, too.

She closed her calendar and leaned back with a sigh. The first time she’d flown into Ualik and landed on the runway that also formed the main street of the town, she’d found Tim Gosuk crouched, shivering, beneath his own porch, hiding from his next beating. The village hadn’t improved in the interim. The last time she’d been there her fare had been late getting to the plane, and during her wait two men had staggered by, and a third had stopped and threatened her, followed by two small children, who also smelled of drink and who threw snowballs at her. She wouldn’t have minded the snowballs so much except that they hit the plane. She had run them off, and they’d come back with their father just as she was loading the passenger, a woman who was also drunk and who she was very much afraid was going to throw up en route. The father cursed her most foully and, what really scared her, got in front of the plane after she’d started the engine. She knew from firsthand experience what a prop could do to a human head, and she was just about to cut the engine when he staggered off again. The kids threw snowballs until she was in the air.

She had been incredibly lucky that no one had managed to lay hands on a gun. It wouldn’t have been the first time a stranger to a village had been attacked. Alcohol, the blight of the Alaskan Bush, was almost always involved. Usually the incident wound up involving the community health representative, the troopers, and sometimes the medical examiner. She was glad she couldn’t understand the last message, and then she was ashamed that she was glad. They were her people, after all, Yupik, Alaskan, Bush rats. That she hadn’t wound up an alcoholic herself was due only to the fact that, at least once, the cards had fallen for her instead of against her. God knows she carried the gene.

The time she’d spent with Moses on the deck the night before came back to her, along with his words.

“No,” she said out loud. “Not now. Later, when Liam comes home.”

She picked up a copy ofThe Fiery Cross, her current book, but she was too restless to read. Liam was readingNathaniel’s Nutmeg, but that didn’t hold her interest either. She clicked on the television. Ninety-nine cha

Then she remembered the Web site she had visited when she was looking up stuff on Lend-Lease, before Moses came over. She clicked on the bookmark and found the page of links. One went to the full texts of the various Lend-Lease acts. Another went directly to the United States Navy’s Web site, and the cargo ships that plied the Atlantic run fu

In 1941 the Army Air Force (recently transmogrified from the Air Corps) selected it as its standard transport aircraft. The floor was reinforced and a large cargo door added, and hey, presto, the Skytrain was born. It could carry up to six thousand pounds of cargo, a fully assembled jeep, a thirty-seven-millimeter ca

All the Allies flew it, on every continent and in every major battle of World War II. By 1945 there were more than ten thousand of them in the air, answering to the nickname of “the Gooney Bird.” General Dwight D. Eisenhower himself called it one of World War II’s most important pieces of military equipment.

Her eyes dropped down to the specs with professional curiosity. It had a wingspan of ninety-five feet, six inches and was seventeen feet high. Its maximum ceiling was twenty-four thousand feet, with a normal range of sixteen hundred miles and a maximum range of thirty-eight hundred miles. It weighed thirty-one thousand pounds and cruised at one hundred sixty miles per hour, powered by two twelve-hundred-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines. It was a three-holer, pilot, copilot and engineer, although she thought they’d been called navigators back then.