Sundown on Top of the World: A Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery (2 page)

– – – – – TWO

A cabin near Eagle, Alaska – June 1997

Betty Salmon brushed a mosquito off her cheek and tucked another bean seedling into the sun-warmed dirt. The growing season in Alaska was short, and she had to make the best of it. The joints of her fingers were swollen and stiff from arthritis, but never mind the pain. There were two more rows to plant in the cold frame before she would go in for tea. The more food she could can or freeze, the less she had to buy over the winter and the less money they would need to survive. Betty’s crippled fingers made it hard to hold a needle, so her income from selling beaded deerskin purses and moccasins had fallen sharply the last two years. Goldie was talking about going outside to work, and Betty didn’t want to lose her. “It would be the death of me,” she said aloud, with only her aged Malamute to hear, if he were able. She’d begun to suspect he was going deaf. Hootie lay flat in the sun, flicking a mosquito off his ear from time to time.

Sometimes Betty would lie awake at night imagining her life without Goldie. Left alone here in Eagle she would die, she was sure of it. It wasn’t a physical thing. Physically Betty was tough as an old grizzly sow. But Goldie was her only reason to stay alive, except for Hootie, and he wasn’t long for this world. Once he left it, she would surely follow right behind him if Goldie wasn’t here. Many of the people who lived in Eagle and Eagle Village were nice enough, and some of them had tried to be her friends, but she’d been gruff and unfriendly for so long, intentionally keeping them at a distance, that now they mostly left her alone.

She knew they called her the Salmon woman, instead of Betty. She imagined the woman at the post office wondering why that old Salmon woman hadn’t come for her mail and sending someone to check on her. They would find her frozen – of course she would die during the dark days of winter – frozen solid. Maybe they would find her sitting in her chair with a frozen cup of tea on the table beside her, her beadwork on her lap; if the generator hadn’t run out of fuel, maybe the television would still be going. Hootie would be curled up at her feet, frozen, too. Or maybe they would find her frozen under the covers in her bed, the woodstove long dead from no one to add another log. She would just go to bed one dark winter afternoon and find no good reason to get back up again.

“Come with me, Gran. When I find a job, we could get a little house in Fairbanks, or maybe even Anchorage,” Goldie had said. “You could still have a garden, and Hootie can come, too.”

Goldie had said it more than once, and more than once, Betty had made a sour face and shook her head. She had wanted Goldie to get an education – as much of an education as a kid can get in a one room school – so she had moved from the old, remote trapper’s cabin up the river to this one just a few miles from Eagle Village, and this was what had come of it. Betty herself was happy enough seeing the world through the videos Goldie borrowed from the library and the educational programs the Alaska government beamed out to villages in the bush; those same videos and TV programs had made Goldie want to go Outside to see it for herself.

“I can’t live in a city,” Betty would reply. “My soul needs to be somewhere wild and quiet and uncrowded. It’s half Indian, my soul. You know that.”

“There’s lots of houses near town where you can’t even see your neighbors, Gran. It’s not like you’d be living in New York or Chicago or somewhere, where it’s all concrete and glass.”

Betty would grunt, toss her long grey braid back over her shoulder and say, “You go ahead, child. Don’t stay here for my sake. I’m old and it’s about time I died anyway.” She said that, knowing that Goldie couldn’t bear to think of her dying, because she was all Goldie had, too. Or so she liked to believe.

“Please, Gran. Life would be easier for us both. Give it a try for my sake. I’ve got no life here in Eagle. I want to take courses at a university. I want to stretch my wings. I want a family one day.” She would sigh and look so unhappy that Betty felt guilty, but then she would think about what might happen if they moved to a city.

What if ‘they’ – nameless, faceless people in government, people Betty had never seen or wanted to see – found out that Betty wasn’t really Goldie’s grandmother, wasn’t even related in any way to the only family she had? Goldie was in her twenties now, so it’s not like she would be taken away, but that’s not what worried Betty. If ‘they’ found out, then Goldie herself would know. She would learn the truth about her mother, and maybe even find out about her father, and worst of all, she would lose faith in her Gran, and she might turn against the brittle old woman who loved her more than life itself.

Betty straightened her aching back and rubbed her eye with the back of her hand. Her fingernails, even her fingers themselves, were black with the dirt from her garden plot, made richer than the poor Alaskan soil around it from years of composted leaves and chicken manure. The half a dozen chickens she bought each spring were a major indulgence on her part – almost her only indulgence – as feeding them properly wasn’t cheap, plus they required a good deal of care, and protection from predators. She’d developed a taste for eggs many years before, and powdered eggs just weren’t the same. She was able to sell or barter some during the summer, and the least productive chickens that survived until the fall were killed, boiled and canned to provide meat for winter. Any leftover fruit or vegetables that wouldn’t be boiled for soups and jams went to the chickens. It was in her genes to make use of every last bit of food, just like the Athapascan people on her mother’s side had always made use of every scrap from the barren-ground caribou, from its eyes to its four-toed hooves.

Where was Goldie? Betty looked toward the narrow dirt driveway that led to Eagle Road. Goldie was supposed to be home by now. She helped out with the cleaning and cooking at Yukon Sally’s Lodge in the busy season, got paid in cash, or sometimes in groceries if there were more leftover supplies than cash at the end of the week. You had to take what you could get. Betty listened for the sound of the old Mercury pickup coming up the road toward the cabin. Neither she nor Goldie had a driver’s license, but nobody seemed to care since they never drove anywhere but the five or six miles between the cabin and Eagle. The Merc – a robin’s egg blue speckled with rust spots where the paint had chipped away – was parked after the snow came, usually by mid-October or early November, when you only needed a snow machine to get around.

Goldie was spending more time in Eagle or at the Lodge these days, less time home at the cabin. That didn’t bode well. Betty wiped her hands on her pant legs, slapped and killed a mosquito on her neck, then bent down to lift another bean seedling from the tray to plant. “We have to live in the moment, don’t we, Hootie? Right here in the sunshine.” She smiled fondly in the direction of the old dog, who was panting from the heat of the sun. “The future’s gotten to be a scary place for old creatures like us.”

“You need help with that?” Goldie smiled at the new guy at Yukon Sally’s Lodge. She figured him for mid-twenties – about her own age, maybe younger – and too tidy to be a bush Alaskan. He was clean shaven, his hair a glossy brown, a wavy lock of it falling over his right eye. He wore work jeans and a black tee shirt, sleeves tight around his biceps. It looked like Yukon Sally had started him with an easy job – splitting firewood for the lodge’s big fireplace or the outdoor fire pit – but he was swinging a light double-bladed axe. “You’re from Outside, aren’t you?” she said. “From someplace warm, where you don’t burn wood?”

The young man’s smile was more like a grimace as he picked up the log, still intact, that he’d just managed to shake off the axe blade. He replaced the log on the stump and straightened up. “I’m okay,” he said with a quick glance in her direction. He tossed his head to get the hair out of his eye and was preparing to swing the axe again.

She shook her head. “You’d do better with the maul,” she said. “It must be in the shed.”

The young man swung the axe and, not surprisingly, it embedded itself in the log again and he struggled to work it loose. A flush rose up his neck into his face. Goldie ducked into the shed before he could see her smile, then emerged with the maul just as he managed to free up the axe.

Goldie strode forward dragging the maul behind her. “Here. Let me show you,” she said, grabbing another log and setting it upright on the stump. “This sucker weighs about five pounds more than that axe, and it does the work for you.” She wiped her palms quickly on the thighs of her jeans, then picked up the maul, raised it above her head and let it fall right in the center of the log, sending two halves of it flying in opposite directions. “See? Even a girl can do it.”

The young man didn’t appear to be impressed. He looked away, his jaw clenched.

Goldie laughed. “I’ve been splitting wood since I was ten,” she said, leaning the maul against the stump. “I’m Goldie. Who are you?”

The young man turned to look at her. He narrowed his eyes and seemed to be seeing her for the first time. She saw his eyes open wider and a smile play at the corners of his mouth, and she knew he liked what he saw. It was her turn to blush, so she dropped her head and kicked at the split log beside her foot.

“Mark,” he said. “Sally’s my mom’s cousin.”

“Where are you from?” Goldie asked all the outsiders the same question. She’d never been anywhere farther than Fairbanks, and that only a couple of times with a friend from school and her friend’s mother. Gran didn’t believe in travelling. Goldie wanted so much to go Outside and see it all. All of the United States, all of North America, all of the places she’d only read about.

“Somewhere warm,” he answered, nodding. “Santa Barbara, California.”

“Nice. I’d love to visit California sometime. I want to see all the states.”

“You’ve always lived here?” He sounded incredulous, as if he couldn’t understand how anyone could live in this part of Alaska for their whole life.

“What’s wrong with that?” Goldie raised her chin. “This is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Everybody who comes here says that.”

He snorted. “Sure,” he said, picking up the maul. “If you like the cold and don’t care much for civilization. You don’t even have TV here. Stand back.”

“You call television civilization? The opiate of the people? Most of us have better things to do.” She raised her chin and looked down her nose at him. “Besides, we do have TV. Free satellite TV. I bet you don’t have that in Santa Barbara.”

“Oh, I guess you figure watching ice break up on the river in the spring is a better way to spend your time? I hear that’s the biggest show of the year here in Eagle. C’mon, get a life.”

“So being glued to the boob tube watching the Simpsons and Seinfeld is better than watching nature? If you’ve never seen breakup, you wouldn’t understand.” Although a voice inside of her told her to ignore the insult, Goldie couldn’t help herself. She and Gran had a satellite dish and often watched TV during the long winter nights, taking advantage of the four rural channels supplied courtesy of the Alaskan state government. “Soap operas and sitcoms. Yuck,” she said, making a sour face.

“Who said anything about soap operas and sitcoms? I’m talking about real live concerts, live theater, sporting events. When’s the last time you saw a good band?”

Goldie couldn’t think of an answer. A few guys from school had put together a rock band, but she would have a hard time calling it good.

“See? What’d I tell you? In the past year I’ve been to see Bruce Springsteen, Garth Brooks and the Allman Brothers – live –, watched the L.A. Dodgers beat the New York Mets, and attended the Professional Bull Riding finals in Las Vegas.” He brought down the maul and split another log with an immediate ease that Goldie couldn’t help but admire. “And that’s just for starters.”

“Well, I’ve seen several grizzlies – live – and shot a bull moose in the past year.” She couldn’t think of anything else to add.

He just looked at her and shook his head, as if to say, “How pathetic.”

“I’ve got to get back to work,” she said stiffly, and walked off toward the lodge. She heard the thwack of the maul hitting the log again, and resisted the temptation to look back.

“Hey, thanks,” she heard him say. “You were right. This thing works like a damn.”

“Bull riding finals, big deal,” she said under her breath. She took a quick look behind her as she rounded the corner of the lodge. He was standing still, watching her. She felt heat rise up her neck. He was as handsome a man as she’d ever seen, and she hoped she would see him again.

And she would, for sure. As long as he stayed at Yukon Sally’s, she would be able to see him almost every time she came to work. She knew that Gran was upset with her for spending so much time away from home, but as much as she loved Gran and was grateful to her for all she had done, for the past few years Goldie had felt like a caged bird. It was all very well for someone like Gran, or Yukon Sally for that matter, who had already had a chance to live in other places and experience the world outside of bush Alaska, to say that they wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Goldie couldn’t say that. Life in the bush was all she had ever known.

“I wouldn’t even have known that some people live in houses with running water and an indoor toilet, if we hadn’t moved to Eagle,” she had said to her school friend, Tessa Charlie. “We lived upriver until I was eight. I thought everybody hauled water from a creek in summer, and chopped a hole through the river ice every day for water in the winter. I thought it was normal to freeze your ass off using the outhouse at forty below, not that we ever knew for sure that’s how cold it was because Gran didn’t have a thermometer. We still don’t have running water or an indoor toilet, but at least now I’ve met people who do, and seen how people live on the Outside. Upriver we had no TV, no radio. It was just me and Gran most of the time.”