I wiped the oil off my fingers on a tuft of dry grass. “Come on, I still smell the coffee and it’s great. You just haven’t developed your senses properly so you’ve got your odors mixed.”
The trail led between stately spruce, their tops invisible in the cloud. Needles had fallen to carpet the dirt path, and in fifty feet the spruce smelled more powerfully than the oil. The Fort Yukon Lodge made its picturesque two-story silhouette against the murk.
“What happened to the airplane, Alex?”
“Sabotage. Someone reached up through the vents and loosened nuts on a main oil line.”
“In Point Barrow?”
“Possible, but I think Fairbanks. If they’d been opened enough to leak, I’d have spotted that before we took off. They just nudged them loose and let the engine vibration finish the job.”
“It couldn’t have happened during maintenance, or something like that?”
We’d reached the wooden steps and started up toward the porch. “No, it could not. Manny did the hundred-hour inspection thirty hours ago and he does not leave nuts loose. In fact, we have him to thank for us being here instead of down in the mountains hours ago. When Manny services an engine it doesn’t vibrate, so it took six hours for the nuts to work loose when one hour would have been normal.”
I banged on the big rough wooden front door and shoved it open. “Hey, anybody home? What does a customer have to do to get a cup of coffee here?”
Debby came bustling out of the kitchen, apron over housedress, arms spread to give me a hug, but she saw Angie and stopped short, cupid’s bow mouth wide open. No animosity this time. We were in Indian country, and Debby’s smile was about to crack her sweet, motherly face.
“Mary Angela?”
“Debby Parent?” The two women ran together and were hugging each other as if each was the last life preserver on the Titanic. The heck with that. I took a cup off the hook and drizzled a cup of rich dark Yuban out of the thirty-cup urn. The first table had a white cloth and was set for two. The other six tables were bare, so I pulled up a wooden chair at the second table. Debby dragged Angie into the kitchen. They’d forgotten that I was there.
The bare wooden table matched the rest of the room, hewn log walls, open beam ceiling, wooden staircase to the second floor. Everything but the yellow curtains and the throw rugs had been made by Joe. Debby had made it bright and cheerful.
Joe and I sat back with glasses of homemade cranberry cordial.
The table was meant to seat twelve, so the four of us were clustered at the kitchen end. We’d finished off a five-pound moose roast and a big tray of home-grown vegetables, and Joe and I each had two pieces of blueberry pie. Joe is big for an Indian and gives the impression of a collection of circles, round face, round chest, arms like connecting rods on a locomotive. He has Debby’s cooking to thank for the roundness, and a lifetime of hard work for the rest of him. A little gray was threatening his thatch, but that, too, might have come from trying to work himself to death. Like many a villager, he’s as at home repairing an engine, a furnace, or a generator as he is netting salmon or building log houses.
The two women were still working on their pie, but that was because they hadn’t stopped chattering from the moment they met. Joe jerked his head, indicating the front door. We wandered out under the spruce trees and strolled toward the airport. The women didn’t notice us leaving. Joe packed his pipe with mixture seventy-nine, struck a wooden match on his pants and lit up. The sweet smell of tobacco blended with the spruce.
“Airplane sabotaged, huh? How bad?”
“No problem at all, just have to borrow a one-inch spanner, tighten two nuts, and refill the crank cases. Might take a gallon of gasoline to clean the oil off the wings.”
“Pretty serious business, sabotaging an airplane. Isn’t that a federal crime?”
“Yeah, whereas murdering us is only a state crime. Thing is, except for the luck of the Irish, we’d have gone down in the mountains, and if the plane was ever found, it might have passed for an accident.”
“So, someone tried to kill you? Sounds a little extreme, even for someone with your bad habits. I always expected it would be a jealous husband that did you in, so what is it this time?”
“Joe, that is the weird part. This is the fourth or fifth attempt and we don’t know why or who. Even my Irish luck is starting to wear thin.” We were walking in a profound sort of darkness, feeling the trail with our feet. Fog was caught in the trees, trailing down like Spanish moss, and it seemed to have turned from white to black. Joe’s pipe glowed like a beacon. We came out of the trees and the plane was a black silhouette, still stinking of hot oil.
“Come on, Alex, brainstorm a little. Don’t tell me you have no ideas.”
“Okay, I’m getting a glimmer. There’s something fishy about the bookkeeping at Interior Air Cargo, but I can’t imagine it’s worth killing, or trying to kill, three people. This oil thing confirms the airport connection. Whoever did this knew airplanes, knew exactly how to sabotage one. Someone is desperate to keep us from telling something or doing something, and we don’t even know what that might be. The whole thing simply makes no sense.”
Joe knocked the ashes out of his pipe into his hand to be sure they were cold before he dumped them on the ground.
“Doesn’t have to make sense, you know.” We started back toward the lodge. “People who kill are insane by definition, so their motives don’t have to add up in a normal way. Follow the money, Alex, and remember that’s a sliding scale. You and I wouldn’t kill for a million bucks, or at least we think we wouldn’t. Maybe it’s good we don’t get tested very often, but on skid row men get killed for fifty cents.”
An owl let out a screech right above us and whirred away through the trees. Somewhere in the village a lone husky set up a howl and was joined by an entire chorus of dogs. They joined in one at a time until maybe fifty of them were wailing their mournful ghostly song.
The women were sipping coffee but showing no sign of tapering off the chatter. Joe shook his head at the impossibility of transcending the gender gap. “You take the room at the head of the stairs. Angie can have the next one, if she goes to bed at all tonight.” Joe turned toward the first floor suite he shared with Debby. He was on the villager’s schedule, would be up and working on something when the sun rose, but saw no reason to stay up after the sun set.
I climbed the stairs, solid two-by-tens with a homemade banister. The bathroom was one door to the left with several fresh towels on a shelf. My room had a cot the size of the one at Maranatha, but infinitely more comfortable. The dogs were in the village a quarter mile away, and the howling was filtered through trees and the thick log walls. It’s a soothing sound really, an indication that all is normal, and when you get used to it, serves as a lullaby.
***
It’s strange to wake up to total silence. No motors running, no sirens in the distance, no noise from the neighbors because there aren’t any. The door to the next room was closed, so Angie had gone to bed sometime. The coffee in the big urn on the sideboard was fresh, and beside the pot Joe had left a one-inch, open-end, Snap-on wrench with a twelve-inch handle. That was Joe, right tool for the job, and the best that money can buy. He had probably been out for several hours working on whatever his current project happened to be.
The coffee knocked the cobwebs out of my brain. Fog had fallen out of the trees and turned to a layer of frost on the porch and the trail, but the sky was still an ugly dark gray. Frost made little crunching sounds underfoot. The plane carried a dusting of white, and no longer stank. Oil had stopped dripping and the coating under the wing felt like black Gummy Bears. I started on the right engine.
The quick-drain valve and the loose nut were four inches above the cowling vents, and I had left those wide open. It was a matter of reaching up through the vent and tightening. The nut turned several turns by hand before I had to put the wrench on it. It came snug, and the final pull on the twelve-inch wrench handle produced the squeak that means metal has bitten into metal and the nut is locked.
The left engine was even easier because I’d shut it down sooner. Five minutes and the plane was repaired, except that the oil pans were empty and everything underneath looked as if it had been paved. The esthetics were no big deal, but that much oil that close to exhaust pipes was a fire danger. Best to start from the top and clean things thoroughly. I climbed up on the right wing, leaned over the nacelle, and popped the Zeus fasteners with my pocketknife to remove the top half of the cowling. The engine looked as if it had been undercoated, or maybe covered with that Rhino stuff they put on pickup beds.
My Casio said eight-thirty, so the village store was likely open. Not that villagers pay much attention to clocks. Probably several households don’t even have clocks, but the morning was progressing, and that they would pay attention to. I crunched along the edge of the runway toward the village.
Frost was disappearing, not so much melting as evaporating. Tufts of brown dry grass struggled through the gravel. Majestic spruce lined the runway with the crimson remains of blueberry bushes under them. The first building, across the runway on my right, was the Episcopal church. It may have been designed in, and shipped from, New England; it was surely the only white clapboard building within hundreds of miles. It did look a little out of place with forty-foot spruce hanging over it, but it was an icon. Next time you’re in Fort Yukon, check out the bleached white moose-hide altar cloth with the native beadwork. It’s a beautiful thing.
Don’t go looking for other churches in Fort Yukon. In the 1800s when missionaries from every Christian sect descended on Alaska, they opted for a peaceful approach. They must have met in conference where they divided up the villages, so Bethel is Moravian, St. Mary’s Catholic, Kotlik Pentecostal, and so on. Fort Yukon was, and is, Episcopalian.
Another fifty yards of spruce, cabins beginning to appear under them, and the main village spread out along the Yukon. I stopped and marveled at the river, as all travelers have for the last several thousand years. The dark brown water rushing past the village was half a mile wide, but that’s less than half the Yukon. It’s split into a dozen major channels, many more minor ones, and all together, counting the islands, it’s at least ten miles wide at that point.
A well-worn footpath led past the end of the runway. The city dock on the left consisted of creosoted piling driven into the mud and down to permafrost so barges can be tethered against the bank. The village store on my right was sixty feet long, maybe forty feet wide, most of it warehouse. Fort Yukon is the northern terminus for the Yutana Barge Line, the hub for thousands of square miles where trappers, homesteaders, and prospectors can get supplies. The last boat of the season was long gone. The diesel-powered, steel tunnel boat, the
MV Yukon
, would have shoved her barges down the Yukon and up the Tanana to Nenana where the railroad meets the river. Like the rest of the outpost’s inhabitants, I was counting on the store’s having what I needed.
Three wooden steps where several old-timers of both sexes were seated led up to the loading porch and ran the length of the building. The oldsters were watching the river and socializing. They gave me pleasant nods but didn’t speak, probably because they had very little English.
Bare wooden floor, low ceiling with light bulbs hanging down from cords, all wonderfully rustic. Head-high racks of everything imaginable were squeezed into the space. The first case inside the door contained jewelry, and I had to stop and look. Fort Yukon is famous for beadwork, and I was seeing the reason. Brooches, pendants, medallions, earrings, miniature woven grass baskets, all exquisite, colorful, beautiful. One pair of earrings caught my eye, tiny fur mukluks, an inch tall, with a minuscule ruff and intricate beadwork.
I was thinking how good they’d look next to Angie’s smooth cheeks and almost reached for them before I noticed they were for pierced ears. Were Angie’s ears pierced? I couldn’t remember. She wore earrings to work, but were they snap-on? Women always complain that men never notice things, and they are so right. I turned back toward the household section.
I gathered up six quarts of Dawn liquid dishwashing detergent and headed toward the hardware. Two full racks were packed with all sorts of liquids and additives, but of course, no aviation oil. Several cases of outboard oil were stacked next to equal piles of snow machine oil. One stack of outboard oil was forty-weight non-detergent. That’s the equivalent of uncompounded aviation oil. Maybe there’s a difference, maybe not. The oil was $2.50 per quart, or a case of twenty-four quarts for fifty bucks. I took the case, paid cash at the register, and lugged my treasures back to the airplane.
It took thirty minutes to coat both engines and the wings with as much detergent as I could get to stay. The soap that dripped off was black, but the engines didn’t change much. I tromped back to the lodge, grabbed another cup of coffee when I passed the sideboard, and carried it to the kitchen.
Debby’s kitchen is an experience. The entire south wall is windows for maximum sunlight above a countertop. Washer, dryer, and dishwasher are tucked under the counter, three stainless steel sinks and cutting boards and such on top. The southwest corner is taken up by a two-hundred-gallon hot-water tank heated by the cook stove. The stove is black iron, four feet wide, eight feet long, with two ovens, and roaring with a fan-fed oil fire.
Debby was kneading a massive mound of bread dough at the six-foot-square island of counter in the center of the room. She wore an apron over a housedress, and had her bonnet of black silk tucked under a knitted cap.
“Mornin’, Alex. Sleep well?”
“I feel like I’ve been reborn. That was the best dinner and the most comfortable bed I’ve had in years. Did you and Angie stay up all night?”
“Most of it, lot to talk about.” She paused to sprinkle flour on the counter and attacked the dough again.
“Yeah, I noticed that. You seemed to be enjoying yourselves.”
“Alex, it was like a trip in a time machine. Angie’s six years younger, so she was like a little sister to me, but we were together every day from the day she was born until she was fifteen. That was the year that Joe came down the Kuskokwim on a raft of logs, heading for Bethel. He stopped in Crooked Creek for a meal, and when he left he just picked me up and took me with him. You can imagine that I wasn’t struggling much.”
“Makes perfect sense. Lot of bread dough.”
“Yep, six hunters from Germany will be on the mail plane tomorrow. Joe will take them upriver for moose, probably take three or four days to get a trophy for every one of them.”
“Wow, an international connection?”
“Yep, Germany, Japan, sometimes Russians, lots of Americans from the east coast. It’s good for the village because all the hunters want is the horns, so the meat gets distributed around, and I’m ashamed to tell you what we charge them.” She stopped kneading dough, turned to face me, and looked right into my soul.
“Alex, are you going to marry Angie?”
I didn’t stop to think. I blurted out my gut reaction. “Debby, I couldn’t. I love her dearly, she’s the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met, but she was the wife of my best friend. It would be like incest. She’s my sister.”
Debby searched my eyes for a long time before she nodded and turned back to her bread. “Yes, I suppose that makes sense to you. In the village that would be the reason you should marry her. When Angie’s father was killed, her mother married his brother, Jack, and when Jack was killed, she married the next brother, Willie. That was correct and proper, but I guess it was another time and another culture. You need some breakfast?”
“No, at the moment, I need a couple of buckets of hot water.”
“Help yourself, buckets under the sink, tap water’s almost boiling. Scrub brush beside the buckets.” She attacked that mound of dough, and I wondered if she was vicariously pummeling me.
It took six trips for more water, but it was working. No problem pouring water on an aircraft engine because the fuel is injected, so there’s no carburetor, and the ignition is from magnetos. Those and the sparkplugs are sealed and shielded so tight they don’t even leak radio interference.
Each engine holds eight quarts of oil. The right engine took seven quarts, the left six. I started them up and let them idle. Oil pressure leaped up to normal and the right engine sounded fine, so I probably hadn’t hurt it. I shut the engines down and added one more quart each to compensate for the oil that was pumped into the coolers and the propeller controls.