Mountain time, p.7
Mountain Time, page 7
“Here.” A little late, he thought to offer the apple sack. “Have some on my publisher.” They huddled out of the wind next to a ratty-looking snowmobile shed and watched Travis go about his plane chores. Lexa dug into the apples.
Conversationally she said, “Guess you know you’re in Bob country north.”
He certainly did know that, but was surprised she did. Then put it together, that the Forest Service’s Bob Marshall Wilderness Area lay just west of where she had grown up, along the same spine of the Rockies where Mitch had, far away there in the lower forty-eight. Up here Marshall, in his twenties and made of luck, had plunged into the Brooks Range and come back with a preservation paean to the colossal wild country at the gates to the Arctic. And a pipeline runs through it.
Brow corrugated with interest, Mitch studied off past the aluminum-sheet roofs of the village to the storied peaks all across the sky ahead of them. “Travis’s work ever take him into the Brooks Range?”
“Only flying through Atigun Pass, like today.” Lexa studied the apple in her hand as if it had just reminded her of something. “But I’ve been pretty far back in, on the headwaters of the Anaktuvuk River.”
He felt major-league stupid. She cooked for all kinds of backcountry expeditions, Travis had made mention of that.
She showed him an askew smile, then contemplated the mountains. “Spent a solid week in a sleeping bag, back in there.”
“May I ask, doing what?”
“Trying to keep from starvation.”
She hadn’t liked the setup from the minute the bush pilot dropped them off on the upper Anaktuvuk, a guide she’d never worked with before confidently insisting the camp be put up out on a gravel bar, right there handy to the river for his clients to flail their fishing lines at. One couple from Japan, the other from Florida, Dopey the guide and Lexa, then there they were at streamside when a cloudburst cut loose in the elevations of the Brooks and every drop of moisture on the North Slope started coming down the Anaktuvuk. They were lucky to flounder across the backwater to shore before the river took the gravel bar. They had managed to grab one tent and their sleeping bags and a provision pack that would feed six people for three days—Lexa knew it was going to be a long week before the plane could get back in to fetch them. The Floridians proposed hiking out. Meet a bear in the tundra and it isn’t going to go hungry, she pointed out. Dopey made hero noises about thrashing his way downriver for help. Right, bushwhack for a hundred and fifty miles to the Beaufort Sea and hail a passing iceberg? Along with Lexa, the Japanese couple wasted no more time arguing in the rain but climbed into their sleeping bags to start saving their body warmth and energy. The other three gradually came to their senses and bedded in too to wait for the weather to lift and the plane to come. An eight-day week, it turned out to be before they heard the marvelous drone of the engine.
She gave Mitch only the quick version, but it was enough to knock his Seattle socks off. She shrugged and sent him a glance. Somehow demolishing her apple and managing to speak at the same time, she asked as if suddenly curious:
“Ever wonder if you’re doing any good at all? The things you write, I mean.”
“I don’t have the world straightened out quite yet,” came back from him. “But it maybe doesn’t hurt for me to keep poking around at it.”
“Lots of us poked at this pipeline project as hard as we knew how, and here the sucker came anyway.”
“You’re not big on oil, it sounds like.”
“I’m not big on watching the spillionaires go at it. These are the same people Travis and I knew when they were milking money out of the pipeline construction.”
Now Mitch was the one curious. “What keeps people like you and Travis in Alaska?”
“Travis loves it up here.”
As if hearing himself cited, the long-legged figure across the runway gave them a thumbs-up sign and beckoned them back for takeoff.
City habited, Mitch glanced around for where to deposit his apple core. He noticed Lexa was empty-handed. “What’d you do with yours?”
“Ate that part, too.” She shrugged. “Old habit. My grandfather got us to doing it,” she said as they started back to the plane. “Most of his life he was a forest ranger, there on the Two, and when he used to have us kids out hiking or camping he showed us how to keep taking little tiny bites on our apple core until all that’s left are seeds and stem.” Lexa inclined her head to watch up at Mitch as she finished. “In the wilderness, you don’t want to leave any more of yourself than you have to.”
• • •
They had been back from the pipeline flight several days when Travis suggested to her at breakfast:
“Come on down the Sound with me this morning. Something you need to see.”
At the first stretch of oil-smeared rocky beach, a bargelike craft with what looked like artillery aboard was moving in close to shore. Travis’s boss from the Juneau office, Timmons, was on hand. There was much consultation, and then a cannonade of high-pressure water jetted onto the rocks, spray and crude-oil sheen flying.
It was like watching a powerful fireboat at work, only the target here was not fire.
“Whooee!” With the first hope she had felt in a long while, Lexa jiggled Travis in the ribs. “This is going to do it? They can just hose away the oil?”
“That’s the deal.”
Travis looked odd, taut. The two of them watched another blast of water scour away at the scummed-up rocky beach. After a minute he said as though thinking out loud, “We have to hope they don’t get too much into your line of work with this.”
Lexa gave him an inquisitive look. “The bird washing? Hey, they’re not going to hose my sick birds with that thing. Over my deadly body.”
“No, your other line of work,” Travis said shortly. “We’ve got—there’s still marine life under those rocks. Protozoa and micro-organisms, on up. Bottom end of the food chain, you might say.” Travis inclined his head toward the hosing operation. “That water has to be hot to take the oil off. Scalding.”
Lexa stared at the jet of water. Then at him. “It might cook anything that’s still left alive under there?”
Travis tightened his jaw. “Timmons signed off on it. I had to, too.”
“On—?” Lexa felt a little dazed. Alaska, oil, Valdez: were slippery answers all they ever had?
Neither of them said anything more, right then. Travis had told her just enough, then counted on her to cut him some slack; she knew the symptoms. She made it through the day, sneaking reluctant looks at the hosing operation, and at the pack of $16.69-an-hour workers mopping up around the rocks that had been hot-blasted. She made it on through her galley shift on the fishermen’s command-post seiner. When she got home, she snapped the bed light on in Travis’s eyes.
“You’re letting them kill the rest of the beach to clean it?”
He wrenched himself up against the headboard, his excellent shoulders and slimboy chest bare to her. Blinking hard a couple of times, he had it ready for her. All too ready, she thought.
“We don’t know how to get around some biota loss from it, all right? But—”
She didn’t say anything, waiting.
“Lexa, I am not a marine biologist. Timmons and I think this is the only way we can get a certifiable cleanup. Otherwise, what are we going to say—‘No sweat, don’t bother picking up that oil’? You can see where that’d put us,” he practically pleaded. “We’d have the world on our necks for letting Exxon off the hook.”
“Instead you’re going to have a dead beach.”
“A cleaned beach. Which is what Timmons and I are supposed to make happen. After that, we’ll have to see how things establish again.” Travis took a major breath. “There’ll be studies then. They can second-guess us then, if that’s the way things turn out.”
His eyes quit meeting hers. “Some sleep might improve both of us,” he said, and snapped off the light.
When she went to Mitch Rozier in the morning, the first thing he did was to mutter: “Why do these things always have to happen on deadline?”
Before he began phoning around to marine biologists he knew down the coast, he paused.
“Travis must’ve figured he didn’t have any choice.”
Lexa’s eyes looked dull, but her voice wasn’t. “That can get to be a habit.”
Glancing at her as he made notes, Mitch spent the next hour cornering people by telephone. One way or another, all the researchers he could get hold of said they wished there could have been more research before the beaches were scoured, but none of them wanted to be quoted by name as opposing the oil cleanup. After the last one, Mitch hung up and told Lexa:
“You’re right. They’re flying blind on this, to get the beaches cleaned while the oil company is still hysterical enough to do it. Got one more call to make.”
Bingford’s voice in Seattle went rapidly up the scale:
“Are you in the same Alaska as everybody else? All they’ve been writing for weeks is Prince William Sound polluted to the max with oil, and here you come tra-la-la against the cleanup?”
“Only the hosing with hot water. The scalding part.”
“Hot water, right, that’s exactly what you’re trying to get us into, Mitcho.” Bing made him go over it again, then at last asked: “Who would we hang the story on?”
“I can’t use the source’s name.”
“Mitch, guy,” Bing began, which he always did when he thought Mitch was getting in over his head.
“But it’s somebody who somebody blabbed to. It’s solid.”
“Only if you cover our ass—”
“You don’t have to tell me that again, Bing.”
“—every which way with—”
“Bing, you little craphead, I do know that.”
“—reaction quotes from the poor bastards who signed off on the hot hosing.”
“I was about gonna go do that,” Mitch said, meeting the eyes of the woman whose marriage he was about to wreck.
• • •
I always knew, with Travis, that winters were going to be the worst. When we could get out, have some room around us, we didn’t do too bad. But cooped up together, that’s when we’d start biting the doorknobs.
Posted by the kitchen door, Lexa was keeping watch on the expressions of the guests starting to circle the table of food. A bit of peering and comparing was good; slow stares at, say, the curl of the lettuce leaves were not. This crowd seemed to be automatic grazers, and she at least could breathe a sigh of relief at that. The space of white jacket across the room was less easy to map.
Mitch would be the same season all year long, if the world would let him. That’s a lot of if. I hope I’m not feeling winter coming, again.
Lexa pushed the kitchen door sharply with her hip and disappeared to cutlery duty.
Meanwhile Mitch, with a touch of panic, was finding out that bartending had changed dialects since the last time he filled in at one of Lexa’s feeds. Somewhere a switch had been flipped and everyone who had been drinking bottled springwater that cost more than perfume now could not get along without boutique beer. He had finally mastered the dozens of water labels; now here was the new zoo of brew. Still, he managed to maul the requested brands out of the army of dark little bottles until a pallid guy with hair like a headful of quills came back to the bar complaining that he had been handed a Fort Apache Amber Ale when he’d asked for a Forklift Amber Ale.
“Time-out!” Mitch boomed to the waiting semicircle of thirsties, and clinked bottles around until he had them scrupulously alphabetized, Anchor Steam to Zyggurat Pale Ale.
While Lexa hovered at the table and trafficked this or that onto people’s plates—she always had the urge to pat a party into shape—Mitch whipped beer out like a Las Vegas dealer. Tribal talk among the techies was of stock options, it seemed; Mitch wondered whether stockbrokers talked about computers at their parties.
Another spurt of beer aficionados, latecomers, and then the physically supreme specimen who had let him into the house came through the line, accompanied by an equally blonde and tawny woman. Sheena @ jungle.com, Mitch thought. They were so gorgeous together they practically hurt the eyes. Mitch handed them a matched pair of beers and they strode away like cheetahs.
Amid his collection of pangs, Mitch singled out hunger as one he could do something about. He slipped over to the food table while Lexa was there inspecting its remnants.
“What do you want devoured?”
“Celery sticks.”
“How come you never say the Swedish meatballs?”
“Vegetables are healthy for my profit margin, Rozier.”
He remembered to ask: “How’s business been while I was gone?”
“Weddings up the wazoo,” she said quite cheerfully.
“Really. In this day and age.” Crunching away on the celery, he scanned the room curiously. “So where’s our host? Off trying to morph himself into Bill Gates or something?”
Lexa gave him a funny look. “You just served him a beer, doofus.”
“That’s Frelinghuysen?” Mitch yanked his head around to stare after the blonde muscleman. “Life is unfair, I can take. But this guy has more going for him than Jesus did.”
A series of blunt chords indicated the band was tuning up. Lexa rolled her eyes. “See you around,” she said and fled for the kitchen.
Mitch went and settled himself in back of the bar while the black-clad band avalanched into its first set. From rock through grunge to ska, musicians seemed to be turning from butterflies back into cocoons. Driven by lots of horns, the music was very fast, very loud, very happy, very everything. Through that set and a bunch more, Mitch tried to keep himself tuned only to the industrial-strength music and dispensing an occasional beer.
Lexa sailed out of the kitchen only once and only long enough to snatch the last few slivers of smoked salmon away. She had on her hunkered-down-in-a-hailstorm expression. Mitch vamped a couple of dance moves for her benefit and she stuck her tongue out at him. He loved big helpings of sound and could not see why she clung to voovy-groovy jazz; “There’s no whang to it,” he kept pointing out. (On the other hand, musically speaking, more than once she had shown him, as Paul Desmond’s make-out alto saxophone toyed with “Two of a Mind” on the CD player, that there is only one playful curlicue of vowel between sax and sex.)
Now the band reached the end of another musical peregrination, and silence rang out.
“Prime time,” someone near Mitch said. “Fre’s going to play.”
The band looked sour as Frelinghuysen vaulted up to share the stage, but hey, it was his stage. They shuffled around wanly while he went to his musical weapon of choice, which proved to be the synthesizer. Cries of encouragement chorused from the guests, Frelinghuysen deprecatingly waving them off. Then, ten of the world’s richest fingers flexed themselves once, twice, and began to caress the equipment:
Pling pling pling pling pling pling pling pling pling pling pling pling NEE-NYEE pling pling pling pling pling pling NEE-NYEE pling pling pling pling NEE-NYEE pling WAH DAH DAH DEE DAH DUH . . .
That Chariots of Fire theme suddenly conjured a wall of runners behind Frelinghuysen, the movie’s familiar slow-motion frieze of British distance runners training on the beach for a flannel-era Olympics. Except, everyone in the room caught on within nanoseconds, these were not those ancient Brits in frumpy shorts; these were younger and Lycra-clad and led by a significantly familiar figure.
The guests roared and applauded as the golden head rhythmically bounded along at the front of the pack and its still-golden current version bobbed over the keyboard.
“Fre did cross-country at Lakeside,” Mitch overheard. “High school state champion.”
The theme music underwent another electronic metamorphosis and abruptly another wall turned into a stadium with a cinder track, this time a newsreel-gray figure striding and striding in gawky detachment. Roger Bannister at Oxford in ’54, breaking the four-minute mile. But the runner at his shoulder nobly setting the pace for him was no longer Chris Chataway, it was Frelinghuysen. Fascinated and appalled, Mitch suffered the realization that he was the only person in the room old enough to remember when Bannister’s historic mile happened, rather than having it cooked into his mind by television’s backward glances. He peered as hard as he could at the spectacle playing out over Frelinghuysen’s fingering, but the simulation, the templates or whatever they were—the mask of Frelinghuysen shouldering history along before he was born—looked utterly seamless. Just as Bannister burst his historic tape, a mountain came into the room and two figures were loping its African slope, Kip Keino training with the playful and predatory cyber-Frelinghuysen shadowing him up through the thin air of Kilimanjaro.
When that magnificent duo scampered into a mist, Mitch thought he had endured all, but the music reverted to the movie theme’s plings of portent and another beach took over a wall, this time unmistakably the Oregon coastline, broadloom of sand between forested capes and haystack rocks with surf grandly breaking. At a distance, a shimmer of tiny figures was coming. As they grew ever closer, several dozen of them undulating in the satiny running, their track uniforms took on brightness against the tan beach and green bluffs; colors from a fever dream, maroon, lemon, vermilion. By now it could be seen that two runners were moving well out in front, like the quickest in a flock of sandpipers. The righthand one, of course, was the requisite Frelinghuysen. The other was longhaired and mustached and as intense as the shaped flame of a cutting torch. Steve Prefontaine, running the sand like the die-young competitive demon he had been.
“Pre!” the party guests shouted in media-reified recognition. Then began the chant:
“Pre! Fre! Pre! Fre!”
Ai yi yi, thought Mitch, and reeled to the kitchen.
Lexa was superintending the cleanup. Scraping, washing and pouting, Kevin and Guillermo appeared to be in agony at missing the music. She sent them a look that jerked them back to their chores, then turned to Mitch. “What in the name of Elvis is going on out there?”
