Sixty-Five Days

The sun went down at 1:41 in the afternoon, and I walked out to the gravel strip to watch it happen.

Almost nobody else came. Two kids idled their snowmachines by the fuel drums, then ripped off toward town, yelling about somebody named Dale. An old woman stopped with her grocery bag, looked once, kept walking. That's the thing about the last sunset up here. It sits down on the ice, low and orange, and it doesn't set so much as leak out along the ridges. Most people have errands. I'd cleared my whole day for it.

Starting tomorrow there are sixty-five days with no sunrise at all. There's still a kind of light at noon, a gray stirring, like milk that won't quite take. Fine by me. I like the dark the way other men like opening day.

I've got a room over the washeteria, forty a week: cot, hot plate, a window the exhaust pipe runs past. I tell people I retired off the Slope. Oil field money, which covers the cash, the missing family, and why a man would come north for the dark instead of south like a sane one. Nobody asks the next question. Up here a man's history is his own business, same as his church or his rifle.

I buy groceries like anybody: bread, canned chili, coffee at eleven dollars a pound. A man who never shops gets noticed, and noticed is the one thing I can't afford. What I actually eat, I don't buy at the store. Eight miles out on the ice road there's a man camp, drill crews and truckers nobody writes to, and every winter a few wander off and turn up in a drift come spring. The cold takes the credit. I've got one rule and I've kept it ten years: never feed inside the village.

The light has arithmetic and I keep it honest. Flat dark is nothing. The noon gray is nothing in December. By January it's strong enough to feel, a tightness in my skin, like a sunburn thinking about it. Direct sun is direct sun. The back of my right hand went bad one January and never healed right. Shiny, like something melted and reset. I keep a glove on it. My charter out is booked for January 20th, the Caravan, two days of margin before sunrise on the 22nd, 12:52 in the afternoon. I don't cut it close. I cut it close once.

***

The ground blizzard came in on the 13th of January and set up housekeeping. Sixty knots off the ice, visibility nothing. Doesn't snow so much as sandblast. From my window you couldn't see the fuel tank, fifteen feet away. The exhaust pipe under my window knocked each time the furnace cycled, and the gusts oilcanned the sheet-metal siding. All night.

Word came through the village store: the Caravan was stuck in Deadhorse, fogged in on their end too. Mail runs wash out up here. Nobody panicked. I did arithmetic at that window and didn't like the answer. I'd last eaten on the 10th, out at the man camp. Since then, nothing. Hunger is like a bad knee that way. You know how many stairs you've got left.

***

January 19th, a lull, I walked the fuel-drum line to the store, one glove on each drum like a handrail. Inside was diesel smell and cardboard smell and the freezer chest humming. Frost grew on the inside of the windows, little flat ferns. Ruthie sat at the register with her coat still on, counting a drawer. Gus's granddaughter. Twelve. Never says more than a line.

I took my time. Bread, chili, the eleven-dollar coffee. A man buys groceries. Halfway up the canned-goods aisle I looked up and there was a big old man at the end of it, holding a can of coffee like it was breakable. Face like a bad road.

Gus Aden.

I'd checked on him ten years back, quiet-like. Anchorage, that was the word, and I quit checking after. All November a 206 had worked the strip and I'd put that down to his boy on the mail contract. October, the store had stepped soft around a pilot's funeral. Heart. I never did that sum.

He set the can down slow, the way a man does when he doesn't trust his hands.

"I thought you were dead."

Ruthie looked up.

"You were off by about ninety seconds," I said.

Gus didn't blink. "Back room, Ruthie."

She went. Didn't ask. The curtain swung twice and quit, and the two of us stood there in the canned goods, the aisle light buzzing. Neither of us reached for anything.

Taped to the register, hand-lettered block capitals: FERRIN AIR, MAIL, FREIGHT, CHARTER, SEE GUS.

Ferrin had been the boy's name.

One plane in this town on skis, and one man who flies it. Sun comes up on the 22nd, 12:52. I did that math right there in the aisle, holding my groceries.

He'd already done his.

***

I walked home and sat on the cot, groceries between my boots.

Ten years back a blow shut this strip three weeks past my charter, and by the new year I was hungry enough to break my rule. Francine Aden ran her kitchen like a clock and fed half the town. I took from her a little at a time, all that winter, the way you'd draw water from a good well. The clinic called it anemia. She believed them, because that's what doctors are for.

Gus didn't. His mother's people came off Big Diomede a hundred years before him, and they kept their stories the way other families keep photographs. One night in January he was waiting in the dark of the back bedroom with a snow shovel. I never heard him breathe.

What he did after, I hold against him about as much as you'd hold it against a neighbor for patching his roof. Ratchet straps, four of them, doubled. A freight sled behind the snowmachine. He hauled me out past the pressure ridges on the 21st, in the flat dark, turned the sled to face south-southeast, and drove home without a word. Fourteen hours I worked the same strap on my left wrist. Fourteen. The sky did it slow: charcoal, then blue, then a thin line of pink.

At 12:50 the sun's rim came over the ice. First one of the year. Up thirty-eight minutes, never clears the ridges. He figured that was plenty.

It very nearly was.

I got loose at ninety seconds and got under the snow. I'll say this once: ninety seconds of that sun printed my right hand, the one I keep a glove on. The rest, the summer. A hundred and some days with no night at all, nothing over me but a yard of ice, and I could hear it, settling, talking. Like a seed, listening to the ice. I walked out the next November lighter than I've ever been. They'd gone by then, him and Francine, Anchorage. The stories had gone with him. That's why I let myself come back.

Francine got her color back by seal season. I say that with something like pride, and I know how it sounds. Natural causes got her last spring. That came off the store board. I read her name twice and skipped the line under it.

I kept the rule after. Ten years, never once fed inside a village.

Nine days now since I ate. I'm telling you that so you understand what the rule is worth.

***

January 20th, after dark, I knocked. Gus opened up with the shotgun. We both looked at it like a coat rack. Oilcloth on the table, a scanner muttering weather, Francine smiling off the fridge.

Storm done by morning, the 206 fueled, ninety minutes to Deadhorse, haul truck south. "And you don't come back," he said. "That's the freight charge. Tomorrow I've got a run. You go the 22nd."

The 22nd. First sun of the year. I said ten o'clock. He said noon or walk. Noon here is gray: rim at 12:52, airborne by 12:15, that sun never clears the ridges. The flight would still sit me in that sun the better part of forty minutes. Coat over the glass, I figured. Walking is a month. I was ten days hungry. Hungry men can make any math come out. Noon it was.

So he'd know what he held: "I was in your house last night. Stood in the hall outside her door." His face did something. "Didn't go in. But Ruthie runs your register, and you know what I did to Francine."

The face stopped doing it. He studied the window. "She climbs good, that airplane," he told the glass.

Old man bragging, I figured.

***

January 22nd. Gus does everything slow. Wing covers off, preheater growling, pulling the prop through, counting blades, and the sky behind him goes charcoal, then blue, then a line of pink along the southeast. I can feel it on my face. Not pain yet. Awareness, like a stove across a room.

Gus is wearing sunglasses. Nobody wears sunglasses in January.

12:18, airborne. Right seat. Shotgun in back. Empty both barrels.

The ice slides underneath. Three thousand. Four. Five. Deadhorse sits at sea level. No terrain, no reason to climb. The pink line's not thinning. It's got a gold rim.

"Sun comes up sooner the higher you go," Gus says, not looking over. "Thought you'd know that. Flew Ruthie to her aunt's yesterday. Till February."

His bet: I need him alive, only pilot for two hundred miles. That part's true. He's betting I love my life more than I hate him. Less true than he thinks. I've been under the snow before. A crash is just a shorter winter.

Six thousand. Gus levels off. He takes his hands off the yoke, puts them in his lap. He nods at the windshield. "Deadhorse is that way." He nods at the gold coming off the ice. "And that's that way. You tell me which."

I look at the side of his neck.

One of us is bluffing. I'm honestly not sure it's him.

I told him. I'll let you guess.