Nothing Gold Can Stay

“Yes,” she said, with emphasis.

“God, you’re just so sexy when you’re in hot pursuit.”

“Is it a positive match?”

“Could I swear in court that the Winchester you sent me is the weapon that killed Mark Hanover? Not without a shell casing, and you didn’t recover one from the scene, did you?”

“No.”

He sighed. “Then all I can say absolutely is that the shot that killed Mark Hanover came from a Winchester Field Model, probably a 16339.”

“Great.”

“Yeah, I know, there’s only about ten thousand of those floating around the Bush. Good duck guns. And they’re relatively cheap, I don’t think any one of the Field Models goes for over four, five hundred dollars. Hell, they’re all over Anchorage, too, people buy them for home defense every day. Quicker than calling the cops.”

“Ha ha.”

“Try to find me a shell casing.”

“There wasn’t one, Nick. We searched the area thoroughly.”

“We, that’d be you and Trooper Liam Campbell.”

She smiled at the opposite wall. “Yep.”

Another brief pause. “Good trooper, I hear, until that mess in Denali. He’ll do well in Newenham. Take the hoodoo off that post, Barton says.”

“Yep.”

“Good-looking guy, too. Pity about his wife and kid.”

“Yep.”

“Bitch,” he said without rancor.

She laughed. “Thanks, Nick. Talk to you soon.”

As she hung up the phone, the door opened and Jo Dunaway walked inside with three other people. Before Prince had a chance to stiffen into official press-repulsing mode, Jo said, “Wy and Liam didn’t make it home last night.”

Old Man Creek, September 4

Tim’s first year in Newenham had been fine. He stayed home mostly, except for school. He’d always liked to read, but his birth mother (he’d quickly learned the jargon of the adopted child, especially anything that might hurt his birth mother if she ever came to know of it) had never seen the need. “Go out and play,” she’d said, pulling the book from his hands and shoving his coat at him. Of course, that was usually when his uncle Simeon (or his uncle Curtis or his uncle Jeff) had come over and he was more than happy to leave the house.

The trouble was, he didn’t have a lot of places to go. It was a small village, to which his mother had come with her man thirteen years before. Her man had lived long enough to father a child and then been killed three months later when his snow machine had plunged through an open lead on the Nushagak River. He’d gone up the river to Bright’s Point, where there was a liquor store. This was the return trip. It happened all the time.

Back at Ualik, his grandmother washed her hands of Tim’s unwed mother, and when his grandmother washed her hands of someone, the whole village did, too. Tim was born after twenty-nine hours of hard labor, his mother alone in the shack that was all the worldly goods his father had left her.

His first memory was of being curled up on the cot jammed into one corner of the shack, trembling behind a length of worn chintz suspended from a string tied between two nails, as the shack jolted from the force of blows being struck, bodies falling, people screaming. His mother and his uncle Simeon. Or maybe it was Uncle Felix, or one of his other uncles, it was a long time ago and he couldn’t say for sure. There was a loud, smacking sound and another jarring thump that shook his bed, and silence. He gathered all his courage together and peered around the edge of his makeshift curtain. His uncle was lying stretched out full length on the floor, his head next to the honey bucket. The honey bucket was a tin pail with a sharp rim. It was overturned and the contents spilled across the floor, the piss and shit mingled with the spreading red pool beneath his uncle’s head.

He didn’t remember more than that, but that much he remembered in clear and vivid detail.

He couldn’t remember a time when his mother hadn’t drunk. At first it wasn’t so bad, an uncle would bring over a bottle and they’d drink it and then his mother would order him behind his curtain. But slowly it became more than an evening bottle, soon it became an afternoon bottle, then a morning bottle, then it was the first thing she reached for when she woke up.

The first time she hit him was when he didn’t get out of her way fast enough. The second time she hit him was for getting out of her way before she could hit him. Pretty soon his uncles picked up on it and joined in.

He developed habits of compulsive neatness. When he made his tea he never spilled so much as a grain of sugar, he never dribbled water from the teakettle in pouring, he disposed of the tea bag as soon as it was out of the mug, he never let his mug sit on the counter after it was empty. He made his bed with perfect corners, the edges of the tattered blankets neatly aligned. He folded his clothes into one Blazo box, kept his toys and books in another, the books on one side with their spines out, the toys on the other, biggest one on the bottom, littlest one on the top.

He washed the dishes every night and put them away. He swept the floor every morning before he went to school. He kept the top of the oilstove scrubbed clean. He lined the cans up in the cupboard according to size.

It didn’t matter. She hit him anyway.

After a while he started hiding under the sagging porch, even in winter, but when she found him she dragged him out and hit him for that, too.

When he was ten he made his first friend, an older girl who tutored him when he fell behind in class. Her name was Christine, and she had dark eyes and a merry smile. She was going to be a teacher, Christine told him, so she was practicing on him.

As soon as she got to know of it, the old woman, his grandmother, had tried to get Christine to stop tutoring him. He wasn’t worth it, she declared, this bastard son too stupid to learn what every other student could in school, this bastard son of an unwed daughter who didn’t even have the decency to move to Newenham, or Anchorage, even, somewhere far away where she could bring her decent, hardworking, God-fearing family no shame. Christine had heard the old woman out with an expression of polite attention fastened firmly to her face, and had tutored Tim anyway, staying after school to instruct him patiently in the mysteries of geography and history. They spoke English in the morning and Yupik in the afternoon at school, and you had to speak both fluently before they’d let you graduate. English was easy, his mother never spoke anything else and wouldn’t let him, either, not around her house. “It’s bad enough you got a brown skin in a white world, kid,” she’d said. “Don’t talk like you got a brown skin, too.”

Christine had taught him Yupik. But then she had gone away, one day she was there, the next she was not. Tim figured the old woman had gotten her way after all, and he retreated once again into solitude.

One day soon afterward his mother had been very drunk and the hitting had been very bad. Uncle Simeon had done other things to him, too. The counselor in the hospital had tried to get him to talk about them, but he wouldn’t. He never would, not ever.

Besides, that was all done now. He was with his true mother. Wyanet Chouinard had flown into Ualik that day when the hitting had been very bad, and when she had flown out again she had taken him with her. She had visited him in the hospital, she’d come every night and talked to him and read to him and brought him presents, and when he was well enough, she had taken him home. She had asked him if he wanted to live with her always and his throat had been so choked that he hadn’t been able to speak, to say, to shout, to scream out the word “YES!”

He had thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

Newenham wasn’t heaven, though, and getting used to the differences between Ualik and Newenham was a long and difficult process. Ualik, his birthplace, was a village of two hundred, Newenham a city of two thousand. Newenham had cable, and two grocery stores, and nine churches and two bars. Ualik had one satellite dish that acted as a conduit for the state-run cha