Nothing gold can stay (11 page)

It was a place to be valued, a home for hundreds of different species of birds and water-loving mammals. Case in pointan otter poked his or her head above the bank, whistled indignantly, as if to say, I thought you left for the year once already. A small splash and it was off again. Little trickles and tributaries riddled the country in every direction, all winding their way somewhere safe to the Nushagak River, and thence to the sea.

Tim needed a dog, she decided, a dog to drape his arm around when he was sitting on a dock with his feet dangling over the edge. Maybe the dog would make him look less frightened, less forlorn.

The door opened and Moses came out, dressed in his sifu clothes, a black jacket and black pants with the cuffs folded and tied closely at the ankles. He walked down the steps and into the yard, faced north, brought his feet together and his hands up, right fist cupped in left palm, and bowed once, holding it for a long moment.

He straightened, his hands dropped to his sides, he took several long, deep breaths, his knees bent, his arms came up, elbows at his sides, to form two gentle curves before him, and he appeared to go into a trance. Minutes passed, and more minutes, until Bill could see the beginnings of a fine trembling about his thighs and knees, first hinted at by the faint vibration of fabric in his pants. Still he held it, what he called standing post, until the trembling increased into an obvious tremor, and what must have been twenty minutes passed before he sighed, a long, continuous inhalation and exhalation of air, and slowly straightened into an erect posture, only to sink back into it again, and this time from the stance into motion.

She never tired of watching him practice tai chi chuan. In Chinese the name meant “soft boxing, a form of martial arts dating back five thousand years. It focused more on defense, designed to take advantage of an opponents offensive moves and discourage them, deter them or deflect them.

Moses in motion was grace personified, wholly concentrated on his art, from commencement to conclusion, through movements with prosaic names like Pull Back, Press Forward and Push, to the more exotic movements with names like Step Back and Repulse Monkey, Stork Spreads Its Wings and Retreat to Ride Tiger.

He went through the form three times. Sounds natural to the creek, birds calling and fish jumping and branches creaking in the breeze, seemed muted and distant. One was aware, watching Moses practice his art, of the inherent possibility of mankind. One grieved that, in five thousand years of practice, that potential had yet to be achieved. But for a few precious moments Moses shrugged off the millstones of modern man and reached back in time for the grace and strength and endurance inherent in us all. It was always there, waiting to be tapped. It was only that so few knew to reach for it.

Bill looked around to see that Tim was watching Moses, too.

Moses said, “Come here, boy.

At first it didnt seem that Tim would obey.

Moses waited, without turning, without moving, without repeating himself, facing north, waiting.

Tim approached reluctantly. “What? He affected a yawn.

“This is called a modified horse stance, Moses said, sinking back into the bent-knee, arm-bent-at-the-elbow position.

“So?

“So, Moses said, displaying a rare patience, “this is the best exercise to tone your muscles for the practice of tai chi chuan.

Tim opened his mouth to say “Who cares? caught Bills eye, and changed it to the less dangerous “So?

“So do it. Now. Moses stood straight and walked behind Tim, poking his hands into the backs of the boys knees and manipulating Tims arms into the raised position, much as someone would operate a marionette. “Not like that, like this. Not straight, curved, and cup your hands. Deeper. He nudged the backs of Tims knees again. “Youre young and healthy, you can go deeper than that.

“Why would I want to? Tim muttered, just loud enough for Moses to hear.

Surprising everyone in the clearing, Moses laughed. “Oh, you want to, all right, young Gosuk. You were watching me, and you thought what I was doing was way cool. He raised his voice. “Amelia!

He had to shout her name three times before she came to the door, rumpled clothes and bloodshot eyes and hair askew. She looked hungover because she was.

“Down here, Moses said, pointing next to Tim.

Befuddled, she shuffled down the steps, and stood next to Tim, swaying a little. Tim watched from the corner of one eye. She was pretty, underneath all the bruises, and not that much older than he was. It seemed strange to think of her as married. People seventeen didnt get married, they went to high school. Melanie Choknok, the junior he had a secret crush on, was Amelias age.

Moses poked and prodded her, too, until she and the boy stood in a parody of Moses assured stance. “Breathe, he barked. “Feel the air, the breath of life, making a circle around your body, pulling all life to you and in you. Breathe, goddamn it! Bend your knees, deeper, deeper, I said! What are you trying to do, boy, pluck a duck? Give me a respectable tai chi cup on that hand. Yeah, okay, thats close enough for now. You, girl, nobody yelled Attention! Lower your chin. I said lower it, damn it, not fall face forward onto your chest. Bend your knees. Bend them!

He kept them in one position for half an hour, always carping, always criticizing, grudgingly accepting their stances only as an imitation of the real thing. “Okay. Stand up. Where you going, boy?

Tim halted. “I thought we were done.

“Who told you to think? Moses demanded. “Resume your position.

Tim resumed his position. Bill was left to wonder how Moses did it. He was five feet seven inches tall, his features were boringly regular with the merest hint of his Yupik ancestry, he had no dignity to speak of, there was no authority vested in him by the power of the state, in fact no earthly reason for anyone to say “How high? when he said “Jump! Tim, who had had a very rough and very nearly fatal childhood in the Yupik village of Ualik and who had been rescued from it by the timely intervention of one Wyanet Chouinard, and who was only now learning how to be an American boy, jumped. Amelia, who had been beaten into a cringing and nearly servile subservience within the space of little more than five months, her obedience was easier to understand.

Still, Moses commanded. There was no other word for it. Maybe it was his eyes, a penetrating gray so light they seemed at times absent of any color at all. Maybe it was the grin, saved from being purely evil by the curl at one corner that invited you to laugh with him. Maybe it was his age, which no one knew but everyone agreed had to be ancient.

He sat on his stool in Bills and he drank an endless amount of beer, but never got too drunk to talk or make love, the two things most drunks most wanted to do and couldnt. Petitioners for news of the future approached him with the deference normally reserved for royalty, or genocidal maniacs. Should I marry the father of my child, should I quit fishing and go to school, should I move Outside? From time to time he issued proclamations. He had declared Bills bar to be a cell-phone-free area, reinforced his edict by launching the mayors cell phone out the front door and into orbit, and no one had murmured so much as a protest. Nobody brought any more cell phones with them when they dropped by for a beer, either.

Half the people in Newenham thought he was crazy. The other half thought he was divine. The whole of the population trod with care in his presence, and most of them listened when he spoke. If and when they didnt, they almost immediately regretted it. If they lived.

She watched him chivvy and chastise Tim and Amelia for two hours, a grouchy little bully even older than she was, and loved him and wished for him immortality, or to live as long as she did, because she had no wish to live without him.

“All right, Moses finally decided, and stepped back.

Amelia, trembling in every limb, tears and sweat running down her bewildered face, folded up where she stood, subsiding to the ground with a thump and a grunt. Tim, more prideful, managed to walk to the porch and more or less fell onto one of the folding chairs.

“Now to the sweat, Moses said. “Come on, come on, move it!

Amelia began to cry in earnest. With no regard for her distress, Moses took hold by the scruff of her neck and yanked her to her feet. Tim, determined to work the old fart into the ground if it killed him, struggled upright on his own. Both of them tottered around the cabin to the sweat lodge next to the creek, a tiny, enclosed shack, weatherproofed more to keep the steam in than the cold out. There was a woodstove inside, vented through the roof, with a pan of rocks sitting on top and a bucket of water sitting on the floor. Built-in benches wide enough to lie down on provided space for four. Moses stripped both kids down to their underwear and more or less shoved them onto a bench. Tim tried not to look at the lacy little brassiere Amelia was wearing, or at the further bruising the removal of her clothes had revealed. Amelia lay down and closed her eyes, oblivious to his presence.

Moses head popped around the corner of the cabin. “You coming?

Bill smiled at him. “A little too crowded at the moment for my taste.

His grin was equal parts understanding and lechery. “Later.

“Later, she agreed.

EIGHT

Nenevok Creek, September 2

The bed shifted as Mark got stealthily to his feet. Clothing rustled as he dressed, the door creaked as it opened and creaked again as it closed. Rebecca rolled to her back and stared at the ceiling, at the patched, cracked, stained ceiling of uninsulated plywood four-by-eights cut haphazardly to fit. The double bed was shoved into a corner, and the air blew cold through the chinks. Theyd used the down comforter all summer except for eleven days at the beginning of July.

Now it was September. September 2, four days from a flight home.

She was going home. There was no doubt of that. She was going home with or without her husband. She was going back home, going back to Anchorage, if not to that nice split-level in the old neighborhood in Spenard with the thirty-year-old prickly rose bush bending the back fence out of shape and the thirty-one-year-old birch coating the lawn with leaves. The yard sloped down in front of the house, and when the four different varieties of poppies she had planted and so carefully nursed through their infancies were in bloom it was like something out of Disney.

It was only a house. She could plant poppies in another front yard. This time she could plant some of those flashy Himalayan Blues. And raspberry bushes, dozens of them, so she could make framboise, and give it away to all her friends at Christmas.

Because she was going home. Mark could stay here, a thousand miles from nowhere, and wash dirt until the creek froze in around his legs if that was what he wanted. To honor and keep, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, so long as you both shall live. She had believed in those words. She was going home, with or without her husband.

There was enough water left in the kettle on the woodstove to fill the coffeepot. She used some of it to make a single cup of coffee and the rest to take a spit bath. She dressed in jeans and a tank top beneath a short-sleeved T-shirt beneath a long-sleeved flannel shirt. She would have worn long underwear if shed thought to bring any with her. She hadnt been warm since they had left Anchorage. She wanted electric baseboard heating in her new house, and a thermostat she could crank up to eighty degrees.

She wanted another cup of coffee, but the water was all gone. She put on two pairs of socks and a pair of short leather hiking boots, picked up the plastic five-gallon jerry can and headed for the door. At the last moment, she paused next to the counter and picked up the paring knife, a three-inch blade on the three-and-a-half-inch black plastic handle. Mark made fun of it and tried to get her to use the slim, deadly skinning knife hed bought for her, in its own leather sheath meant to be threaded onto her hand-tooled leather belt, but she liked the paring knife. It was short and sharp, and it served for cutting up vegetables and trimming bead cord.

There was a stalk of fireweed next to the creek where they got their water. Shed noticed yesterday that the last group of blooms at the very top of the stalk had opened, and she wanted to bring them back to the cabin with her. She was designing a bracelet, a wide cuff with picoted edges and a raised pattern in a floral motif. She had two tubes of size eleven seed beads, one Ruby Rainbow Matte and one Purple Blue Transparent Matte, hoarded as her reward for sticking out the summer. They were as close to the color of the fireweed blooms as she had in her private stash, and the blooms would make a lovely motif for the bracelet. She would give it to Nina for Christmas. Nina loved reds and purples and hot pinks. Her Volkswagen Beetle was a silvery fuchsia. Shed always gone more conservative with her car colors.

She left the cabin door standing open and trod the path to the stream with soft, carefully placed steps, listening for anything that might be beyond the bushes. She no longer started at every rustle or creak, but neither did she ignore them.

She hoped she wouldnt run into Mark. She hoped he was prospecting up the creek somewhere.

It had been a long, still night. Neither of them had slept, but they hadnt talked, either. Rebecca had said all she was going to say, and Mark was still confident he could change her mind. It was the second of September. Wyanet Chouinard and the Nushagak Air Taxi would come on the sixth of September. Four days, if she counted today. Shed made it through three months. She could make it through four days.

The brush opened up at the creek, where a small slope of reddish dirt fanned into a narrow gravel bank. The rocks were round and flat, and many of them gleamed white and sparkled in the early morning light. Quartz. Quartz and gold were found together, Mark said. She thought of the half dozen tiny vials filled with dust and the one nugget the size and shape of a kidney bean back in the cabin, the fruit of a summers labor, and shook her head.

She filled the jerry can. The fireweed was still there, still blooming. She used the paring knife to cut the stalk just below the last set of blooms, feeling slightly guilty as she did so. It had been perfect just as it was.