“Sure,” he said, “everything.”
“Safe trip,” I told him.
“Wise guy,” he said and turned to the pilot. “Excuse me, you’re not afraid you’ll wear out the batteries?” He pointed to the plane’s radio, turned high, pushing its tinny music through the headset on the pilot’s seat. Philip also liked to use his radio for purposes for which it was never intended. I recalled how upset I’d been when we were airborne again and he’d tuned in to listen to a Fairbanks station, perhaps the very one that was playing now. Only now I understood what was happening. It was the same instinct that drove them to six-pack the house, that same sporty waste and recklessness lifted to a kind of code. You started with the realization that you only lived once. Then you modified your behavior to spite the bad news. (I had a sudden hunch about the stake all of us were supposed to be putting together up there, that it was a myth, more chimerical and dreamy than any of Petch’s disasters.) Maybe that was what was so unamiable and cynical about the idea of the potlatch. Maybe it was what Petch objected to in me. Life was so difficult, being good, respecting God. Dread and awe, I was thinking, were hard in such an awesome, dreadful world, and I began to pray that Rabbi Petch and his pilot be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year, then that Shelley and my daughter Constance were, Spike and Ambest and Krezlow and Anderson and Peachblow and Schindblist and Jeers, and all the names of all the people I could remember meeting up there — the Jacobsons, Dave Piepenbrink, Arn Sternberg, McBride, Deb Grunwald, Howard Ziegler and Milt Abish and Karen Ackerman and Philip, the bush pilot who’d almost gotten both of us killed. Which is just exactly when the song ended and they broke for the news and the announcer came on to say that there’d been a plane crash on a small island in Cook Inlet. His two passengers had survived, but the pilot, Philip Kutchik, a Fairbanks resident and Tinneh Indian who flew for the Alyeska Corporation, had been killed instantly.
I went to Phil’s funeral. A busman’s holiday, you’re thinking, but that’s not it at all. I hadn’t been to the funeral of anyone close in years. Not since my mother’s, not since my father’s. Living in New Jersey, in that queer, Jewless, almost unpeopled town, there’d been no occasion. Shelley and I had only a few friends, and none of them, knock wood, had died. So I went to Philip’s funeral. Though we were hardly friends and I thought him a bit of a jerk, we’d certainly been through a lot together. We’d hacked out a nest together. We’d broken hardtack, shared the last of our jerky, displaced each other’s weight — I’d bite a fingernail, he’d spit out a window. I shouldn’t go to his funeral? My God, we were besieged by bears, found out by the wind-wafted tang of our mutual excrement. We weren’t close. That was only proximity in the plane, but I shouldn’t go to his funeral?
And a good thing, I thought at the laying out. Because except for one or two pilot chums (there, it turned out, as official Alyeskan delegates), and the crash’s two survivors (who stood by the casket — which, to my surprise, was open, Philip’s face having escaped injury, its only wound being in the suddenly paid attention of his expression — and told everyone who came near, myself, representatives of the funeral parlor, who they were and that, but for the grace of God, it could have been them there in that coffin instead of the poor dumb, jargon-spouting son of a bitch with his attitudes and minimums, civil evening twilights, eminences, DF steers, pan pans and A-OKs who lay there now), no one showed up.
I had rented an automobile and drove in the three-car cortege (the hearse, my rental car, a bright yellow Alyeskan truck) out to the cemetery. The two survivors had decided not to come, but the man with the flowers in his beard was outside the funeral parlor when I came out, and he rode with me in the rental car.
“They seem a little faded, Khokem,” I said. I think it was the first time I ever referred to his beard to his face.
“Yeah, well,” he said, stroking it lightly, “you know. October. The last leaf, same old story.”
“It’s good to see you.”
“Next time it should be a better occasion.”
“Well, of course,” I said, shamed and chastened as I always am whenever anyone pulls this line on me. “It’s awful about Philip. Just awful.”
“Terrible.”
“I felt I had to come,” I said.
“Of course.”
“Though we were hardly friends and, to be perfectly frank, sometimes I thought he was a bit of a jerk, we went through a lot together.”
“Certainly,” he said. “I understand.”
“That plane crash. All the time we spent living in that airplane. Remember that nest that we hacked out of pine trees?”
“I do.”
“We lived out of survival tins and broke hardtack together. We shared dried jerky.”
“I had some myself.”
“That’s right,” I said, “you did.”
“Sure.”
“We learned each other’s weights and measures. I bit my nails, he spit out the window. He tutored me in the intricate Alaskan economy. My God,” I said, “we were besieged by bears!”
“I remember that.”
“I shouldn’t come to his funeral? I shouldn’t come? He was like a brother to me.”
“To me too,” he said.
“I know,” I said, “I know, Tzadik,” and wiped my nose with my handkerchief. “ ‘Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. . Any man’s death diminishes me, I am involved in mankind.’ ”
“No, no,” said Flowerface, “you miss my meaning. He was my brother.”
“Phil was your brother?”
“We were identical twins. Here,” he said, “look,” and removing an old black-and-white photograph from his wallet, he pushed the snapshot toward me. In the photo a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old youth, who bore a substantial but, considering the face I’d seen in the open casket, fallen-away resemblance to the Phil he had become, stood next to someone who might have been his mirror image. Both boys were beardless and, near their left temples, where, back in the plane in March, their heads had been covered by parka hoods, each had a tiny birthmark like a corporal’s chevrons. I saw the tzadik’s where he tapped at his temple. “Hmn,” he said, “hah? Hmn?”
“He was your brother? Phil?”
The falling away had occurred on both their parts, as if Phil had come to resemble a distant, younger cousin who would always look youthful, while old Posypuss, tricked out in his now fading flowers, was an actor, well cast but unrelated, carefully prepared by Hollywood makeup artists, to look like a relative, an uncle, say, even a grandfather, of the kids in the photograph.
“We were Tinnehs,” he said. “It’s the way with Tinnehs.”
“Beg pardon, Khokem?”
“Tinnehs. Tinneh Indians? I told you. In the plane? How the Tinnehs are tribeless, clanless. How they — we — break away from each other. Generation after generation. Highest divorce rate in Alaska. Alaska? The world. How the children are placed in orphan asylums when the parents run off? That picture was taken in the orphanage. Don’t you remember? Why don’t you listen? You think I talk for my health? Identical twins, I told you how even identical twins drift apart.”
He had mentioned identical twins. Phrases came back to me. They would, he’d said, “dissipate affinity, annihilate connection.” They moved, “down some chain of relation from sibling to friend, friend to neighbor, neighbor to acquaintance, and acquaintance to stranger.” And remembered his saying how once the Tinnehs outnumbered all the other tribes put together but were now “rare in the Alaskan population as Frenchmen.”