“I’m hanging on to it,” he said, and Voynovich looked confused.
“I thought you wanted to make some money.”
“And I will.” He wrapped the cross back up in the soft old rag he’d brought it in, then stuffed it into the inside pocket of his coat.
“If you want some kind of an advance,” the pawnbroker said, his eyes avidly following the cross into Charlie’s pocket, “I could do that. What do you say to two hundred bucks now and—”
But Charlie was already pushing his wheelchair away from the counter.
“Okay, five hundred up front, against whatever we get, plus the usual split.”
Charlie was at the door, but to his humiliation, it was the kind you had to pull inwards, and he had to wait there for Voynovich to come over and hold it open while he maneuvered his chair over the threshold.
“Make it a grand,” Charlie heard over his shoulder as he wheeled away. “An even grand.” But now, with the bid rising so fast, he knew that the thing must really be worth something, after all. Quite a bit, in fact, unless he missed his guess.
The sidewalk, like every concrete surface in Alaska, was pitted and uneven, and it was murder getting the chair down the street. But Charlie knew where he’d find Bathsheba. The Book Nook sold used paperbacks, and she’d be in there stocking up on romance novels.
Somebody leaving the store held the door open for him, and a little bell tinkled overhead. Bathsheba, no surprise, had her nose buried in some piece of trash that she hastily tried to hide when he wheeled up beside her.
“Where’s your sister?”
“Just up the street, buying yarn.”
“We’re going.”
“You’re done already? Rebekah said we could eat someplace in town.”
“Rebekah said wrong.”
“But there’s that place, the Nugget—”
“I said, we’re going.”
He whirled the chair around, and Bathsheba put the book back on the shelf and leapt to get the door open for him. Once Rebekah had been retrieved from the yarn shop, the sisters helped Charlie up into the driver’s seat of the van, and he pulled out onto the slushy street using the hand controls.
“Look,” Rebekah said, as Charlie drove by without even slowing down, “that’s the burled arch.” She was hoping to distract her disappointed sister.
“The what?” Bathsheba said, taking the bait and turning in the backseat to glance at the split spruce log raised atop two columns.
“That’s the place where the Iditarod race ends every year.”
“What’s that?”
“Remember, I told you about it last time.”
“Tell me again.”
How in God’s name did Rebekah put up with it, Charlie wondered? Always having to explain everything to her sister, even when she’d already explained it a dozen times before? They’d come to him as a package deal — wife and sister, indivisible — and since he’d needed a lot of help around the house, he thought why not. Still, there were times, like right now, when he wondered if he hadn’t acted rashly.
Then he chastised himself for the uncharitable thought. Man, staying right with Jesus was a full-time job.
“It’s in honor of something that happened many years ago,” Rebekah said, with the patience she showed to no one but her sister. “There was an epidemic of a disease, typhoid I think—”
“Diphtheria,” Charlie corrected her.
“Okay. Diphtheria. And the children of Nome — the native children — had no immunity to it.”
“It was in 1925,” Charlie said, unable to restrain himself. “And it used to be called ‘The Great Race of Mercy.’ ”
Rebekah waited a second, scowling, then went on. “The only medicine for it—”
“The serum.”
“Was in Anchorage.” She lay in wait for another correction, and when it didn’t come, she continued. “So teams of dogsleds had to be organized in relays, and the serum was carried hundreds and hundreds of miles, through terrible storms and ice and snow, to get to the children of Nome before the disease did.”
“And did it?”
“It did — in only five or six days. And there was a famous dog who was the first one to run right up this street, pulling the sled across the finish line.”
“Balto,” Charlie said, “his name was Balto. But the real hero was a different dog, one named Togo. Togo and his musher were the ones who took the serum through the hardest and the longest part of the route.” There wasn’t a kid in Alaska who didn’t know the story behind the present-day Iditarod, named after the trail so much of it took place on. But it had always bugged Charlie that the credit didn’t go where it really belonged. Once, many years ago, before the Merchant Marine had drummed him out, he’d had a shore leave in New York City and seen a statue there, in Central Park, of Balto. He’d wanted to scrawl Togo on it instead.
“Can we watch the race sometime?” Bathsheba asked.
Rebekah looked over at Charlie. “When is it, anyway?”
“March,” he said. “I’ll be sure to get us front-row seats.” He wondered why it still bothered him, about Togo. Maybe, he thought, it was because he hated stories where the ones who should be recognized for their greatness were somehow overlooked, and somebody else was able to swoop in at the end and get all the glory.
At the corner of Main Street, they passed the famous signpost with a dozen different placards showing the distances from there to everywhere else. Los Angeles was 2,871 miles away, the Arctic Circle a mere 141 miles. A couple of tourists were posing for pictures underneath it. Bathsheba craned her neck to get a better look.
“Get me Harley on the horn,” he said, as the van pulled out of the town proper. The lights of Nome hadn’t been much, but the night enveloped them the moment they left. Rebekah called up his brother on the car’s speakerphone, and Charlie heard the ring tone just before he got a burst of static, followed by dead air. Same as he’d been getting for the past couple of days.
“Goddammit!” he said, slapping his palm against the steering wheel.
“It’s an island in the middle of nowhere,” Rebekah said, hanging up. “I don’t know why you ever expected to get any reception.”
“I’m hungry,” Bathsheba said from the backseat.
“We should have eaten in town,” Rebekah said to Charlie. “Now you’ll have to pull over at that roadhouse we passed on the Sound.”
Charlie was about to protest, but he realized that he was hungry, too — it was just in his nature to be contrary — and it was going to be a long drive back. The road between Nome and Port Orlov, if that’s what you could call it, ranged from asphalt to gravel to hardpan — a compacted layer of dirt just beneath the topsoil — and most of it could be bumpy and rutted and washed out even in summer.
And this was sure as hell not summer.
In the snowy wastes around them, it was hard to see much, but mired in the moonlit fields there were old, abandoned gold dredges squatting like mastodons. Occasionally, you could come across one of these that was still in operation — growling like thunder as it devoured rocks and brush and muck in a never-ending quest for the gold that might be mixed up in it. Even more eerily, railroad engines were stranded in the frozen tundra — left to rust on sunken tracks that had lost their purpose the moment the gold ran out. Their smokestacks, red with age, were the tallest things in the treeless fields.
“There it is,” Rebekah said, pointing to the parking-lot lights of the roadhouse — a prefab structure on pylons — perched beside the Nome seawall. The granite wall, erected in the early fifties by the Army Corps of Engineers, was over three thousand feet long and sixty-five feet wide at the base, and it stood above what had once been known as Gold Beach, a place where the prospectors and miners of 1899 had discovered an almost miraculous supply of gold literally lying on the sands, just waiting to be collected.