“He bought it,” Rebecca said, an edge to her voice.
“Ah.” Nina examined the coffee in her cup with close attention.
“Without even asking me if I wanted to spend the whole summer out there, he goes and buys a gold mine. God, Nina, I don’t even know where it is.”
“Did he say?”
“West of Anchorage, north of Bristol Bay.”
“That takes in a lot of territory. Is there a town nearby?”
Rebecca gave her head a gloomy shake, her fine blond hair escaping its ponytail to fall into wisps around a face that had been described variously as an angel’s (her mother), Hayley Mills’ (her father), Grace Kelly’s (Nina, enviously), and “fucking drop-dead gorgeous” (Mark). Her figure had been described as “a little too plump, dear” (her mother), “healthy” (her father), “stacked” (Nina, enviously), “built like a brick shit-house” (Dale, her roommate before she married Mark) and “it’s like Christmas every time I unwrap you” (Mark, although he hadn’t said that in months).
“I like going to two movies on a rainy Sunday afternoon,” Rebecca said. “I like biking the Coastal Trail, and hiking Near Point. I especially like it that there is a hot shower and a soft bed at the end of a day of biking and hiking.” She raised her cup ceilingward. “I like lights that turn on with the flip of a switch.”
“There’s no electricity? How do you get the gold out?”
“How should I know? By gold pan, I guess.”
“I thought they only painted on gold pans these days.”
“Me, too, but Mark brought home half a dozen yesterday. Plastic ones. They’re green or black, so they show the gold more, and the bottom of the pans are riffled, you know, little ridges? So the gold falls down between them and is trapped when you rinse the dirt out. Because it’s lighter.”
“Lighter than what?”
“The gold.”
“Oh. Sounds like you know something about it.”
“I don’t have a choice. It’s all he talks about anymore.”
There was a short silence. “You want a refill?”
“Sure. Heavy on the half-and-half. Which I also have to give up. No cows in the Bush, I bet.”
Nina returned with full cups the color of café au lait, and Rebecca accepted hers with the air of one who was determined to savor every drop as if it were her last.
“Rebecca, you don’t have to go,” Nina said. “Just say no.”
Rebecca sighed. “He’s been working double shifts all winter to save up for time off this summer. He’s got nine weeks coming, plus his regular two weeks off, plus the week he won at the Christmas party. Twelve weeks in all. He’ll be out there the whole summer, Nina.”
“Let him be.”
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought of it herself. “I can’t.”
“What about your job?”
“He wants me to quit.”
“Rebecca. You love being a legal secretary, and you love your boss.”
“Yes,” Rebecca said mournfully, thinking of the bright, bustling office on the seventh floor of 710 K Street. “I do.”
“He can’t ask you to do that.”
“He’s my husband,” Rebecca said. She tried to smile. “Forsaking all others, and all that. You know.”
Nina, who had never been married, didn’t know, but she was that good and rare friend who listened without judging and so she sipped her coffee and smiled. “You know what’s wrong with Mark?”
“What?”
“He’s too good in the sack,” Nina said, and grinned.
Rebecca rose to Nina’s obvious expectations and made an elaborate show of bristling. “And you would know this-how?”
Nina toasted her. “Only by reputation, girlfriend. Only by reputation.”
They laughed and changed the subject.
And now here Rebecca was, five months later, waking up in a one-room shack deep in a canyon somewhere in the Wood River Mountains, part of the southwestern curve of the Alaska Range. The mine sat on a creek in a deep, narrow crevice formed between three mountains four, five and six thousand feet in height. The sun could have been up till midnight but Rebecca couldn’t swear to it; the only time the mining camp got direct sunlight was between the hours of ten and two. It might as well be December. There was even snow packed into various hollows on the north-facing slopes of the peaks.
It had not been a fun summer. Not only was there no electricity, there was no running water, and the plumbing consisted of a teetery outhouse with bear hair stuck to the outside where the local grizzlies had come to scratch. With the advent of salmon up Nenevok Creek, the bears had come for more than scratching their backs. And if there weren’t bears, there were moose, mama moose with babies and attitude. One day a porcupine had wandered into the outhouse and frightened her outside. Mark had come running at the sound of her shrieks and roared with laughter at the sight of her hobbling around with her pants down around her ankles.
Mark had bought her a.357, which nearly knocked her flat the first time she’d shot it, and she wore it faithfully whenever she stepped out the door, but guns made her nervous and she preferred to remain inside, beading and knitting by the soft glow of the kerosene lamp. Mark had gotten a little tight-lipped when she had run out of kerosene for the second time, but that nice woman pilot with Nushagak Air Taxi had dropped off two five-gallon cans on a trip from Newenham to the fishing lodge at Outuchiwenet Mountain. The three Danish fly fishermen on board had taken one look at Rebecca and tried to persuade the pilot to leave them there, too. They spoke little English, but Rebecca, starved for conversation in any language, had been reluctant to let them go.
The pilot had also brought in a bundle of magazines,Newsweek s andTime s andSmithsonian s andCosmopolitan s, and Rebecca had been moved nearly to tears. The pilot, a leggy woman in jeans with dark blond hair stuffed carelessly through the back of a Chevron baseball cap, could not quite conceal her sympathy. Rebecca, who had her pride, pulled herself together enough to express her thanks, wished the fishermen luck and helped push the tail of the plane around, yet another skill she had acquired this summer. The Cessna blew dust into her eyes as the engines revved up for takeoff, but she stood where she was, watching as it barely cleared the birch trees at the end of the rudimentary little airstrip with the uphill grade and the surface made of rocks rubbed smooth from a hundred years of tumbling in Nenevok Creek. The engine roared a protest in the thin mountain air as the pilot hauled on the yoke and the plane slipped through the minuscule space between Mounts Pistok and Atshichlut. Rebecca had tears in her eyes from more than the dust.
And now here it was, September 1, a Wednesday. On September 6, Labor Day by the calendar but Christmas, New Year’s and her birthday all rolled into one for Rebecca, Nushagak Air Taxi was scheduled to fly into the Nenevok Creek airstrip and pick up Mark and Rebecca and fly them back to Newenham, where they would board an Alaska Airlines 737 (until this summer the smallest plane Rebecca had been on). In a little over an hour, they would land in Anchorage. Nina was meeting them, with orders to have in hand at the gate a grande cup of the day from Kaladi Brothers, with half-and-half and a packet of Equal already stirred in. Rebecca could almost taste it, and looked up from the watchband she was beading for her grandmother to the calendar on the wall, as if by doing so she could make the days, the hours, the minutes go faster. Dinner at Villa Nova, she thought, or maybe Simon’s, or Yamato Ya, or Thai Kitchen. She was so sick of salmon. She was a good cook, but there were only so many ways to prepare fish, and she had tried them all.
Maybe a trip to the Alaska State Fair in Palmer, she thought, examining her palette and selecting a number 11 seed bead in lime green. Rain or shine, the fair was always crowded over the Labor Day weekend, kids standing in line for their last Octopus ride before school started, serious, tight-lipped women examining the crafts building for blue ribbons, cowboys roping calves in the arena, lumbermen rolling logs in the pond, Roscoe’s Skyline Restaurant selling the best barbecued ribs this side of Texas on the Red Path. But no, Roscoe had forsaken the fair for the Sears Mall, and for that matter, Labor Day was the last day of the fair, wasn’t it? She used to know these things. Fine, they could stop at Roscoe’s at the Sears Mall on the way home. Rebecca’s mouth watered at the thought.