Raindrops rattled the window glass with a sound like an electric bell heard through quarter-inch steel. Rowley awoke in a second. His hand shot out for the flashlight... the generator would probably die, sucked a herring and overheated. He flung off the blankets and froze. The flashlight wasn't where it belonged.

But maybe neither was he.

His vision cleared and he pulled up the blanket, feeling adrenaline drain from his blood, chilling him so he shivered. He wondered for maybe the millionth time why he always woke up with the surreal sense that he wasn't a part of this picture. He'd been dreaming about a sunlit place of swaying palm trees and gentle blue waves, the usual escapist shit of laying somewhere on his ass in the sand with a book, a beer, and Russel, and the bell had been like a bucket of water flung in his face to mock him. Except there had been no alarm bell, only the wind-driven rattle of rain like nature's natural wake-up call.

Time for a change? his gargoyle asked. You have the means to paint your own picture.

He sank back into the big fluffy pillow. According to old Uncle Remus -- al-la Walt Disney -- some folks found bluebirds perched on their shoulders, but all he had was a gargoyle and he'd never belonged in anyone's picture. He considered the fact that he really could flee, he had the means but not the motive -- or maybe not the motive yet -- but Captain MacLeod had once told a story of a man in the late 1930s, who, convinced that the civilized world was doomed, had found himself a tiny island; an island, he'd thought, so insignificant that no one would ever bother it.

The name of that island was Iwo Jima.

Compose yourself, homes. Lately his gargoyle had taken to mimicking Jana's often pedantic voice and tossing off words like "compose." He snagged the word like a dead sea lion, heaved it overboard, so to speak, and hoped it would sink out of sight. Jana used words like that all the time, as if Anglo-Saxon eloquence was better than her native tongue to express the fact that shit smells bad.

He scented the air; why had he dreamed about tropical isles when the smells around him were wet pine trees, clean cotton sheets, and Jana? She had a beautiful scent, wild and woodsy, a natural woman; but could you love someone for just how they smelled? He snorted to clear his nostrils like dog who wants to change the subject.

Jana stirred as he yawned and stretched. She sleepily sighed and kicked him. Jana wasn't a morning-person despite all her natural ways.

"Rowley?" came her sleepy murmur, making his name an animal sound.

"Expecting something furry?"

Her fuzzy mind conceded the point, though once she had woken in horror to find herself cuddling Russel... he'd had a bad dream and had joined his father. She hadn't actually done anything that might be construed as MOLESTING, but fortunately Russel had been asleep.

At least she hoped he'd been.

Rowley relaxed, closing his eyes and casting his fingers onto the night table for a pack of Camels with waterproof matches -- made by exploited Australian Bushmen -- stuffed in the cellophane wrapper. Jana rolled onto her back, half awake now and wishing she wasn't. She studied Rowley's body-language; the native was restless this morning. He lounged against the headboard and fired a cigarette. Smoking in bed was a no-no, rule number 666; and this might be a beastly morning, she thought, last mornings often were lately. She wondered where he was in his mind. Or maybe where he wished he was.

Well, she thought, maybe if she could button her lip about whales, seals, and toxic waste -- and especially the research boat -- their last hours together still might be saved.

Rowley flipped the match into the bathroom, scoring a dunk on the toilet, and sucked smoke deep as if it were Lamb's Breath. Had anyone actually smelled a lamb's breath? Rowley was probably rasta in the spiritual sense of the word, but he never smoked ganja because, he said, the sharp edges were always there whether or not you could see them. Again Jana sighed. She knew the signs like Unimak weather, dark clouds gathering on the horizon, the flicker of lightning, the warning of thunder. It was probably her fault, but she found herself growing illogically angry. There were things to be done in the world -- dammed important things -- and somehow she knew that he'd help her if she just found the right magic words.

She peered at the big brass alarm clock, like a cartoon with bells on top, while ignoring the cigarette sacrilege, and tried to banish his second-hand smoke by force of will or telekinesis. "It's early," she murmured. A natural fact.

Rowley's voice was a natural growl. "Had a dream," he began, then decided not to display that picture because she would probably interpret it for him... and maybe she'd be right. Instead, he said, "Thought the generator overheated. Figured if I shut it down, Justin would want to take a piss an' couldn't find his dick in the dark. Then he'd fax a report to Seattle."

Jana smiled at that picture... the dick in the dark, anyway. "He must write a lot of reports."

"Between wastin' paper an' bustin' wharf pilings, he keeps a whole gang of lumberjacks busy cuttin' down spotted owl habitat."

Jana looked shocked -- which was Rowley's intent -- before telling herself it was only a joke. He blew gray smoke which seemed to condense instead of dispersing as it drifted toward the rain-licked window. It formed a spirit-face for a second and stuck out its tongue at her. She watched the image fade away and wondered if anthropologists had ever studied comparative cultural senses of humor. When she had been a little girl they'd had a shaman on Unimak Island, who lived -- strange to say -- in the rusty hulk of a Liberty Ship on the rocky northeastern shore. He'd taught the children about The Old Ways, until the new magic of television invaded by satellite, and ancestral ghosts had proved no match for Freddie Kruger and Jason Voorhees. Still, she had learned the basics; spirits were everywhere all the time, and you didn't invade their spaces. A few were helpful and might even become your companions, but it was usually safer to focus your eyes on material matters and make believe you didn't see them.

Rowley reached out and stroked back her hair. She moved against him, almost grateful, and lay her head on his chest, her cheek to one of his nipples... Russel had been asleep when she'd done that to him. Sure he'd been, she decided. She smiled and felt safe, lulled by the warmth of Rowley's skin and the soothing patter of rain on the roof. His scent was unequivocally male, with a hint of engine oil. She was just beginning to think about love when he said:

"So, what kind of endangered species y'all gonna cuddle in bed when I'm gone?"

Jana frowned. "That's not a very nice picture."

Rowley chuckled. "I used to think that's what 'animism' meant."

She felt annoyed but resolved not to show it. "I'm not an eco-Nazi."

"Mmm," he murmured. "A planet-raper is anybody who wants to build a cabin in the woods. An environmentalist is somebody who already has one."

"But I don't believe that all technology is evil."

"Yeah," he said. "What if whale oil lamps came back in style."

She smiled in spite of this blasphemy. Her hand moved over his body, drifting down under the blankets. "There's still time."

"Woah," he muttered. "I will not be your sperm whale."

She jerked her hand away. "What?"

"Don't think about whales and sex at the same time."

"I wasn't thinking of whales," she protested.

He chuckled again. "Must be hard livin' up to that name."

"The name has nothing to do with their reproductive organs."

"Sure it does. Penis envy was Ahab's problem. Moby had a bigger dick."

"Gross!"

Rowley smiled. Jana had gotten her degree in Marine Biology with a Cultural Anthropology minor at UCLA, and along with some other souvenirs she'd returned to the North with a headful of Valley Girl expressions. His smile widened: this might not be a bad day after all. And she was right, there was time.

Wind gusted outside through glistening pines, and rain beat the window again. "I wish you'd stop smoking," she said.

His shaft had been stirring, but she had harpooned Moby's mood.

You're Russel's role-model," she added, and was instantly horrified at herself.

The alarm clock rang, end of Round One and saved by the bell. Rowley shut it off, and he and Jana looked at its face in something like relief. Six o'clock. The first train left Portage at nine.

Rowley pouted a perfect smoke ring. "Hear anymore about the rail strike when you were in town yesterday?"

Jana sat up. "It's all about greed."

"What in the world ain't, my sweet?"

"You," she countered.

He only shrugged. "Maybe you just don't know me very well." Rising naked from the bed, he padded to the bathroom on feet as adolescently large as his hands. Jana watched through the doorway as he splashed water on his face and over the floor before brushing his teeth.

"The lesser races will inherit the earth," he biblically frothed. "What's left of it by then."

Jana ignored that and thought about teeth... maybe her ancestry had made her extra perceptive about such things? Teeth were a survival item in most primitive cultures, and Rowley's teeth were strong and white despite those goddamn cigarettes. A little too large for his face, they were fearsome when he bared them in anger and startling when he grinned, which wasn't a lot these days. She watched him wipe the steamy mirror... probably wouldn't show his reflection. She never tired of watching him; maybe she didn't know him very well? He was like some wild thing you had rescued, brought into your home and allowed to run free, but which always kept you wondering if it would bond to its new environment or bite off your hand and run away at the earliest opportunity.

Then there was Russel... sort of a cross between Eddie Munster and Pugsly Addams combining the worst of each.

Rain blurred the window, dimming the room to shades of gray and sucking the life from the animal paintings adorning all the walls. She remembered her first close encounter with them: they'd been sitting on the railroad wharf over in Whittley two years before. It had been a rainy morning like this, windy wild and wetly fresh, and she had driven a friend in her truck to catch the Cordova ferry. What about them had first caught her eye? That they didn't look like tourists? Or fishermen. Or, for that matter, like anyone else she had ever seen, including down in L.A. -- and that was saying a lot for sure! A few black people lived in Anchorage, so they hadn't stood out because of their color, though they both wore dreadlocks, a hairstyle she'd only seen Outside. They might have been up for the summer to work in some seasonal fish-packing job; the kind of people who slaved all day, partied all night, and dragged south again at first nip of winter. But, something had attracted her: fate perhaps? Pheromones maybe... the wind had been blowing in her direction. Or had it been only the incongruity? A Rastafarian father and son who should have been cracking coconuts on some Jamaican shore, but were sitting on an Alaskan wharf with snow-covered mountains at their backs? It had definitely been the artist in her who had first felt the fatal attraction; she had whipped out her sketch pad and tented her parka against the drizzle, hoping to capture them on paper before their banana boat sailed away. She'd been working on their faces before she'd really noticed their eyes -- alarmingly amber and wolfishly slanted -- and she wondered why it was so hard to draw them. She had always been good with eyes, bringing life to her animal paintings with just the right touch of shadow and light. But, animal eyes were never ironic. Irony wasn't a survival item.

Of course she hand been more impressionable then, her mind expanded, so to speak, by the recent discovery of an alternate universe which had always existed South-Of-Sixty but had never quite seemed to be real until she had actually seen it. At first it had been like a magical place where the air was warm even at midnight, clothes were adornment instead of protection, and most of the bugs didn't bite or suck blood. She had only seen colorful shadows before, beamed from space to a satellite dish in a colder, grimmer, grayer world where little girls scraped walrus hides to the sounds of hip-hop on a Walkman, or paused to play Sonicat the trading post when buying a gallon of kerosene to light the family lamps.

The expansion hadn't always been pleasant, but had certainly done her a world of good; she had always been able to draw fairly well -- doodles when bored like most kids do, decorating her homework assignments and trying the patience of crusty old teachers -- but ART wasn't taught in a one-room school crammed with kids who smelled like fish; and suddenly down in that warm southern land she had found with a shock that she could paint! The discovery was almost traumatic, as if she'd been mute all her life but only because she'd had nothing to say. Pictures had poured from her fingers like magic. It had taken a while to get a grip, to come down from the high of painting all night and missing too many down-to-earth classes, and put her talent in its place before it lost her the scholarship. It was tempting to shift her major -- some of her works were actually selling -- but somehow that didn't seem right. ART was a luxury -- then, anyway -- something you did when the real work was done. And the talent, it seemed, had always been hers; and Oz hadn't given anything to Dorothy that she hadn't already possessed.

There had been other benefits, too, suspected maybe but unforeseen; four years in L.A. had enabled her to return to her roots with a knowledge of her enemy. Four solid years of "who-gives-a-shit, it's not my fault," and "I didn't do it," had revealed that the climate was warmer down there than most of the people who took it for granted. And, like members of other minorities, Jana had wondered deep inside if white was really the ultimate color and rightfully destined to rule. A lifetime of being told that it was -- subliminally or right to her face -- had made it an elusive worm to dig out of her subconscious salmon. She had been prepared for racism; but it had been the Native Americans who had proved to be the least enlightened, most being frauds or wistful-eyed whiners, assimilated into their conqueror's culture but too full of shit to admit it. And sex, she had found, was only the sum of its separate parts no matter the color of Moby's dick.

But, four years later her moose heads were mounted, and she hadn't been trophy-hunting that summer back in her own territory. And yet she had wanted more from Rowley than just his ironic eyes on paper. Her rain-spotted sketch was enough to paint him -- her memory would have sufficed for that -- but somehow she'd wanted him in the flesh. "Only for posing," she'd fibbed to herself while recognizing a big green lie. She had never -- engaged?-- a model before, and had felt absurd about asking. Fortunately, her truck had been sick -- troubled perhaps by an evil spirit -- and he had looked capable in that department with grease already on his hands. A minute to tighten a battery cable wasn't enough to talk about ART -- inviting him over to see her etchings? -- but the subject of supper, home-cooked of course, had been a natural excuse. She remembered that Rowley had made some remark about whale blubber seasoned with Hamburger Helper, which she'd thought as charming as new-puppy mess on a Scotchguarded carpet... then. There had been wine, fruity and white; and his son had consumed it like Kool-Aid, then had tactfully gone out for beer, a two-mile trek down a woodland trial that usually took about an hour. There had seemed no point in pretending then, and they'd undressed each other like kids on the couch. It had been the only time in her life when she'd wanted a polar bear rug.

She had heard the old proverb about opposites attracting, but she and Rowley hadn't begun like a pair of magnets aimed north and south: he smoked cigarettes, was an engineer on a corporate tugboat -- and therefore aided THE ENEMY -- and his only interest in animals was when they were served piping hot on a plate. Yet, she sensed some sort of common denominator somewhere deep inside their souls, and he had accepted what she had offered while artfully dodging the strings attached.

She watched him now in the rainy gray daylight, running long fingers through ropy dreadlocks that often concealed his eyes. She had never asked his age; maybe, as with his old tugboat captain, it was one of those questions you simply didn't, though his son was now fourteen. Under various conditions, Rowley could look about anywhere from eighteen to thirty. Convenience store clerks always asked for I.D., and kids awarded him the fear and respect reserved for older adolescents and never for adults. Los Angeles had been full of boy-men of various orientations and ages, always denying the passage of time, but Rowley was different somehow. It was if he had never bought into America's sick fascination with youth and its childish fear of losing same. Jana had sometimes wondered how many billions of medical dollars had been spent on perfecting Rogaine instead of curing cancer, simply so men could look more like boys. It was said that "man is the only animal who knows he will die," but Rowley was more like some wilder thing who would wander through life unaware of its clock. He seemed indifferent to his body, not concerned by what it might look like as long as it served as a habitat. It was basically boyish and gently defined, long limbs and torso and slenderly-boned, the sort of male shape that ages well but would never have been very muscular. His back was somewhat swayed like a child's in deference to a prominent tummy, cartoonishly round and cherubically chubby. It blatantly overhung his jeans, usually peeping from under his shirt, and gave him the look of an African bush boy. His skintone was sort of a soot-colored shade that somehow looked dirty even when wet, and suggested a shadowy camouflage pattern for forest or jungle at night. Above his narrow and up-tilted eyes were heavy brows that met when he frowned. His nose was wide but practically bridgeless, an impertinent snub like a sassy street urchin's. His lips were full and usually open, revealing a pair of aggressive front teeth. Though almost the diametrical opposite of every Caucasian conception of handsome, Jana had seen a lot of white women giving him meaningful smiles.

She thought about polar bear rugs again.

Rowley returned from the bathroom clad in faded 501 Levis so ebony stained with engine oil that two cycles through an Anchorage laundry hadn't restored them to blue. He sprawled in an overstuffed chair by the bed and fired another Camel. "Y'all comin' over with us?"

Her musings disturbed, she answered shortly, "Don't I always?"

An eyebrow lifted. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Oh... Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Rowley blew smoke. "Well, if you got the bitchies..."

Jana turned to a sea otter portrait as if it could make a suggestion. "I've got a headache," she fibbed.

"That time of month?"

"No."

Rowley grinned as if knowing she'd fibbed and watched as she rose and dressed. This made her feel absurdly embarrassed; the sort of sensation some people described when their dog was watching them naked. She darted a glance to the bedroom doorway, doorless like all the others in the house, but hung with a Navajo blanket which wasn't quite drawn clear across. "I guess Russel is still asleep?" she asked in a tone a little too casual.

If Rowley's grin had been a dog, Jana would have kicked it. "You never know," he said ominously.

That, too, was absurd: she was always telling herself that Russel, though typically oversexed at his age, was probably as indifferent to her body as to her overtures of pax vobiscum. The female forms of his fantasies most likely resembled the Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark poster that hung on his wall. Oh, he peeped whenever he could, but Jana suspected that it was her shape he wanted to see -- even as she spied on his -- as if she would slip and reveal something. What that was she had no clue, but it bothered her just the same.

Rowley lounged in the chair and politely pretended not to be watching. Jana's body was golden-brown like sunlight seen through honey. Her breasts were robust and round, and her figure was full and substantial... voluptuous sometimes came to mind like paintings from an earlier age. Her hair was long and unrestrained, rippling down like ebony silk and almost reaching her ample waist. Her arms were firm with active muscle, and her legs were strong and solidly sculpted from thirty-one years of walking the earth. Her face was a little narrower than the usual rounded Aleut pattern, with a small button nose and expressive lips over teeth which were often displayed in an smile, especially when she was working. Her obsidian eyes were ancestrally shaped, somewhere between "almond" and "Oriental" -- though when most people said "Mongolian" it was usually accompanied by "idiot."

She wore old Levis most of the time -- over thermal underwear in winter -- along with faded flannel shirts and heavy lug-soled boots. She also packed a big Bowie knife on a wide leather belt which was sewn with patterns of black and white beads. The steel wasn't for show, as a couple of good-ole-boy tourists on dirt bikes had found out the summer before. They'd given the squaw-lady shit, and she'd flashed her glittering silver fang and threatened to slice out their honkey-ass guts for sled-dog supper if they didn't get their terra-terrors the hell off her land in five minutes or less.

Not that she had any huskies, but the geeks got the word and tucked tail.

Rowley liked watching Jana, naked or not, and supposed that he loved her most of the time. But it was an elusive kind love that seemed to shift shapes with the passing of shadows. Love was a hard thing to figure out and you needed a yardstick to measure it.

On a trash-TV show there had once been a little white boy, about three, adorably dressed in a KKK robe lovingly made by his hateful mother. He'd professed to hate niggers with slavering rage, but he probably also hated carrots, despite the highly unlikely event of one ever wanting to marry his sister.

Rowley could count the loves in his life on the fingers of one hand and still have a spare, and each had been a different feeling. The first was the love for his father, a pure and unquestioning thing. There were times when he hadn't liked the man, but he still would have willingly died for him. The second had been the sort of love which had left him with a son of his own, also pure in its puppy-sex way, but mostly mindless physical lust in the sweaty sheets of his bed at thirteen. ...Except that it had created a life.

The third kind of love was his love for that life, a sort of reversal of roles from the first, the father loving the son.

Rowley could measure the third by the first, though the second was often only the craving for someone beside him at night. A few of those temporary pairings might have been called relationships, though Russel was always wary of them. Even at an early age he was too mature to be jealous, always wise beyond his years in knowing that Rowley had certain needs he naturally couldn't fulfill. But he soon became a companion, as if realizing that life was a battle and you guarded the backs of those you loved with all the strength you had. A weaker boy would have been a slave -- if a weaker man had needed one -- a sad and servile shell of a child, terrified of being abandoned, seeing it happen all around, and willing to suffer any abuse for the slightest sense of security. But Rowley only needed a friend, and Russel seemed to instinctively know it, offering Rowley his strength and comfort, sometimes simply by being there in those small and lonely suicide hours of vivid regrets and dimming dreams, yet never afraid to demand what was his; the right to be loved in return. When Rowley was seventeen Russel was five, but only in the physical sense, and at times he became like a brotherly equal, which often seemed like the best of both worlds, a father and son without any secrets and few ordeals they hadn't shared. More than that they trusted each other, and trust often translates to faith. Russel naturally didn't need sex, and until about ten had a normal and healthy dislike of girls. He read a lot and watched TV, which made him sort of an armchair explorer observing the birds and bees. He may not have understood the desires, or why his father would bring a girl home, but forgave him in faith by accepting the ancient parental cliché of "someday, son, you'll understand." If Rowley had actually been his big brother, the same explanation would of sufficed for spending a lot of time in the bathroom.

Russel's faith was justified by the time he reached the age of twelve, though "bathroom" was only a metaphor as a place of self-satisfaction. He still hadn't fathomed the "real thing," content for a time to discover himself, but he now had a yardstick to measure it by -- at least the basic physical feelings -- and knew why Rowley wanted females. It was only when they stayed for awhile that he seemed to become less accepting: he didn't resent these possible prospects -- even the ones who become instant mothers and bought him new clothes and Happy Meals and treated him like a kid -- he just watched them with his wary wolf gaze and eventually found them unworthy. Rowley could see when the verdict was reached, although the accused never could, and that often made for a huge howling mess. This thing with Jana had lasted two years, the longest by far, but Russel still seemed to be watching.

Or maybe, thought Rowley as Jana dressed, he was. And he may have learned it from Russel. Lately he'd begun to suspect that Jana was still growing inside as all good people should, although they usually didn't, while he had reached his natural limits. There were times when he felt like a dog being talked to, trying so hard to understand but simply lacking capacity.

At first he'd thought she would outgrow her righteous rage over planet-rape, as if it was some sort of simple infection she might have picked up on her L.A. safari and which would eventually go away. But it only seemed to get worse. It wasn't recent news to him that the earth in general seemed to be sinking; everything he remembered from birth had been rotten, rusty, or falling apart. It could all be blamed on the whitefolks, of course, the superior species, the crowns of creation, who regarded all others as failed experiments in nature's natural research lab. But what did nature define as success, a race that destroyed its own habitat and killed any life-form it didn't like or couldn't exploit for profit? If so, then kindness, compassion and empathy were not superior human traits or even basic survival skills. Was it better to be a racist rat than a loving and lovable dodo bird?

He crushed out his Camel in a tunafish can, a dolphin-safe brand, of course -- the official ashtray, a ceramic sea otter, only existed for decoration -- then headed for the kitchen while Jana laced her boots. He paused to push a blanket aside and peep into Russel's room. Old cigarette smoke flavored the air, along with the feral scent of young male. One oversize foot, a wide little nose and a tangled nest of bushy dreadlocks were all that showed from under a quilt. "Russy?"

"...Yeah."

The kitchen was a tiny room, added like the bath and bedrooms to what had once been a trapper's cabin back when fur was fashionable instead of a target for terrorists who threw fake blood on expensive coats and thought they were saving something. Rain rattled hard on the rusty tin roof, and the place was a perfect movie-set for a woodland cabin's kitchen -- meaning it didn't look much different from a similar space in a ghetto apartment. An ancient fridge stood in a corner, straight from the old Honeymooners show, with its motor and cooling coils on top. Rough pine shelving lined the walls, loaded with cans, bottles and jars... enough for six months of being snowed-in. There was a sink with a leaky pump, and an elderly Volcano range designed for wood or diesel fuel. Jana cooked with wood, of course; though Rowley had more than once pointed out that the oil burned cleaner and contributed less to the Greenhouse Effect. But wood was free and "uncorrupted," while petroleum was demon piss.

Rowley opened one of the oil valves and struck a match to a burner. A green enamel coffee pot sat in the old yellowed sink, and he worked the pump to fill it, while deftly dodging leaky spurts. Jana made Eskimo coffee, the kind you could chew on for hours afterward. He snagged a jar of Folgers -- mountain-grown by Juan Valdez purely for Yankee pleasure -- and spooned a potent wake-up measure into a trio of smiley-face mugs. Then he drifted into the living room while waiting for the water to boil, sitting down on the sagging sofa which faced a massive fireplace. The great stone mouth still gave out heat, though gloomy and gray with last night's ashes.

Like his head, he thought, brushing the dreadlocks out of his eyes: there were times when he felt like most of his life had been spent waking up with a headful of ashes. A month ashore with Jana lately and he couldn't wait to get back on the boat. He glanced around: the room was every redneck's dream of a rustic hunting lodge -- almost -- log walls chinked with mud and cement, massive rafters to support a snow-load, but no musty moose heads or rifles in racks. A huge picture window looked out on a valley where waves of wind tousled the trees. The window was incongruously modern, thermal glass and aluminum-framed, but Jana had wanted a view of her world through something more lucid than oiled buckskin. Her easel, also a high-tech item, and adorned with her most recent project -- yet another baby seal -- stood skeleton-like against the rain and the glistening mountain forest beyond, while shadows from the streaming glass threw rippling patterns around the room. Her books were everywhere else in the place, filling shelves, stacked in corners, and piled upon a pine plank floor that seemed to remember its polar bear rug. There was also a big-screen Sony TV, a Pioneer stereo and sizable speakers, surrounded by a low-tech clutter of rustic northland junk -- kerosene lanterns, wooden-snowshoes, and a dog sled being restored. Surprisingly, to him at least, the cabin had electricity, but the wires went down with the first heavy snow and stayed that way until spring. He'd installed a Lister generator in its own little shed outside -- music and movies helped a lot to make it through twenty-hour nights -- and Russel's computer and video games kept him cheerfully sane and generally sober when caged for days by nature's fury.

The walls were covered with Jana's paintings, animals mostly, whales and dolphins, beavers and bears, and cuddly little baby seals, along with mountains and seascapes. They hung there awhile in retrospect while she diddled and fussed with finishing touches, and then they were sold at Native shops around the Kenai Peninsula. She had also done a few spirit things -- keeping the details soft and hazy because spirits "don't like their shapes clearly shown" -- but she seldom painted a human being. He'd only seen three since he'd known her, and all were here in this room. One portrayed some wrinkled old coot in feathers and fur, supposedly a shaman, though he looked more like that dirty old man your parents warned you about. Another was of an Aleut boy, husky and heavy but not really fat, standing shirtless in jeans and boots, up to his knees in emerald water and tending a set-net on some sandy shore. But, the sunlight around him seemed too golden, the sparkling water too crystal green, and the sky too blue in the infinite distance, leaving some doubt as to whether the boy was supposed to be real or just a youthful spirit.

Rowley resented the pictures slightly; all in their ways were reminders that his life had been lived on the dark side of things, behind the facades of the huge movie-set that people of privilege called their world. He knew jack about Art and admitted it freely, but her stuff was good. Way too good to be hanging here and seen by only the native elite, or cheaply sold in tourist-traps set by her friends along asphalt trails to snare the passing dollars. She made a comfortable living -- aside from his contributions, of course -- but it made him inexplicably angry to know they were usually bought by people who only thought they were pretty, who couldn't understand they were real, and who only saw the beauty because it was trapped in a frame for them. They bought them to brighten their modern-day dens, like clueless crows on a scavenger hunt who couldn't see any difference between genuine gold and beer bottle caps if both were equally shiny. Her paintings sold fast when she sacrificed them, like New-Age placebos for polar bear rugs.

There were forty-ounce bottles arranged in a row on the heavy homemade coffee table, something a kid would do to keep score, and Russel had done it last night... getting sloppily drunk on the eve of a voyage was a time-honored sailor's tradition. Rowley tossed one into the hearth, knowing that Jana would just dig it out and truck it to town to recycle... polluting the planet with carbon-monoxide to save a bit of silica. He watched the ashes settle, then scanned the pictures again. Since she spent all her money -- and most of his -- on eco-crusading these days, he'd suggested she peddle her paintings Outside where at least she'd get paid a fair price. But then she'd asked, so innocently that she should have been locked in a cage and observed, "wasn't that. like, selling-out?" And what would her people think? No doubt her people wouldn't approve, though probably not for spiritual reasons; earthy commissions from selling her works kept many a native business afloat. She could have used the extra green; her latest crusade was a research boat rusting away down in Seward that some wet college wimp named Jonathan Smith -- Jonathan, not John or Johnny -- had bought with his rich parents' money and was trying to salvage so he and his converts could sail away and save anything that wasn't a part of the human food chain. She'd met St. Francis a few months ago and -- come to think of it now -- that was just about when the fur started flying. Of course, Rowley and Jana had seldom agreed on most of her ecological issues, though at least they had usually set them aside and agreed to disagree in peace, but lately the odds of their survival as a latter-day functional family-unit had begun to seem about the same as the saber-tooth tiger making a comeback.

He sacrificed another bottle and watched the ashes blackly scatter, revealing an angry red ember. An ancient ex-tugboat like Jonathan Smith's newly rechristened Arctic Avenger -- formerly the Rhinoceros, circa 1912 -- was nothing more than a hole in the water lined with rusty iron plates; and fools poured money into such holes. Jonathan's parents must have capped their faucet because he was begging with artful e-mails -- Jana providing the Art, of course -- to anyone on the web who would listen, but the only thing his boat had saved was a ship-breaker's trouble to cut her up.

Rowley watched the ember die. Maybe playing Captain Planet kept Jana from buying a rocket-launcher and stalking moose hunters or something? Everyone ought to have a hobby, and most were therapeutic. Word on the waterfront recently hinted that Jonathan's gang of eco-crusaders was rated on the radical fringe by organizations like Greenpeace, and barred from the clique of elitist tree-huggers who already owned woodland cabins.

Rowley yawned and stretched. A magazine lay beneath the bottles, and big black letters bellowed up, magnified by the glass: DO PEOPLE REALLY SPEND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO SAVE THE SIX-TOED SALAMANDERS? ...PEOPLE REALLY DO!

He slipped it out and glanced through the pages: some profiteering planet-polluter was patting itself on its corporate ass for cleaning up its own waste dumps. Sounded a lot like the Nazi Party building a daycare for Jewish kids. This wasn't Jana's usual read, though its cover displayed a baby harp seal so cute you wanted to take it to bed. But the magazine was nothing more than a company claiming it gave a shit about something besides a big fat profit. Exxon put out a classier rag with lies that were much more convincing. So did Conner Tug & Barge, the company Rowley worked for: every crewman got a copy, and so did Vulcan, the boat herself, lest any of their employees doubt their company really cared. Sometimes the deckhands looked at the pictures, which always included a "secretary," usually very well-endowed, and generally taking her paid vacation bikini-clad on a tropical isle. This 'zine was printed by Grizco, Inc., and not even on recycled paper... Rowley recognized the logo, the snarling head of grizzly bear with a lightning-bolt clenched in its teeth. They had an Alaskan division, a small refinery north of Fairbanks that specialized in machinery oils. Their handful of rusty old railroad tankers made weekly trips by barge to Seattle. One of their shabby supply ships had broken down in Cordova last summer and Vulcan had taken the tow. Rowley had heard of corporations that ran a division supposed to lose money and thereby saving them taxes, and judging by their local equipment this might have been Grizco's scam. Their ship had been a floating junkheap and her chief engineer an obvious drunk... though a lot of engineers were. According to the magazine, another of their foreign divisions made infant formula in Africa and had selflessly donated tons of the stuff to starving Zimbabwean refugees.

Jana came in with two mugs of coffee, silent as cats despite her big boots. He was left-handed, so the smiley-face was wasted on him and simpered at her instead. She sat in a chair instead of beside him, and he wondered if that was a sign.

Over the hearth was a painting she'd done almost two years ago of Rowley and Russel based on her sketch. Russel had grown a lot since then, mostly in unattractive ways, but Rowley hadn't aged a day. She had a strange thought and looked hard at the picture but it hadn't aged, either. Like the old shaman and the boy on the shore, it was one of her works that wasn't for sale.

Rowley followed her gaze. It took no shaman to guess her thoughts; that faraway utopian look of how the world could be, if only... He held up the journal. "Finally figure you really can't beat 'em, so y'all gonna join 'em?"

"What? ...Oh." Jana sipped coffee and shrugged. "It was at the laundry. I like the cover."

"That's stealing, ain't it?"

Jana frowned. "I spend a lot of money there. Washing those oily clothes of yours."

"Surprised you don't do 'em by hand in the creek."

"Don't be absurd."

Rowley glanced at her work on the easel, comparing it to the magazine cover. "Thought you only painted from life?"

"Beauty is where you find it. ...Besides, it's not as if I'm copying."

"So, you didn't really read this?" asked Rowley. "Just brought it right into your home, not knowin' where it might have been?"

Jana made an impatient sound and snatched the magazine out of his hand. Frowning again, she scanned the index then flipped through the pages. "This is a lot of self-serving shit!"

Rowley smiled. "Well, you gotta admit that goin' on record as bein' against the clubbin' to death of cute baby seals was a pretty brave stand to take."

"Didn't you read any of this?"

Rowley shrugged. "Too many scientific terms, like 'environmentally-conscious reconfiguration of indigenous species habitat'."

That, too, was absurd, she knew. Both Rowley and Son were amazingly literate, though it wasn't something they liked to admit. Besides his eclectic taste in books -- Charles Dickens to Donald Goines -- Rowley pored over marine engine manuals. He had a whole trunkful, though most seemed archaic and long obsolete. Russel read comics, Steinbeck, and Lovecraft -- H.P., the writer of horror -- along with steamy sex novels, the dirtiest possible kind.

Jana snorted. "'Clean up their own waste sites!' There's no cleaning up that shit! All this means is they've found somewhere else to dump their filthy poison!"

Rowley made no reply, and Jana scanned through the pages again before looking triumphant. "What about this? I happen to know that all that goddamn infant formula those bastards donated to Zimbabwe had been stored for so long in South African warehouses it wasn't fit for human consumption! The South African government ordered Grizco to destroy it. So what did they do instead? Donated it so someone would haul it away for free! Those refugee children were already so sick from cholera and dysentery they could have died from drinking that shit and nobody will ever know! And those greedy bastards come out looking like saviors! And Grizco supported Apartheid. Jonathan told me."

"Of course he'd know," said Rowley.

"You don't believe him?"

Rowley considered the options, then shrugged. "Does it matter? I heard it all before. The world is doomed unless we revert back to noble vegetarian savages." He lifted an ironic eyebrow. "Your people were farmers, weren't they? Harvested Sno-Cones or something?"

Jana sighed. Mentioning Africa was always risky. She sometimes suspected that Rowley was homesick for what had been stolen a long time ago and didn't exist anymore.

Russel came in with his own mug of coffee, seeming slightly sulky to her, maybe because she'd forgotten to bring it, or maybe because he'd been drinking last night, though that seldom had an affect on him due to a lifetime of practice. She gave him a smile of apology, which covered either situation, and he might have acknowledged by shrugging a shoulder. She glanced again at the baby seal before tossing the magazine into the hearth. Russel watched the ashes settle as if sensing that something important had happened.

He wore only jeans, thuggishy large, indecently low, and stained and streaked with rust and grease like camouflage for a junkyard. Their ragged cuffs concealed his big feet and dragged behind him on the floor. His bushy locks had never been cut, framing his face like a lion's mane and trailing nearly down to his butt. He resembled his father in many ways, sooty skintone looking dirty, triangular-shaped Aboriginal face, a broad but almost bridgeless nose, and an eye of alarming amber that slanted like a wolf's. Yes, an eye, for he had only one. The empty place where the other had been was covered by a black leather patch like an African version of Bazooka Joe. It was probably natural to ask, but Jana never had. She assumed he'd lost it a long time ago because neither he nor Rowley ever talked about it.

But, except for sharing shades of skin, the resemblance ended below the neck. Rowley's shape was long and smooth except for the cartoonish bulge of his belly, while Russel was like a flabby pubescent, a typically modern American boy who'd never lifted anything more than a Triple Bacon Whopper With Cheese, or had used any muscles except in his fingers when changing channels on TV, playing games or surfing the web. He wasn't massively overweight, unless measured by current health-Nazi standards where even a chubby child was "obese," but he looked like a kid created from pudding by slopping it over a framework of bone. His belly was a slab of flab that rippled and quivered with any exertion; his navel was like a funnel-shaped cave that tunneled upward into darkness; and many girls around his age would have envied his bobby breasts.

In fairness, Jana sometimes wondered if her vision of him was too unforgiving; most of her friends seemed to think he was cute, like something the squeaked when you squeezed it. She defended herself by rationalizing that the artist in her wanted balance, and her models for that were Aleut children who tended toward shapes like burly barrels if fed on traditional foods. There were many Aleut kids who were genuinely obese, stuffing down civilized sugar and starch until almost unable walk; but they hoisted themselves aboard ATVs, or snowmobiles in winter, and rode to the nearest trading post for daily galas of garbage-food gorging and orgies of video games. Seeing such children angered Jana in much the same way -- she supposed -- as Rowley would feel about youth of his race smoking crack or shooting up shit. There was little difference in Jana's mind between Native-American men and women lying drunk in tavern doorways or boys and girls who were drowning in fat and sprawled outside convenience stores too stuffed with Twinkies to waddle away.

In spite his sloppiness Russel was strong, almost supernaturally so, but he seemed to possess no pride in his shape, whatever that really was. When they had returned from the boat last month Jana had offered to paint his picture-- the greatest gift that she could bestow -- if he'd lose a little weight. He'd looked at her with that one wolfish eye as if she had asked him to lose it, too. She was sure he hadn't told Rowley, though whether he'd simply dismissed what she'd said as the foolish faux pas of a well-meaning nut, or was saving it to use against her was impossible to guess. He seemed to have taken no offense -- though he could have been plotting revenge -- but he certainly wasn't resentful in general, doing his duties without being asked, dumping the ashes and sharing the chores. Sometimes he volunteered to cook, something he did very well; but, cynically-speaking, that wasn't surprising. He even chopped wood when he didn't have to, shirtless whenever the weather permitted, but seeming to know that she watched him in secret, showing his strength with powerful strokes while somehow keeping something concealed. She sometimes wondered if Lizzie Borden had looked like that when wielding an axe... maybe a little too thoughtful.

He came over now with a hand on his belly to keep it subdued -- bridges had been known to collapse when marching soldiers built up a rhythm -- and though he weighed less than it looked, the floorboards creaked underfoot. He plopped beside Rowley and made the couch creak like a kid defiantly blasting a burp, then shaped himself to Rowley's side.

"Ready to go?" Rowley asked.

Russel gulped coffee, heavily sugared and goldenly creamed, and glanced at the wood-cased clock on the mantle. "I'm already packed. Done it last night. We don't wanna miss the first train." Russel waited for Rowley to rise, then followed him out of the room. His dusky behind above sagging jeans seemed to moon Jana a half-assed farewell. She wondered if he'd done it on purpose, but she'd made a lot of mistakes about him and probably shouldn't make many more.

She took the mugs into the kitchen, then got her old parka from its hook by the door. It had been her grandmother's, sewn of sealskin and trimmed in fox fur, its hem and cuffs brightly beaded. A few tourists gave her disgusted looks for wearing it in Anchorage... white people dissing her for wearing what she had every right to! Was she supposed to burn it now because they had changed their rules? Far from appeasing the spirits of those dutifully-honored animals, such an act of wanton waste would bring them back to haunt her.

Rowley and Russel returned, each with a seabag over a shoulder. Both were clad in big battered Nikes and faded hoodie sweatshirts. Rowley wore a brown leather jacket, and Russel a similar model, too tight to button over his belly, which hung out from underneath his shirt like a typical cartoon fat kid's. They carried their bags outside to the Jeep. Jana started to follow, but stopped to recover the magazine, shaking off the ashes. Jonathan might want to see it: he hated Grizco with slavering fury, though his rage included Standard Oil, Exxon, Shell, DuPont and Dow as well as the whole Industrial Complex. Even Jana had to admit that he stood as much chance of thwarting their schemes as the first mammalian mouse would have had of stopping a charging T-Rex. You had to sight on smaller targets, causes that were closer to home, sort of like being a locavore, if you hoped to accomplish anything real; and while Grizco was definitely close to home and was no doubt polluting as hard as it could, its Alaska division was inland-based and didn't seem like appropriate game for a "seagoing bunch of seal-savers." To use Rowley's words. She left the cabin's door unlocked, an old Alaskan tradition.

Rowley's Jeep, a 1964 CJ-6 he had somehow charmed up the Alcan Highway, squatted in the muddy clearing next to an almost equally battered 1958 Dodge panel truck which had once been an Army ambulance. The truck's rear bumper and doors were plastered with ecology stickers, but the Jeep wore nothing but faded green paint. Its body and fenders were dented and bashed, and it bore about as much resemblance to its tinny modern counterparts as Rowley's body did to Russel's. Its seating was user-unfriendly, its controls were not ergomatic. It had butt-busting springs and a sheet-metal top that might have been made in a Russian foundry and rattled and sweated and leaked. Russel squirmed behind the wheel... American boys had been a lot thinner back in the days of Willys Jeep. He didn't have a license yet, but had shared the driving with Rowley at twelve on their exodus from Oakland, and often went on junkfood runs down to the Crow Creek general store. Rowley offered Jana shotgun, but she took the traditional squaw seat in back, probably so she could watch them.

Rowley went around the side of the house where the stove-oil tank, an Army-surplus engine container, was perched on a framework of logs. He unscrewed a cap and dipped in a stick, then returned and got in the Jeep. "Only about a quarter full."

"That's all right," said Jana. "I won't use it while you're gone. The tanker truck tears up the road."

Rowley might have rolled his eyes. Russel definitely did. "Yeah," said Rowley with dryness. "But we won't be back till late next month, an' there might be an early snow. Then the truck can't get up here. If you don't fill it now, we'll have to haul oil in five-gallon cans like we did last winter."

Jana sighed. "I'll call."

Raindrops dummed on the rattling roof and drowned the hiss of the vacuum wipers as Russel drove along deep ruts, now running mud, which snaked and switch-backed down through the trees to a narrow gravel road. Once there had been a sign on a tree at the entrance to Jana's trail -- Hikers Welcome -- but all it had ever seemed to invite were snarling dirt-bikes during the summer and screaming snowmobiles in winter, so she'd finally taken it down and nailed up a KEEP OUT warning. This was usually interpreted as a challenge and seemed to attract the dumping of trash the way a dog pisses on what it can't eat.

Jana scowled at the latest insult, a set of wornout SUV tires. She always felt impotent rage whenever this occurred, as if some smart-ass, snot-nose kid had jeered at her and run away. "Rowley?"

His voice was patient. "No," he said as Russel footed the brake. "They won't all fit in here, an' if you can't take 'em all there's no point in taking any. Come back with the truck this afternoon."

Jana knew he was right, but it seemed to be a law of the universe that garbage always attracted more garbage, and there would probably be something else, a bag or two of tourist trash -- neatly tied as if that mattered -- atop those tires when she returned. She glared at them as Russel drove past. "Tires take hundreds of years to biologically degrade. There's already so many of them that a stack would reach to the moon!"

Russel asked, "So, how come they don't melt 'em down an' make new tires from the rubber? Like they recycle beer cans an' bottles."

Maybe he was humoring her, but Jana labored under the curse of believing that someone who asked a question actually wanted an answer. "Tires aren’t made of natural rubber. It's a chemical mixture, vulcanized with sulphur. The process bonds the molecules into new chains, new substances that can't be separated back into their basic elements. It's like toxic waste; they've created something the earth can't deal with."

"Oh," said Russel, maybe acting, maybe not.

Only Rowley could tell the difference. "It's like eggs," he said. "Once you hard-boil 'em they stay that way."

Russel nodded. "I get it."

Jana was forced to agree: Rowley could explain the most complicated things in ways a child could understand.

The road emerged at Crow Creek Junction where there was a little log-sided store, its old Alaskan quaintness defaced by glittering digital gas pumps and garish posters for movies and games. Russel stopped to provision himself with artificially preserved snacks.

"I could have made you a decent breakfast. ...With eggs," said Jana when he returned, his pockets packed with sugary shit and his mouth around a meatfood muffin.

He shrugged. "These are good."

Rowley smiled at Jana. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Russel put the Jeep in gear and they continued on. The back seat was solidly bottomed with steel and seemingly meant for the short-distance transport of small rugged children or big hardy dogs. Jana stayed silent as they rolled through the woods, the rattle and clatter of loose body parts and the keening howl of the transfer-case mocking attempts at conversation. The Jeep bucked and pitched over frost-heaves which humped the narrow ribbon of road as it wound through the forest past Girdwood to meet Highway One at Turnagain Bay. The wind had died down but the rain was still steady, and pockets of mist lurked in ambush, ghosting around the curves. Russel drove with casual caution, even one-handed and feeding his face. It wasn't his fault when they hit the fox.

Jana's scream was empathic. For an instant she felt the animal's terror. Russel skidded the Jeep to a stop, and Jana shoved Rowley aside in her frantic haste to get out. The fox lay flopping and yelping in a pool of blood on the pavement. Jana gritted her teeth to ward off the stabbing shocks of its pain while she tried to assess the injuries. It was obvious that its back was broken and there was no hope of saving it. Rowley got out and opened the tool box under his seat. Wordlessly, he took out a tire iron, stepped past Jana, who crouched in anguish, and crushed the suffering animal's skull. For a second she tried to hate him for that. Then she tried to hate his son but failed at both attempts. The animal's body quivered slightly before going limp and still. Jana crouched for another moment, fighting tears she knew were absurd. Then she gathered the fox in her arms and carried it into the weeping woods. She lay it down on the carpet of pine needles, knowing its vermin would sense its death and abandon the corpse for her own living warmth. Not all things were signs, she knew, some things, like shit, just happened. But she wished this hadn't happened today.

They were still in the rain when she returned, their dreadlocks lank and dripping, their dusky faces unreadable, but seemingly watching for her reaction as if she were something wild herself that might bare its teeth and attack. "Shit happens," she said, getting back in the Jeep.

Again they rolled on through the rain and mist. Russel drove no differently, the wiper blade flicking in front of his face. He knew it hadn't been his fault and didn't need Jana to say it. He pulled a Snickers bar out of his pocket and tore the wrapper with his teeth. A little African wanga doll made of colored telephone wire, swung and banged against the glass from the rearview mirror bracket. All cherished things were protected by charms. Unfortunately the Alaskan fox had crossed paths with an African godlet.

Reaching the highway, Russel stopped to trade places with Rowley in token deference to the law. Rowley turned left and coaxed the Jeep to a grudging max of 55. The V-6 engine cleared its throat, blew the carbon from its valves, and settled into a stuttering snarl. Raindrops hammered the windshield, and the strident whine of old mud tries competed with the keening wind around the boxy body. Jana didn't mind the noise, in fact it seemed like a natural penance, as if humans should suffer a little for the privilege of going this fast. She prayed for the spirit of one foolish fox.

Rowley's attention stayed on the road because the vehicle tended to wander... needed a bell-crank bushing or something. Russel munched a Milky Way and seemed to be staring straight ahead as if watching the raindrops explode on the glass, though Jana could see his eye in the mirror turn to his father from time to time as if he wanted to say something but wasn't sure how Jana would take it. She wanted to tell him the fox was at peace, that she'd already put it out of her mind, and that in another place and time, not long ago nor far away, she probably would have skinned the carcass and put its fur to practical use. Instead she gazed out the small side window, keeping back because it leaked, at the rain-dimpled waters of Turnagain Arm stretching away on the right. The surrounding flats of grayish-black mud were thickly grown with scruffy marsh grass. Clumps of stunted or skeletal trees broke the horizon here and there, and a few old cabins loomed out of the ooze, sunken down to their window sills like low-rent dwellings for desperate dwarves. The earthquake of 1964 had caused the land to subside: tidal bores often covered it now, up to the eves of the foundering cabins, and anyone with any sense avoided the place as if it was cursed; though at least one tourist was drowned every summer when caught by the sudden inrush of water while out there searching for souvenirs. Warning signs were posted, but people loved to warn themselves and then ignore the warnings.

The Jeep howled over a concrete bridge, then Rowley cut left and down an embankment, crunching across a graveled space beside a line of railroad tracks. The shuttle train hadn't arrived yet, and Jana caught herself almost hoping the strike had begun and no train would come. The only way into Whittley by land was through the railroad tunnels, unless you hiked the Portage Glacier. But, who was she kidding? If the train didn't come then their corporate masters would fly them in on a float plane.

And, why did she want them to stay anyhow?

She pictured the cabin upon her return, silent and possibly somehow defiled; the earthy scent of Rowley's body haunting the spiritual sheets of her bed, the feral stink of Russel's room -- cigarette smoke and dirty socks, stale beer and bitter boy-sweat -- where likely the stains from a whack-off session remained to be washed from his blankets. And give her some motherly credit, she knew goddamn well not to tidy his things. Of course she'd go through them -- and he knew that she would -- but what evil charm would he bother to hide?

And why was she always looking, as if hoping to find a diary of what he really felt about her? Or maybe, she thought, he felt nothing at all? Rowley's old captain was Scottish, and Rowley had once recited a saying: "If ye kenned how seldom folk thought of ye, ye wouldn't worry they did."

The house would reek of tobacco. It would take her a week to catch up... She frowned: catch up with what? Rowley had fixed everything that was broken except for the pump in the kitchen, its gasket on order from Mexico. And Russel had thoughtfully chopped enough wood to last until they returned. Maybe that had been his revenge for suggesting he might lose some weight? Absurd but somehow appropriate.

A handful of Nordic-type tourists were clustered under the tin-roofed shack beside the railroad tracks. All were male and warmly clad in polyester furs and skins, self-sufficient unto themselves with well-stocked packs and Primus stoves, waterproof matches, satellite-trackers, survival foods and thermal tents. Only two other vehicles sat at the ramp awaiting the early train, a pair of motorhomes nose to tail as if one was sniffing the other's butt. The sniffer was shiny and new, while the sniffee was older and looked experienced, bearing Iowa license plates and a bumper sticker that boasted: "We're Spending Our Children's Inheritance."

If you only knew, thought Jana.

Rowley coasted up behind the sniffer and shut off muttering engine. Silence settled except for the rain, pattering softly on the roof, and the ticking and clicks of cooling metal. Rowley and Russel kicked comfortably back and fired a brace of cigarettes. Russel slipped a hand up under his shirt as if his breasts were someone else's. He often touched himself like that, and without any shame or self-consciousness. Jana recalled a famous playwright who, asked if he had enjoyed himself at someone's pretentious party, had said, "I had to. There was nothing else to enjoy."

Surrounded by second-hand smoke, Jana slid open the small side window. She had never believed it to be as deadly as most health-Nazis ranted, but she wished for a breeze to blow it away, and surprisingly it happened. The air was cool but not really cold, yet both motorhomes were running their engines to keep their occupants warm. No doubt those people would tell their friends about all the ordeals they'd had to endure while braving the wilds of Alaska.

A middle-aged man with a middle-aged spread, stepped out of the older motorhome. He zipped his Lands-End Polar Parka, turned to study the battered Jeep, noted the muddy Alaska plate, then ambled up to Rowley's window. Russel's reflection in the windshield glass revealed a wary amber eye, but Rowley only smiled: he never seemed to mind such people unless they were either astoundingly stupid or monumentally arrogant. The man was probably from Des Moines... Jana decided that. He studied the African father and son; but that's what travel was all about, rubbing elbows with foreigners.

"I see you're natives," he said. He caught sight of Jana -- who gave him an ironic look -- then flushed a little and cleared his throat.

Jana felt illogical anger... or was it so illogical? To her, this man, and also the rosy-cheeked middle-aged woman tidying up the motorhome after a traditional American breakfast, were the most dangerous people on earth. They were innocent in their arrogance that what they possessed and all their values were the greatest things in the world. They were totally oblivious to all the horrors inflicted on others and the planet just so they could have what they had. For most of her life Jana had searched for the right magic words that would make them see what they were doing, but the empathy shock would probably kill them.

Des Moines may have sensed Jana's anger with some vestigial instinct and turned back to Rowley. "You folks ever been to that Whittley place?"

"Now an' again," answered Rowley, sounding ready to spit and swap horses... they could make-believe the horses.

Whatever shape Rowley had assumed, Des Moines warmed to it instantly. Russel was smirking, obviously seeing what Jana had missed.

"This is our first trip up here, the wife an' me," Des Moines went on. "Kids all grown..."

"So, you're spending their inheritance?"

Des Moines chuckled. "That sticker gets a lot of laughs. We been wantin' to make this trip for years. Paid thirty grand for the ol' winny-bago." He glanced at the gleaming new motorhome sniffing the butt of his own. "'Course, that's only a drop in the bucket compared to a doozy like that one! Know what that is? She's a god-damn Bluebird! Base model starts at near eighty grand!"

"But, does it bring happiness?" Jana asked, joining the game in spite of herself. A sense of humor was healthy.

Des Moines looked nonplused for a moment, but then burst into chuckles again. "Oh! Bluebird! Happiness! That's a good one! Got to tell the wife!" He thrust his gray head through the window. "Well, little lady, I bet we could buy us a whole lot of happiness with that kind of money!"

Rowley glanced at the big gaudy box behind the older machine. It looked like a school bus customized by a redneck truck driver on crack, even boasting chrome-plated horns.

Des Moines followed Rowley's gaze. "Couple young guys inside. On a fishin' trip would be my guess, but sure ain't the friendliest folks. Kinda remind me of big-city people... keep to themselves an' won't shoot the breeze." He lowered his voice. "The wife thought they might be tootie-fruities, but I doubt if there's any of them way up here. No interiors to decorate!" He chuckled again and smiked man-to-man. "I could tell you some tales about San Francisco! Me an' the wife was there last year." Then he seemed to notice Russel's eye patch, and Jana could almost read his thoughts... was the kid playing pirate or was it for real? A polite person probably shouldn't ask. Instead he smiled.

"That your boy? Good-lookin' boy. Got a right little prosperous pasta pouch on him. Been feedin' regular, eh, son?"

Russel smiled the smile of a wolf, which is not a smile but a warning.

Des Moines glanced again at the new motorhome. "I was hopin' to get a gander inside... probably real hardwood... but them guys wouldn't even open the door."

"Maybe they are tootie-fruities," said Russel.

Des Moines seemed slightly disgusted by whatever picture that put in his mind, and changed the subject by looking around. "Mighty pretty country you folks got up here. Be nice if the sun came out now an' then, an' you oughta spend some of them oil-well billions on buildin' better roads..."

Russel offered, "There's a McDonalds in Anchorage."

Des Moines beamed. "That's the first stop we made this side of the Yukon. We got this directory of all the McDonalds, even goin' through Canada. An' everything tastes just the same! That's what me an' the wife like about 'em... no nasty surprises when we're travelin'. A Big Mac's a Big Mac wherever you go!"

Jana sighed but couldn't hate him. Hate only weaked the hater; and it wasn't his fault he'd been taught ignorance and to see the world through one privileged eye that denied him a true perspective. She gave him a forgiving smile. "Wherever you go, there you are."

The shuttle train to Whittley was far from being picturesque, and tourist faces usually fell when it came farting around the mountain. Jana sometimes wondered what they expected; some big black brute of a steaming thing straight from a time when the picture of American prosperity was phallic smokestacks perpetually pumping poison into the skies?

The reality was a dingy little diesel, a rusty, square-nosed switch engine whose stubby stack did spout lots of smoke, although it wasn't supposed to. Its blue and yellow colors were faded, but looked presentable shining with rain. A few more campers and vehicles had arrived to queue at the loading ramp behind Rowley's Jeep and the two motorhomes, and many Caucasians with Japanese cameras stood by the tracks as the train rumbled in. There were glances exchanged as if they were wondering when the real train would come, but what the hell, the rust-streaked logo on the locomotive's flank did say Alaska Railroad. Lenses were focused and shutters snapped just as the engineer leaned from the cab and spouted a long yellow stream of tobacco. Jerry Cruncher often bragged that he'd spit on every tie from Anchorage to Whittley and back. Twice.

Behind the locomotive was a baggage and passenger coach, reminiscent of the 1930s with a rounded hip roof and rows of big rivets. There was a platform at each end, where lovers parted in black-and-white films or Gestapo troopers goose-stepped across to demand identity papers. Following that was a short line of rattly wooden-decked flatcars, some with rusty canopy roofs, and joined above their couplings by clanking iron plates. Light bulbs dangled yellow and dim along their pipe-framed side rails, not for festive appearance but for safety in the tunnels.

The locomotive didn't whistle; it honked a highly-offensive blatt that made you want to wash out its hooter. It blatted now, twice, then added a bonus as Jerry caught sight of the Jeep. Rowley raised a palm out the window, and Jerry made a similar gesture -- a primitive human greeting, "see I don't have a rock," -- with a thickly leather-gloved hand. The nasty little engine that could clattered past the loading ramp, air spitting out from between its wheels, and the screech of clamping brake shoes causing dogs to howl and people to wince. The passenger car rolled by, white tourist faces at most of the windows, and finally the line of creaking flats slowed to a squealing stop.

Russel snickered. "Jerry's horn sound just like a whoopy cushion."

"Jerry is a whoopy cushion," said Jana.

A grizzled brakeman in greasy brown coveralls stepped down from the passenger car and shambled back to the loading ramp to wave the vehicles aboard. The big Bluebird was already inching impatiently around Des Moines' Winniebago. The narrow door to the locomotive's cab burst open with a bang, and Jerry came out on the catwalk. He bellowed something to the brakeman before jumping to the ground and walking back along the train. The brakeman stepped in front of the Bluebird and pointed to the left. The motorhome seemed to hesitate as if its driver wanted to argue, but grudgingly pulled to the side.

Jerry, grinning, came to the Jeep, his engineer boots crunching gravel. He was about twenty-five, a NATIVE by virtue of birth, although Sweet Home, Alabama was stamped on his hawk-nosed features. He was the kind of All-American good-ol'-boy usually seen driving four-buh-four pickups with gun racks and Confederate flags. No doubt his father, an oil-rig roughneck, had tried to teach him all of the proper prejudices, but Alaska's minorities were Eskies and 'Lutes, and even they could be equals when there were Outsiders around.

He was jawing a wad of Red Man, and wearing bib-overalls, flannel shirt, and a Caterpillar cap on oily brown hair not surprisingly cut in a mullet. He drove his train with a battered boom-box yowling out old Lynyrd Skynyrd songs, took his two fat sons fishing every weekend, and maintained that a man oughtn't to argue with his wife, just dicker.

Arriving at the Jeep, he draped an arm over the outside mirror and spit tobacco juice at a beer can, knocking it a good six feet. "Howdy, boy," he greeted Rowley. A nod to Russel. "Boy." And a wink for Jana. "This boy been givin' you any?"

Jana sighed. "Hi, Jerry."

Jerry jerked a thumb toward the ramp, where the brakeman had shooed the big Bluebird and Des Moines' Winniebago aside. "Get your ass up there, boy. First on is first off. Got me a problem with ol' ninety-seven. Boys in the shop gettin' lazy with all this talk about strikin'. 'Preciate you havin' a look. Tourists go ape-shit if she craps-out in the tunnels."

Jana frowned. "Can't the railroad fix its own trains? Maybe you should strike for better mechanics instead of more money!"

Jerry just grinned like he'd heard a funny noise. "Yeah, well, takes a goddamn act of congress to get them shop boys off their asses anymore. Like it takes to get my wife in the kitchen." He turned back to Rowley. "Tole the boys she wasn't feelin' too frisky this mornin'."

"Your wife?" asked Jana.

Jerry chuckled. "Sound like somebody didn't get none last night." Again he faced Rowley. "Roll on up there, boy, so we can get this donkey show loaded. Then come an' have a look." He smiled across at Russel. "You can ride up front if you want."

"Cool."

Jana watched Russel get out. Jerry let him drive the locomotive, but his favorite place was standing on the platform in front, above the blade of the snowplow and below the blue-white beam of the headlamp as the engine thundered through the tunnels. Jana had seen him, gripping the rail, leaning into the onrushing air like a spooky little figurehead on an ancient ship.

Rowley drove up the ramp and onto a flatcar while Jerry and Russel walked to the idling locomotive. Jana saw Jerry pause as someone in the Bluebird demanded an explanation for not being let on first. Jerry spat tobacco and gave the driver the standard Northlander reply, "Don't give a goddamn how they do it Outside, this is Alaska!"

The iron plates clanked as the Jeep rolled up the line to stop at the front of the first flatcar behind the passenger coach. Rowley cut the engine and pulled the parking brake. Jana climbed into the shotgun seat. "You're coming back, aren't you?" she asked as Rowley got out.

Absurd as it was, she hated the eerie experience of sitting in a vehicle that was moving through the tunnel darkness seemingly all on its own. A lot of tourists turned on their headlights, not reassured by the few feeble bulbs strung along the flatcar rails. It was an out-of-control, helpless kind of feeling like something in a bad dream. Freud would have called it symbolism -- the tunnel, the train, and all that stuff -- but it bothered Jana just the same. As did the picture of Russel standing up there at the head of it all.

"You could ride with us," said Rowley.

"And listen to the Lynyrd and Jerry show for half an hour? I'll pass, thanks."

"I'll come back," said Rowley.

Behind Jana came the clanking of iron as the other campers and motorhomes boarded and crawled up the line of flatcars. The Bluebird had cut in front of others like a bully in a movie queue and filled the Jeep's rearview mirror. When it stopped all Jana could see was the chrome-plated name on its grille. She heard a voice question the brakeman, asking if the vehicle should be put in park.

The brakeman's reply: "You're parked ain't ya, slick?"

A seagull cried, circling above and scanning for fresh tourist trash. A breeze sighed along the train, smelling like rotten eggs from the mud flats. The lingering scent of cigarette smoke seemed more reassuring than annoying now, like a she-wolf scenting her mate... and cub.

Rowley and Russel followed Jerry, climbing to the locomotive's catwalk and entering the gray-painted cab. The interior was warm and smelling of diesel, all levers, handles, guages and switches. Everything vibrated to the slow iron pulse of the idling engine. Russel went to the chain of the air horn dangling above the engineer's seat. Jerry gave him a wink. "Knock yourself out, boy."

Russel yanked the chain, and the breaking-wind blatt sent the Nordic hikers scrambling for the passenger coach with tickets waving in frantic hands. Jerry chuckled, giving the brakeman a thumbs-up. "Once in the mornin' does it, boy. You'll be findin' that out pretty quick."

Rowley opened the narrow little door to the engine compartment, where the huge six-cylinder Alco thumped-over. "So, what is it this time?"

Jerry stepped to the brass throttle lever and gave it a jerk. The engine revved raggedly, and black smoke billowed outside. "Hear that? She's missin'. No power comin' over the hump. I just about decided to back her on home. Called dispatch, but they said to keep goin' as long as she'd move. Shop's already full. Ask me, it's a work slowdown."

Rowley listened to the engine. "You really think there might be a strike? Right in the middle of tourist season?"

Jerry shrugged. "All about money, ain't it? Only kinda language them rich boys understand. Strike in the middle of winter wouldn't scare 'em nearly as much. Besides, I could do with a couple weeks off. An', what about you? Be no barges to lash. Hell, you could stay home in bed."

"We just left home," said Russel.

"So, go fishin', boy. Have yourself some good clean fun before they make it illegal like everything else they can't tax."

"But, I don't like fishin'."

"Get your daddy to take you to town an' chase a little nookie. 'Bout time you got yourself some nookie. Wouldn't wanna be known as no-nookie of the north, would ya?"

Rowley had an ear to the engine. "Bring her back to idle. Got a Crescent wrench? Ten inch?"

Jerry squatted to dig though a tool box under the engineer's seat. "Wish I had me a ten inch!" He handed Rowley the wrench, and Rowley disappeared somewhere in the engine compartment. The strong smell of fuel drifted up. A few minutes later Rowley emerged, wiping his hands on a rag. "Now try it."

Jerry pulled the handle again. This time the engine throttled up smoothly. "All right, boy! What was wrong?"

"Secondary filter was full of white shit. It's a fungus that adapted to live in diesel oil. Have the shop flush the system an' put some poison in the tanks. We used to have that problem on the tug with that real old fuel from the Valdez barge."

Jerry spit out the window. "Goddamn amazing how anythin' can learn to live in fuel oil."

Rowley shrugged. "That's evolution in action."

Back in the Jeep, Jana looked up from the Grizco magazine, relieved as Rowley reappeared and got in the driver's seat. The locomotive blatted, spouted more smoke, and jerked at the row of rusty cars. The clash of couplings rippled down the line, and the little train clattered off.

"Is Russel is riding up front again?" asked Jana.

"He likes it."

"But that wind off the glacier is cold, and his jacket won't zip. I wanted to buy him a new one."

"I guess he likes his old one."

"Because it used to be yours."

Rowley shrugged. "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

Steel wheels clanked over switch points, and the flatcar lurched as the train took a curve and headed up a little valley toward snow-capped mountains and the sapphire facets of Portage Glacier. The rails hugged a swiftly rushing stream that frothed through grassy meadowlands, leaving the drab gray mud flats and slate-colored waters of Turnagain Bay. The ground rose at a steady grade, and the little locomotive labored, pouring smoke over the line of cars. Raindrops spattered the Jeep's windshield, blurring the beauty outside. Rowley's hand rested on the shift lever, and Jana put her own on his lest he leave her again. "Rowley?"

"Mmm?"

"Do... you think I should say something to Russel? ...About his weight?"

Rowley raised an eyebrow. "He's always been chubby."

Jana might have admitted that love was blind, but she wondered how Russel could hide his true shape from his father. She tried to choose her words with care: "But, he's not just chubby. Not anymore. He's..." The latest hate-word came to mind, but she said instead, "...out of shape."

Rowley gave her a thoughtful glance like a wolf to a rabbit who'd said something lame. "What you're really saying is, he don't look like that boy in your picture."

Jana was startled. She had never considered that, but wondered now why she hadn't. "Well... in a way," she began, then suddenly saw a ridiculous picture, of catching Russel in an old-fashioned bear-trap and hauling him to some mad-science lab to suck out his fat and staple his stomach, then bringing him home all balanced to paint the perfect boy.

Rowley frowned. "Y'all wanna paint his picture, then paint him the way he is. ...Paint him bustin' his ass chopping wood 'cause you don't wanna cook with oil."

"Forget it. I'm sorry," said Jana.

Rowley was silent a moment as rain rattled softly on the roof and steel wheels clicked over rail joints. "If you were really sorry, you'd do something about it."

Now it was Jana who frowned. "Like what?"

"Like cut him some slack. ...Dammit, Jana, he wants to like you, but you keep tryin' to change him into... I don't know... something else. He'll never be like that boy in your picture. ...An', who in hell is he, anyhow?"

Jana turned to look out the window. There was a set of siding tracks, rusted and smothered by grass. On them sat lines of old rolling stock, wooden boxcars with obsolete brakes no longer compatible with newer equipment, their McKinley Route logos faded and dim. There was also a row of passenger coaches, their windows all broken by bored tourist kids who hiked the mile up the tracks from Portage while their parents sat warm in motorhomes watching the same TV programs as down in the Lower Forty-eight.

"He was... nobody," said Jana. "A dream I had a long time ago."

Rowley seemed to consider that. "Then, quit trying to make Russel be him. Russy's not a spirit-child, an' he's got dreams of his own."

"I'm sorry," said Jana again, then smiled. "Maybe I'll paint him while you're gone." Her smile faded as she pictured what he must look like now, riding the front of the locomotive with the icy wind whipping his hair. That would make a good picture, but she'd never been able to paint a machine.

The train rattled over a short wooden trestle above the fast-flowing stream. The water glistened like liquid gunmetal beneath the silver-gray sky. The valley was narrowing, the mountains closed in. The tunnels weren't far ahead, though she wasn't sure why that seemed to matter.

Jana took a breath. "Jonathan said they still haven't been able to figure out how to start the engine."

Rowley dug in his jacket for Camels. "You don't start a steam engine by turning a key. There's a sequence of stuff you have to do, an' it's got to be done in the right order. A Mietz & Wiess triple-expansion ain't a little tea-kettle like Bogart had on the African Queen... you don't toss in some wood an' just light a match. First you top off the boiler... with fresh water, never salt. Then you lay a fire an' build enough steam for the dynamos an' supply pumps. Then you warm up the cylinder jackets, which can take a few hours or a whole day. Then..." Rowley fired his cigarette, dropped the window and flipped out the match. "It's art, what it is. An' a lost one. ...Listen, Jana. Not only are you gonna need an engineer who knows about steam, but you're gonna need a black gang... stokers who know how to tend a fire. An' coal. Lots of coal. Got any idea how much coal a Scotch boiler burns?"

"But there's coal all over Alaska," said Jana. "Jonathan and the others were able to dig a whole truckload just south of Seward. It's not environmentally friendly, but it makes us self-sufficient, and our carbon-footprint is offset by..."

"Your good intentions," said Rowley. "You sound like one of those clueless dreamers who figure they only need forty acres an' a mule to be self-sufficient. They never seem to realize that something as simple as a shovel takes mines, steel mills an' factories. Sure there's coal all over up here, but you're gonna need more than one vein on a beach an' three people with shovels to fill a bunker. Digging a truckload might have been fun... or healthy exercise... but it wouldn't steam that old tub fifty miles. An' I just can't picture those college boys stoking a boiler twenty-four-seven, or dodging the rods in the crankpit to keep the oilers full. ...An' I can't see Jonathan on the footplate, one hand on the throttle an' the other on the Stevenson Link, watching the telegraph for maneuvering orders. Like I said, you're gonna need a black gang. An' a real engineer who knows about steam."

Jana peered ahead, wishing she could see around the passenger car and the locomotive. They crossed another trestle... weren't there three before the first tunnel? "Jonathan has been talking to the Terra Foundation people. We should be able to get that grant if Avenger is ready this month. Most of the interior painting is done. You wouldn't even recognize the engine room now."

Rowley blew smoke out the window. "Probably make a good museum. ...If Jonathan's gonna try running the engines and doesn't blow you all up in five minutes, who's gonna be your captain?"

"Jonathan sailed his father's fifty-foot ketch from San Diego to Hawaii single-handed last summer."

Rowley sighed. "But that was in a straight line, under sunny skies, over open sea. Up here you got rocks an' reefs an' bad weather. You're gonna need local knowledge."

"He's been talking about hiring a local captain to break him in."

Rowley rolled his eyes. "Talking is one thing he seems to be good at."

She put her hand on his again. "You could be our engineer."

The world went black. Those goddammed tunnels! For seconds she couldn't see anything. She almost swore she heard Russel howl, but that was impossible with all the racket the locomotive was making. She stared out the passenger window but stayed away from the glass, as if the darkness might leak in and touch her. The feeble bulbs on the railing outside seemed to be smothered in black ectoplasm. She caught a glint of water on rock, uncertain glimpses of old shoring timbers, and the snarling skull of a long-dead bear who'd picked the wrong place to hibernate. She turned back to Rowley. His face was lit by the bloody-red glow of his cigarette ember, but his eyes seemed to shine with a light of their own, like Russel's sometimes in the den of his room.

"Listen, Jana," he said. "I spent most of my life stealing knowledge so I could barter it for pieces of paper. Then I traded that paper for food an' shelter. Most people call that life. But knowledge is power an' power scares people who already have it. Why do you think it used to be against the law for us to read?"

He studied Jana, then added, "An' don't go off about your people being in the same boat, 'cause they ain't. Not anymore. Most folks who think they're enlightened these days feel guilty about what happened to Indians. To them you're the noble savage, an' they want you to remember your past because it makes them feel good. But you never had a civilization to threaten them with. Napoleon didn't blow the nose off the Sphinx because he didn't appreciate art: he was scared of the people who'd built something mighty an' might remember they had." He blew smoke and shrugged. "People destroy what they're scared of... 'I didn't know what it was so I killed it.' But in your case they feel sorry for you 'cause you came all the way across that land bridge an' never stopped anywhere long enough to even invent your own wheel. They romanticize the shit out of you... 'so in harmony with nature, so environmentally friendly'... when the real truth is you just never learned how to do any damage. So, it's cool if you play rainbow warriors, 'cause you can't use their own tools against them."

He blew smoke out the window again. "But people in power get nervous when we get our hands on their tools. Up here I got a full box of tools, an' I built something with them for Russel an' me. An' now you want me to throw it away an' join your war party against the tool-makers."

The train burst into gray daylight again. It seemed strangely quiet now, just clicking and clacking over a trestle without the eerie underground echoes. But the second tunnel was coming up fast.

"You don't know what it's like for us," said Jana. "Our children feel unwanted... disconnected from the earth. They see no hope for a future. We are supposed to remember our past, but we're also supposed to stay there."

Blackness once more; no less unexpected by being expected. Jana stared out the window. Maybe the lights had failed because she could see nothing now. They seemed to have a perverse habit of doing that in the tunnels... she suspected Jerry switched them off to give the tourists a scare.

Rowley spoke: "A tool can be a wrench or a book. An' if somebody's already saved you the trouble of inventing your own wheel, you're that much ahead in the game. The first step to using a tool is easy... you just pick it up. But then comes a lot of hard work, an' that's what too many of us 'lesser races'... black, brown or red... don't want to do. The white man didn't invent sweat, an' you... or me... can't blame him if we don't want to get sweaty." He paused. "Submitted for your artistic approval: picture a boy..."

And, amazingly, she did. Outside in the darkness was a flicker. At first she thought it was a light bulb feebly coming to life, but then it morphed into a flashlight. There was a boy, dusky and lean, with dreadlocks over his chest and back. Water dripped, and his young body glistened in short cutoff jeans. She remembered a long winter night by the fire: Rowley had told her how he'd used to swim out to the mothball fleet above the San Francisco Bay and prowl through the dark creaking engine rooms of rusty old cargo ships.

She saw him now, about Russel's age, with a cheap little waterproof flashlight and some old musty manual in long-fingered hands, comparing the time-faded pictures to the rusted reality of ancient engines. A black boy picking up tools, even if some were long obsolete... though maybe that's why they'd been left unguarded.

There was daylight again. He flipped his cigarette butt out the window. "I got a old engineer's manual on Vulcan. There's a basic steam engine start-up sequence. I'll copy it for you. Come over tomorrow an' pick it up."

Jana kissed his cheek. Thank the Great Spirit for small favors.

The train was now running beside the dark green water of Prince William Sound. The breeze here was fresh and more scented with sea than what blew over Turnagain Bay back on the other side of the mountains. They rounded a cliff shoulder and clattered into Whittley with a blatt from the locomotive's hooter.

It might have been said that Whittley deserved its shabby little train, otherwise the trip in from Portage would have been like a Disneyland ride that ended in the maintenance section where children might have been traumatized at the sight of Dumbo #3 stripped of his friendly latex face while having new servos installed. Tourists who expected a picture-postcard Alaskan village were in for a similar shock. Whittley had been built as an Amry base in World War II, and most of its buildings were ugly concrete in stark utilitarian styles, weathered drab-gray and bleeding rust streaks. There were several huge multi-storied structures, one a former hospital, another a high-rise barracks now converted to apartments, which looked like innercity projects.

The buildings were crowded at the foot the mountains, their backs to the steep, almost vertical slopes. There were no real streets, and nothing that looked like shops or stores if one was accustomed to strip-malls or modern American architecture. The smaller structures were built of wood and at best looked like those in movie ghost towns. A small alluvial flat of greenish-gray gravel spread down to the bay, where there were floating docks. Campers, motorhomes, and local vehicles -- most of the latter muddy and battered -- were parked near the harbor in a huge gravel lot. Between this area and the mountain-backed buildings was a maze of rusty rails and switches and the boarding ramp for the shuttle train. To the south was the railhead, where barges, ships, and the Valdez ferry docked to load or unload vehicles, and railroad cars came from or went to Seattle. Nearby was the old Army wharf with a row of weathered warehouses, now used mostly for fish-handling. At the head of the wharf was a railroad shop, no longer in use except as an office and storage space for obsolete junk. Farther south was another old wharf, abandoned and rotting, its deck planks mushy and grown with grass. On a cliff above stood an old power plant; three gray stories of crumbling concrete with black windows staring like eyes in a skull.

Jana smiled as the train came to a stop at the dirt-and-gravel loading ramp. She imagined all the cameras being stuffed with disgust back into cases because this was a picture of civilized man squatting like a hobo jungle in nature's otherwise unspoiled realm; and if those mountains had shuffled their feet they would kick it all in the bay.

Rowley started the Jeep as the brakeman uncoupled the locomotive and passenger car after shooing the passengers off. Although Jana was returning to Portage, the Jeep would have to be turned around to face the opposite direction. Rowley drove a little way and stopped, leaving the engine idling. The other vehicles nosed down the ramp, most driving off toward the railhead to wait for the Valdez ferry. Others, like the big Bluebird and Des Moines' Winniebago, crawled slowly away like confused aminals waking up from a tranquizer. Russel came trotting over, soaked to the skin like a little kid who'd been playing in the rain. His belly flopped out from under his shirt now plastered tight to his breasts. He had just reached the Jeep when there was a "Yo!" Another boy appeared from between two boxcars on a siding. The boy wore knee-high rubber boots, baggy jeans, and an oversize hoodie, its hood pulled up against the drizzle. He looked as wet as Russel, but that was a natural state for kids in summertime Alaska.

Rowley smiled as the boy flashed him peace, while Jana only studied him as if she might start a sketch. The boy's native name translated to Fox and Fox was Russel's homey. About fourteen, he was more of a modern-day model of how an Aleut boy should look than her own more primitive picture at home. His beefy, big-breasted and barrel-like build was bulked by civilized sugar and starch. He clumped up to Russel. "They got the new Space Wars game at the store."

Russel turned to Rowley. "Okay to kick-it awhile?"

Rowley nodded. "Be aboard by lunchtime."

Fox gave Rowley more peace, and the boys walked away giving Jana nothing.

Rowley offered a smile. "The thanks you get."

Half playfully Jana replied, "Stay out of my mind."

Rowley leaned over and kissed her cheek, and she took it for a sign that he was reluctant to leave. She thought of the love they hadn't made but could have made in bed that morning, and decided it was all her own fault. She almost reached for his hand as he opened the door and got out, but it was too late now. He pulled the seabags from the back of the Jeep as she wiggled past the shift levers into the driver's seat. She hoped he would kiss her again, but he was looking toward the docks.

She leaned from the window. "I'll see you tomorrow. ...For those engine notes."

"Check the oil in the morning."

Jana drove back to the ramp, then watched as Fox and Russel, arms over each other's shoulders, walked across the jumble of rails and up the slope to the general store. Russel would score them a beer somehow, but Jana didn't worry about him; he had the right DNA. It was Fox who courted destruction with even a sip of alcohol, and his father was one of the many town drunks. Russel's ancestor had likely stopped off for a beer with the boys after hunting antelope, while Fox's ancient counterpart had nothing but snowmelt or crowberry tea. A lot of islands and villages had outlawed alcohol, but, as with all controlled substances, that had only created a thriving black market, and many tenders and processing ships made a sizable profit on the side from supplying the natives with firewater.

On the other side of the train, Rowley tilted his head back, letting the rain wash his face. Then he remembered Jana saying that even the rain was dirty now. He jerked his head down and spat, then glanced at the Jeep at the loading ramp. He thought of the love they hadn't made but could have made in bed that morning, and decided it was all his own fault.

Shouldering the seabags, Rowley walked down to the docks. A few campers and motorhomes were parked on the flats nearby. Some of those people had come to see Whittley, and were probably pissed as hell right now and thinking of getting back on the train before it left and they were stranded. The big Bluebird had pulled off by itself and parked near the railroad wharf, and its door stood open to a Holiday Inn interior. Two clean-cut thirtyish white guys were standing outside in new bush pants and "Alaskan" shirts. Both wore stiff new hunting boots, and one held a fishing pole as if he'd never seen such a thing. Rowley's innercity eye tagged them as urban cops on vacation, especially after they'd spotted him and looked like they'd just seen a black polar bear.

Rowley walked out on the dock floats and noticed a ship across the bay, anchored near the forested slopes of the mountains on the opposite shore. It seemed to be a supply ship like those that carried equipment to oil-rigs, its superstructure crammed in the bow, leaving a long flat afterdeck for pipe and bulky stuff. It was loaded with something now, but the rain made it hard to see what.

He reached the end of the dock where the Conner tug, Vulcan, lay moored. She was seventy years old and a classic design like pictures of tugboats in little-kids' books, but her age was why she'd been condemned to work out her last years up here alone. The company wasn't miserly about maintenance or paint, but parts were hard to find for her obsolete machinery, which required a lot of engineer art to keep her operational. She had been a natural match for Rowley with all his obsolete knowledge, and since he'd arrived two years ago she had been officially recognized as being the most reliable vessel in Conner Company's fleet.

Vulcan's bright red funnel made a cheerful contrast to the the rainy gray sky. Her hull was black, and her white superstrucure was banded with tan. Her straight-stemmed bow was high, and massively sheathed with rubber for pushing. Her traditional lines swept gracefully back along her sixty-foot length, garlanded with heavy truck tires and terminating in a broad, low afterdeck with a huge towing winch near the engineroom doghouse. She sat alone at the end of the dock like a tough ghetto-girl in a whitebread mall, and even the rugged fishing boats looked fragile in comparison. Her bow was armored to break winter ice, and could have smashed any boat in the harbor.

But, bashing things wasn't Rowley's department; he only supplied the power. Where that bow went -- and with First Mate Steerforth at the helm, it had gone lots of places it shouldn't have gone -- wasn't his lookout. Word around Prince William Sound said that Justin had busted so many pilings he was personally responsible for the deforestation of North America.

Rowley stepped across the low stern bulwarks to Vulcan's ruddy-painted deck. Walking forward, he knocked back the handles of the starboard watertight door and entered the galley. The ten-by-twelve compartment welcomed him with grayness, lit only by two small portholes. The air was dank and clammy with the rusty-steel smell of a sleeping boat.

He dumped the seabags down the forecastle companionway and twisted the galley light switch, but the pair of overhead bulbs stayed dark. That meant the master switches in the engine room were still off as he'd left them, and the engineer from the tug, Jupiter which had been covering for Vulcan this month, hadn't been boosting light bulbs, tools, and all the clean wiping rags.

Rowley descended the steep, narrow steps into the darkness of the little forecastle. Vulcan was half the size of Jonathan's Arctic Avenger... he scowled: why had he thought about that?

Six narrow bunks lined the triangular compartment, two sets of uppers and lowers to starboard, and one set on the port side. Six lockers filled most of the remaining space against the engine room bulkhead aft. Portside aft was a watertight door that opened into the engine room, while to starboard rose the steps to the galley. The low overhead was a skull-bashing jumble of pipes and conduit, usually draped with smelly towels and sweaty socks when the boat was active. There was a radiator for heat up forward, which roasted the upper bunk occupants and left those below to shiver in winter. Ducking the downthrust bulk of the bow capstan air motor, Rowley snagged the seabags and stepped to the aft set of starboard bunks. The lower was his, the upper Russel's. The ferral scent of his son still lingered in the blankets. Rowley dumped a bag into each bunk, then bent to his own and pulled the four-cell MagLite from its place on the shelf and flicked it on to check the batteries. The portside bunks were the skipper's and mate's; Captain MacLeod in the lower with all his elderly "aikes and pines," and the upper for Justin Steerforth... Russel had naturally short-sheeted him after he'd come aboard last year, resulting in a three-page report and tongue-in-cheek reprimand from Seattle.

The other starboard upper was Scooby's. Rightfully, Scooby, the deckhand-cook, could have claimed the more comfortable lower, but that was the X in the equation, only briefly occupied by snot-nosed punks or burned-out drunks who filled the berth of deckhand. And fill that berth was all most of them did: Scooby had finally taken the upper because he got tired of getting puked on.

None of those Outside replacements had been worth the price of their plane fare, and few served out their full sixty days. The younger ones knew nothing about working an ancient tug in the wilds, and the old mariners had forgotten their skills in a fog of alcohol fumes. Rowley, like Russel, preferred the kids; a few even wanted to learn the old arts, but usually wilted from all the hard work and Justin Steerforth's impersonation of schizophrenic Captain Queeg. The old ones were less than useless, sent only because the Seamen's Union demanded they be sent somewhere to justify their impending pensions, and were often raving racists. One, from the Redneck Riviera, had even refused to eat at the table if Rowley or Russel were there. The knee-slapper was he'd bitched to Justin. Even the union had given in and pulled the cracker's card. But the replacement had been another young kid who Justin browbeated until he'd jumped ship. Vulcan had so often sailed one fish shy of a full boatload that the Union had almost given up demanding she be crewed by six.

Rowley took off his jacket and shirt and hung them over a pipe to dry. Then he slipped the flashlight into his jeans and knocked open the handles of the watertight door. Hopping over the knee-high sill, he entered his own world of ART.

Like most tugs, large or small, Vulcan's engine room was huge, about two-thirds of her hull space, and echoed to Rowley's footsteps on the spotless gray deck plates. It was lighter in here; the four doghouse ports glowing pearl overhead. The quad unit of General Motors 6-71s sat big, green, and silent, awaiting his touch to awake. The four engines drove a single shaft to a massive screw. Rowley stood for a minute in front the engines, head bowed, feet spread, with dripping dreadlocks. A New-Ager might have called it communion, but often he could feel if anything was wrong. Then a vision of Jonathan Smith and his goddammed Arctic Avenger invaded his mind like a virus. He remembered the one time Jana had coaxed him aboard that old hulk; the shadow-haunted sepulcher of the vast and silent engine room, the stink of coal dust and wet corrosion bellowing out when he'd opened the door; the reek of a vessel long mummified, like the mothball fleet he'd youthfully haunted. Rust covered all the machinery, paint like scabs hung down everywhere, shrouding the ancient corpse of an engine and massive riveted boiler. Despite himself, he'd prowled that musty maritime crypt with I think I could running through his mind...

Until he'd glanced up at the gratings where Jana and Jonathan stood together beneath the dim glow of a drop-light. Jonathan touched the soot-covered rail and looked at his soiled white hands with disgust. Maybe the light hadn't been good but Rowley was sure he'd seen that look. How could you despise something and expect it to save you or even serve you?

Raindrops catfooted the doghouse roof. Faintly the shore power transformer hummed, inverting AC to DC for Vulcan's old-fasioned electrical system. Rowley walked aft, port side of the engines, to the workbench beneath the air-receivers. He snagged a red wiping rag and stuffed it into his pocket beside the waterproof flashlight, the internationally-recognized symbols of marine engineers. Against the forward bulkhead was a tall black electrical panel. It was lined with big copper knife switches, interspaced with rheostats, guages and indicator lamps. A single amber eye was burning beside the shore power switch. Stepping to the panel, he started throwing switches and the tug came alive all around him.

Seven glaring light bulbs in glass and steel cages flared over the gleaming machinery and reflected off the white hull plates, and polished brass handles and valves shone like gold. He swept a hand along a row; masters for forecastle, galley, wheelhouse and navigation lights, then towing, search, and deck lights. He closed another row; pumps, inverters, and dynamotors. Blue sparks jumped, their arcs reflecting from his dusky wet chest. Twin voltmeters flicked their needles erect, and the refrigerator woke in the galley above. A blower spun to life, and the heating boiler spat yellow flame inside its fire chamber. Rowley stepped back from the panel now glowing with many lights and leaned against the auxiliary generator. The big compartment began to warm as the boiler hissed and mumbled, and the smells of hot iron and oil filled the air. He gave the boiler's feed valve a turn, and knelt to peer into the flames through the sight glass... have to clean the burner soon. When he looked up again Jana was standing in the forecastle doorway, a look of surprise on her face.

"I never saw you like this before," she said.

Rowley rose to his feet, pulling the rag from his pocket and wiping his oily hands. "Maybe it's the moon."

Jana stared around the engine room. Rowley recognized her look; when she finally had a whole picture and couldn't wait to paint it. She stepped carefully over the door sill and walked around the bright-lit space like a little girl in a toy shop. She touched the brass of the engine throttles. "Everything's so clean!"

Rowley smiled. "Not bad for the belly of the beast."

Her eyes went to him, climbing his body to his face. "I could paint this," she said. "Even the machinery. With you just like you are." She moved to him, leather and fur, long raven hair and bright little beads. She touched his chest, then slipped her hand down his rain-slicked body. "Just like you are now."

Gently, he turned back the hood of her parka and rubbed his nose against hers --something that used to annoy her until she'd admitted that, absurd cliche' or not, she liked it. She slipped her arms around his waist and drew him close. "You looked like an altar boy practicing for priesthood."

"We ain't a celibate order." Rowley touched her lips with his own. "I love long goodbyes. Wish we'd had one this morning."

"There's still time for a good time, sailor."

Rowley put his arms around her. "But you'll miss the train."

"...Oh, it's broken again."

"But, I just fixed the goddamn thing."

"Jerry said it's something else. The brakes won't release on the engine. But the guy at the railroad office found another part in the shop."

"So, he sent you down to get me?" asked Rowley.

"No. Jerry said he can handle it but the Union won't be happy. I just came... sort of hoping to say goodbye again."

Rowley leaned back a little. The scents of leather and fur and female mingled with those of hot metal and oil. It was hard to tell what was warming him most, his butt against the boiler or Jana's body to his. He glanced at the boiler's pressure gauge then scanned the electrical panel, reading the various meters. "Looks like we got us some time after all." He reached to the hem of Jana's parka. "you look hot in all that politically-incorrect fur." He drew it gently over her head. Her old flannel shirt clung damp to her body, its buttons half open like she usually wore it. "My, what big bouncy breasts you have, Little Fish-Eater."

"And what big teeth you have, Wolf-eyes. Just keep those to yourself."

He unbuttoned her shirt the rest of the way and slipped it half off her shoulders, then, his arms around her again, he drew their bodies together. "An', what a fine behind."

"I hate to screw up the storyline, but that's a steel floor down there."

"You're supposed to be too impassioned to notice." Rowley took Jana's hand and led her to the forecastle door. The little space was warming, too, now that hot water was circulating through the radiator. Jana sat down on Rowley's bunk to unlace her boots. He knelt at her feet. "Ever hear of speed-lacers?"

Jana smiled and lifted his face, brushing aside his dreadlocks to kiss him. She ran her hands over his back as Rowley removed her boots and socks. Her feet weren't cold, yet they tingled with the feeling of returning warmth as if she'd been out in the snow as Rowley gently massaged them. The soft sensation of heat he created seemed to flow up her legs and inside her thighs. He quickly undressed and she pulled him against her, the soft caress of his lips and tongue touching and tasting her own. His locks trailed over her breasts, tickling and teasing her nipples. She sank back into the little bunk den and his sooty shape moved over her, then heat spread out from the thrust of their joining. They moved as longtime lovers do, each knowing what pleased the other, gentle but fierce and making it last, mounting almost to the summit and holding that second in balance before slipping to savor the climb once again.

After, they stayed in each other's arms. The air was warm and slightly steamy around their naked bodies. Raindrops pattered the deck overhead, a dynamotor softly hummed, and the boiler murmured and creaked. Then came the honk of the locomotive. She wondered if Jerry would would guess that her boy given her some, but decided she didn't give a goddamn. They kissed once more and she let him go, though not without reluctance. They got out of the bunk, and Rowley slipped into his jeans while she dressed, then knelt to tie her boots. A last long kiss and whispered goodbyes, then he returned to the engine room while she climbed the steps to the galley.

Someone had lit the diesel stove. The lights were on overhead in their cages, reflecting off the white steel walls. She blinked in the glare, and then saw Russel. He was sitting half-naked at the table, his shirt and jacket above the stove and slowly dripping from a pipe while his dreadlocks dripped on the tabletop and a puddle had formed on the floor at his feet. He was casually smoking a cigarette, and the stereotypical symbolism made Jana suddenly furious despite that being absurd. Words popped out before she could stop them: "What are you doing here?"

Russel looked surprised. There was beer on his breath and he seemed slightly drunk, but that was how he'd chosen to look. Surprise morphed into a thoughtful gaze from his one uptilted amber eye. "I belong here," he said, a natural fact.

He wouldn't have watched... Jana was almost sure of that. But he had ears, goddamn him! The train honked again, maybe for her. She spun to the door and fumbled with the handles. Russel was instantly on his feet... to help her out.

Rowley heard the galley door clank shut and Jana's footsteps coming aft along the starboard side. The doghouse ports darkened as she passed, and there was a glimpse of her strong Levied legs. Above the hiss of the boiler he could hear her boots on the dock planks as she walked away. Their tread sounded somehow angry. Why? He considered possibilities, but finally shrugged and went to the work bench. He took down a wrench from the tool board, then knelt beside the main gearbox and unscrewed a magnetic plug. Footsteps came padding across the deck plates.

"I'll do that," said Russel, appearing in only his jeans and sneaks.

"I got it," said Rowley. "Check the batteries."

Russel took what looked like a watering can with a long narrow spout from the workbench, then paused. "We got time for a hug?"

Rowley put down the wrench and drew Russel close. Russel's own arms went around him with almost fierce intensity. Finally Russel let go and sighed. "We should do that more."

"I'll make a note of that." Rowley got up, went to the workbench and opened the engine room log. He took a pencil and printed something. Russel read the entry and giggled. "What Seattle gonna think of that?"

"Hug Russy more?" said Rowley. "It's part of my new efficiency plan." He took his son's shoulders. "Something on your mind?"

"Naw, I just love you, is all."

Rowley smiled. "Make a note to yourself to say that more."

Russel tapped his forehead. "Just did, up here." He went to a long row of batteries nestled in a lead-lined box. He unscrewed the battery caps one-by-one, looking into each of the cells and occasionally adding water. Rowley moved around the engines, taking off reservoir caps and checking the coolant levels. From above came a creak as the galley door opened, then booted feet came down the forecastle steps and Justin Steerforth peered in though the doorway.

Russel snapped to a sloppy attention, almost losing his jeans. "Welcome aboard, SIR!"

Justin only looked annoyed. He stepped over the sill and strode to the workbench to scan the log. Justin was about six feet tall and had the fairly muscular build of someone who'd been born that way but didn't sweat to stay in shape. Although he was only twenty-three there was something about his expression that made him look older than Rowley... or maybe just wound a lot tighter. His black rubber boots, nearly new jeans and navy-blue turtleneck sweater somehow looked like a uniform. He wore his brown hair severely short as if to hide its natural curl and shaved every day though he didn't have to. His complexion suggested a tan, as if he'd vacationed in some southern clime, and his eyes seemed to shift between blue and gray depending on the light. His face was almost Hollywood handsome though lacking some of the sharpness of Anglo-Saxon Caucasoids... as Jana would probably say. His lips would have looked a bit fuller if he hadn't always kept them pressed tight as if he was constantly consipated. He tapped the log with a fingertip. "What's 'hug Russy' mean?"

Rowley drew Russel close. "This."

Justin frowned. "This is a company record book and personal comments have no place in it." He looked around the engine room. "We're reactivated. You haven't logged that."

Rowley shrugged. "Ain't twelve-hunded yet, so we ain't offically here."

"The boiler is burning fuel," said Justin. "That... whatever it is..."

"A dynamotor," said Rowley.

"Well, it's running. The company wants all hours logged, especially on a boat this old. Let's make this a smooth sixty days, Chief." Justin scowled at Russel. "Get your clothes off the galley stove, it's slovenly and unsanitary."

"Aye-aye, sir," said Russel and casually shambled away.

"And don't say that, it's ridiculous."

"Very good, sir," said Russel.

Rowley checked the auxiliary generator's coolant. "Were you on the train? You could have said yo to your shipmates."

Justin closed the logbook. "The captain and I were flown in this morning. The company is concerned about a possible railroad strike. There's a ship across the bay that has some cargo for Grizco... generators, I think, that have to go to Fairbanks. One of the ship's engines failed coming up from Seattle so we'll have to help them dock, then transfer the generators onto flatcars."

"What good will that do if there's a strike? Cargo won't get out of here."

"That's why the company flew us in early. They want those generators on their way in case there is a strike. We'll take our barge off the bouy today and leave it at the power plant wharf as soon as the rest the crew is aboard. Then we'll dock the Grizco ship and get those generators ashore before the Seattle barges arrive."

"They won't be here for two days," said Rowley. "What's the point in bringing our barge here now? If those generators are so important, we should get that ship docked an' unload them first."

"The point is I decided to do it and Captain MacLeod agreed."

Russel stepped over the door sill. "Maybe Mister Steerforth wants to practice so he don't stick that ship on the mudbank like he did with our barge the last time."

"That wasn't my fault!" snapped Justin. "You should have shortened the tow!"

"But you didn't order me to, sir."

"You could have made a suggestion."

"He did," said Rowley. "But you ignored it."

Justin frowned. "It's natural you'd defend him."

"I read your report," said Rowley. "You didn't mention Russel's suggestion... or that you were at the wheel."

Justin shrugged. "The Captain has the ultimate responsibilty."

"Meaning he takes the blame for your fuck-ups."

Justin scowled. "He'll be retiring soon... and should have retired a long time ago."

"Then God help us all," muttered Russel.

Justin tensed. "What did you say?"

Russel smiled sweetly. "Did Scooby fly in with y'all?"

"...No, he's coming on the afternoon train. The company sent him to Anchorage to meet the new deckhand at the airport."

Russel sighed. "I hope this one is worth a shit."

Justin shrugged again. "It's up to you to train them, and you haven't been doing a very good job."

"I'm sure that's in your reports," said Rowley.

"It's a poor workman who blames his tools."

"I've noticed that," said Rowley.

Justin drew himself up. "Thus far I haven't noticed that your son is considerably less than eighteen... the minimum age for company employment."

Rowley smiled. "An' we haven't noticed a few things, ourselves... not that there's anything wrong with that."

Rowley growled, "I'm tired of hearing about Jonathan Smith an' his goddamn Arthritic Pretender!"

Jana, sitting in the Jeep, tried to lighten the atmosphere. "Sounds like somebody didn't get any last night."

Rowley, standing outside on the flatcar, jammed his hands in his jacket pockets which made him look like a sulky kid. "Fact is, I got a lot last night... a lot of Justin's bitching!" He glanced up the line of cars where other vehicles were boarding. "There wasn't an afternoon train yesterday."

"I know," said Jana. "The engine broke down on the way out." She shivered slightly. "In the tunnel. It was hours before they got it going."

Rowley smiled. "You should have entertained the tourists with The Creamation Of Dan McGee. Maybe they would have thrown you some money. ...Anyway, Scooby an' the new deckhand couldn't get here. Justin had the day all planned to run down to Shotgun Cove an' pick up the Valdez barge." He pointed across the bay. "Then bring that ship to the dock. We could have done it anyhow, but if the Union found out we weren't fully crewed they would have bitched to the company an' they would have bitched at MacLeod."

"How would they find out?" asked Jana.

"Justin would have reported it like the good little houseboy he is." Rowley spit off the train. "So, here we sit, an' Justin's got nothin' better to do except snoop around lookin' for dumb-ass shit to write more reports about."

"Who's doing the cooking?" asked Jana.

"Russel. An' Justin bitched about that, too."

"Sounds like he's really an asshole."

"At least we agree about that." Rowley glanced at the passenger coach. "Scooby an' the new deckhand are supposed to be on this train. An' because we have to dock that ship I couldn't come down to Seward with you even if I wanted to." He pulled some sheets of paper from his jacket pocket. "Here's that steam engine start-up sequence."

"Thank you." Jana took the papers and laid them on passenger seat beside the Grizco magazine with its heartbreaking baby seal picture. Whittley's eternal summer rain had lightened a little this morning, but the sky was still a gloomy gray and mist ghosted under the train. Steel plates clanked and wooden planks rattled as vehicles from the Valdez ferry boarded the flatcars and crawled up the line.

Jana thought of the old cliché about walking on thin ice, but took a breath and said, "We need to get Arctic Avengeroperational as soon as we can. Terra Foundation wants to give us that grant. They called Jonathan yesterday. He drove up from Seward to tell me."

Rowley's eyes narrowed a little. "An' did he drive back again? ...Last night?"

Jana cocked her head. "What's that supposed to mean? He slept on the couch. ...Rowley, listen. We've only got until the end of this month to get Avenger going. Another crew member quit yesterday."

Rowley shrugged. "Did they figure out that savin' the earth can be a dirty job?" He glanced down at his oily hands. "Jonathan always looks squeaky clean."

"You don't even know him!" snapped Jana.

"I know this much," said Rowley. "He's taken most of your money an' a lot of your time an' sweat. His crew... if you wanna call 'em that... is workin' for free. He's been getting a ton of donations, an' now he might get a big grant. An' he don't even know how to fire up his engine. Don't you see somethin' wrong with that picture?"

"The only thing wrong is you aren't in it."

Rowley sighed. "We been there before, an' too many times."

Jana reached for his hand. "Rowley, this is important."

Rowley stepped back to the edge of the car. "If you'd ever had a kid of your own then maybe you'd know what's really important."

"Goddamn you!" Jana exploded. Sometimes she wanted to run away, too, back to her own little island. Let the civilized world self-destruct! Her people could live without it.

"Sometimes I think He did," said Rowley. "But then I look at Russel." He jumped from the train, landing lightly on gravel, then turned his back and walked away.

Jana watched him in the mirror, wishing she knew the right magic words to make him turn around. She remembered something the shaman had said, or maybe just a line from a movie: If you love something, set it free. And if it loved you, it would come back. It had once been an Eskimo tradition that when a man didn't come back from a hunt his woman would sit by the fire with a pair of his trousers over her head, presumably praying for his return. That made an absurd picture of her sitting with Rowley's oily jeans.

Rowley reached the passenger car and tried to put Jana out of his mind. Maybe she was still growing, but maybe she needed to grow a lot more? And maybe he couldn't help with that? Right now he had other worries: where was Scooby and the new deckhand? If they weren't on this train the tug couldn't move, which meant another night with Justin, like being caged up with a leaky skunk. Then a voice called, "Hey, boy," and Rowley saw Jerry beckoning from the back of the locomotive.

Jerry climbed down and ambled back to the baggage door on the side of the passenger coach. "Just seen your skipper an' mate goin' into the railroad office. Figured you'd wanna clean up your new boy before they get back to the boat."

Rowley sighed. "Another one of those, huh?"

Jerry chuckled. "Last time I went on a wing-ding like that I woke up married! Conductor didn't wanna let him on so I brung him over back here." He knocked back the latch and rolled the door open, then bowed aside with a sweep of his cap as Rowley stepped to the chest-high floor. The small compartment was dim, dirty and mostly empty. A little light bulb burned overhead, flickering to the iron thump of the locomotive's idling engine. A huge shape seemed to materialize and shamble out of the shadows, Scooby, Vulcan's deckhand/cook.

He lifted Rowley into the car like picking up a baby. His almost awkwardly muscle-bulked body was stuffed into tight bib-overalls and a gray sweatshirt with a gym logo. He ran a hand through tangled brown hair and gazed at Rowley with innocent eyes that made him look like a short-bus kid designed by Doctor Frankenstein. Like Baby Huey, you expected a "duh" before he started a sentence.

"What we go this time?" asked Rowley.

Scooby only pointed, and Rowley saw something sprawled on the floor. It was a white kid, maybe sixteen, though his face looked younger unconscious. It didn't take a Sherlock Holmes to read the kid's life at a glance. As Jana might say, he was the natural evolutionary product of a throw-away society where kids, like baby alligators, were only cherished while young and cute. Then it was time for the toilet and sink or swim in the sewer of life. ...E-mail us if you find work.

Believing the modern American myth that loving a kid meant keeping him one, his parents had force-fed him innocence sweetened with entitlement until he was too out of shape to swim, then wondered why he wouldn't try. He had probably dropped out of school, and it would have been embarrassing -- after child safety seats, bicycle helmets, and keeping him from becoming obese -- if he died in his room with drugs in his blood and a game controller in hand; so his father, no doubt a union man, had greased the palm of a local don, and sent his overgrown child off to sea.

Maybe he'd once read Captains Courageous?

Rowley studied the youthful mess: he sometimes wondered what happened to these kids when they didn't make it here. Like most of the other potential young failures, he wore big-jeans, expensive sneaks, and a T-shirt beneath a bulky puff-coat. His hair was a mop of golden curls topped with a backward-turned cap. Around his neck was chrome-plated chain, and a silver stud gleamed in one ear. He stank of beer and unwashed adolescence.

Rowley took his shoulders and pulled him to a sitting position. "What's his name, Scoob?"

"Tuna."

"Nobody's name is Tuna."

"That's what he said... you could check his papers."

"I'm sure he's got a pedigree, an' one that says he's eighteen, but he probably won't be around long enough for anybody to care." Rowley shook the kid gently, getting a mumbled "fucker" and a blast of beer fumes in his face, but the eyes stayed stubbornly shut. There was a faint bridge of freckles across the kind of pugged urchin nose that was often drawn on newspaper boys in 1930s cartoons. Another shake brought another curse and a feeble swing of a fist.

"Yo, Tuna! C'mon, man. The Good Ship Lollipop is sailing to where the wild things are." Rowley took the kid under his arms and wrestled him to his big puppy feet. The kid coughed, and Rowley got out of the way as he puked amber foam down his chest.

Jerry was standing outside, resting his chin on his heavy-gloved hands and watching over the door sill. "Christ!"

"I'm sure you got a union swamper." Rowley steadied the spewing kid until he was more or less finished, then he turned to Scooby. "Get his bag."

Scooby scooped up a new seabag, then got his old one from a corner. Tuna managed to unbutton his jeans and started to piss on the floor. He swayed again, and Rowley caught him.

"Christ!" bawled Jerry.

Rowley shrugged, still holding the kid. "No good deed ever goes unpunished. ...Mac an' Justin still at the office?"

"I think so," said Jerry.

"Can you go look? Make sure they ain't headed back to the boat. It'll be a lot easier on everybody if we get this wet one halfway clean an' straight before they see him."

Jerry glanced at his watch. "'Bout time to roll."

"You want your train fixed next time it breaks?"

Jerry grinned. "I'm goin'."

The kid finally opened his eyes, green as a cat's but webbed with red. "The fuck?" he mumbled.

Rowley smiled. "Just tell yourself it's only a dream an' you're gonna wake up next to Mr. Stuffins."

"...Huh?"

The kid's jeans were slipping off his butt. Rowley yanked them up and fastened the buttons as Jerry returned. "All clear."

"Scoob," said Rowley. "Dump the bags outside. Then get down an' I'll hand him to you." He steered the stumbling kid to the door, and Scooby draped him across a huge shoulder. Rowley jumped to the ground and picked up the bags.

The brakeman signaled to Jerry, who scrambled aboard the locomotive. The hooter blatted, air blasted out, and brake shoes unclamped down the line. Couplings clashed with iron-fisted clanks as the engine began to move, spouting smoke. Jerry leaned from the cab. "My camper's in the railroad shop! Key's under the mat! You owe me a tune-up for this!"

Rowley gave Jerry a nod, then started across the flats toward the docks. Scooby followed, toting the kid like a sack of soiled something. A few tourists stared while a few locals smiled. Rowley noted the vacationing cops watching through the Bluebird's windshield.

Russel was at the galley table, shirtless in the heat from the stove, with a plate of chocolate-chip cookies he'd made and a mug of golden coffee. He was reading a dirty novel and only gave an amber glance to the smelly burden on Scooby's shoulder.

"Another one of those, huh?"

Rowley dropped Tuna's bag down the forecastle steps. "It's showtime again."

Russel got up and opened the door to the tiny head. "Cold?"

"What would you recommend?" asked Rowley.

"Hope it's cold enough."

"Scoob," said Rowley. "Take off his clothes an' get him in the shower."

"He ain't gonna like that."

"But you're bigger than him an' might makes right." Rowley slid down the forecastle stair rails and dumped Tuna's bag on the bunk under Scooby's. Russel joined him, and they searched the kid's things; mostly more clothes like the ones he'd arrived in... T-shirts, jeans, boxers and socks. Someone had had the foresight to include rubber boots and a rain suit. Russel unzipped and upended a new shaving kit in a nylon pouch. Of course the kid didn't shave yet, and Russel held up a packet of crack. He ran his fingers around the pouch lining and pulled out a half-empty baggie of weed. "Here's some prescription stuff, too."

"Feed it to the fishes," said Rowley.

"What if he needs it?"

Rowley glanced at the labels. "If he needed all that he'd be dead by now."

"He's gonna wish he was without it."

"That's part of the great game of life, son, learnin' what you can live without." Rowley found three airline bottles of rum stashed in one of the boots. "Yo, ho, ho."

Russel added them to the pile. "Gonna be some happy fishes."

From above came the sounds of a struggle and cursing, the hiss of the shower and then a long scream. Vulcan carried her water in her double-bottom, and it was the same icy temperature as what she floated in.

"Here, fishy, fishy," said Russel, climbing the steps with the booty.

Rowley took clean jeans and a T-shirt, and followed Russel up to the galley. Scooby's huge frame filled the doorway to the little head and shower compartment. Imprisoned within by Scooby's bulk, Tuna struggled, cursed and screamed beneath an icy spray. Rowley tossed Tuna's clothes on the table. "You can give him some hot water now, Scoob."

"Queers!" Tuna squalled. "Homos! Faggots! Fairies! Flamers!"

"Save that for a privatized prison," said Rowley, looking in over Scooby's shoulder. "Which will probably be your next port of call if you can't learn to play nice here."

The green eyes suddenly stared. "You're black!"

"I hope you're not suffering from white rage on top of all your other afflictions 'cause there ain't a pill for that yet."

Scooby scowled. "He's the chief engineer, you dumb little shit!"

Rowley smiled. "Which is easy to be when you're the only engineer. You can thank me for the hot water. Snag the soap an' wash... which is also a four-letter word."

The kid curled his lip and looked fierce. His body was pale from an indoor life, but his DNA had done its best with a Mickey Dee's menu and strange chemicals. His waist was a little rolly, but his biceps, though soft, were roundly defined and his pecs, though pudgy, were prominent. One shoulder displayed a bright tattoo of a snarling saber-tooth tiger. It suggested a rudiment of pride... no one decorated a garbage can.

The shower was warming up, steam starting to swirl in the draft from the doorway. Below in the engine room, the boiler rumbled to life. Tuna slumped against the steel wall under the rushing water. "Oh shit. I don't feel good."

"Just wash," said Rowley. "You can throw up some more later on. I got your clean clothes out here."

"You been in my stuff!"

"Just lightened your load a little... an' if I hadn't the first mate would have an' you'd be on the next train out."

Russel appeared at Rowley's side and offered a big bright smile. "Hey shipmate."

"You're black, too!"

Russel looked up at his father. "How come you never told me?"

"You're also adopted and slightly retarded."

"What happened to your eye?" asked Tuna.

"Oh, an' handicapped, too," said Rowley.

Russel blinked. "Nothin', it works fine. See?"

"I mean the other one!" Tuna howled.

Russel lifted his patch to darkness. "This one?"

Tuna flinched back. "Don't do that!"

Russel grinned at Rowley. "I like him, dad, he's funny."

"Don't get too attached, son, he might bite an' run away."

The booming bass thunder of four engines in sync echoed up the forested slopes of Shotgun Cove. Vulcan squatted as her big screw backed, kicking white froth under the counter. Smoke billowed black from her funnel and she slowed her forward momentum as foam swept along her ebony flanks. The sun had come out -- wonder of wonders -- the sky was a clear northern blue and the water a dark crystal green, reflecting tall mountains whose snow-capped summits sparkled like sugar frosting. The afternoon air was comfortably warm, and Rowley wore only his jeans and seaboots, his sooty skin seeming to glow in the sun as walked up the deck toward the bow and stopped below the wheelhouse windows where Justin leaned out with a hand on the helm while MacLeod's craggy shape stood nearby.

Russel and Tuna stood in the bow silhouetted against the pine-wooded shore. Both were shirtless and facing forward. Despite his slack muscles and rolly waist Tuna looked strong beside Russel, his baggy jeans low and showing white shorts. Russel's bottom was more than half bare, his belly wobbling over his jeans, his boy-breasts bobbing with every move.

Tuna clutched an eye of three-inch hawser and fought for balance against Vulcan's roll. His golden hair hung over his eyes despite the backwards-turned cap, and his pale body was shiny with sweat that gave off a chemical smell.

Russel's voice was cheerful: "Not till Justin says, man."

"You mean the young white guy?" asked Tuna.

Russel snickered. "Yeah. The young white guy. ...Wanna be friends?"

Tuna scowled. "Just tell me what to do."

Russel pointed to an eighty-foot barge moored in the cove to a bouy. Vulcan had drawn alongside it and was slowly gliding toward its bow and the red-rusted mooring bouy ahead. "See that cleat up on deck midship? You gonna be loopin' this line over that."

Tuna regarded the barge, its deck eight feet above the water. "But how do I reach it?"

Russel patted Vulcan's rubber bow armor. "Stand up here an' stretch, but not till Justin says. He's supposed to know when it's safe." Russel smiled. "But I'd listen to me if I was you."

Tuna scowled again. "Why should I listen to you? He's the first mate an' you're only a deckhand."

Russel shrugged. "I done this a few hundred times, includin' during the winter when everything's coverd with ice. He's never been up there once."

"He's still supposed to know more than you."

"An' he's white?"

Tuna frowned. "That's not what I meant."

Russel laughed. "But that's what you was thinkin'."

"The fuck you know what I'm thinkin'?"

"'Cause I used to believe it, too." Leaving Tuna looking confused, Russel pulled several coils of the heavy line within easy reach of the capstan as the barge's rusty black side slid by, its name, Valdez, chalky white amidships. He saw Rowley and raised a thumb. "I think we should keep him."

"You'll have to clean up his messes till you get him housebroke." Rowley headed back aft, past the open galley door, catching a whiff of Scooby's cake baking in the oven. Scooby, straining his overalls, crouched against the stern bulwarks as Vulcan glided past the bouy and her engines rumbled again in reverse. The tug dipped her nose and stopped, then began to back toward the buoy under the barge's square-ended bows.

The engines' rumble muted as Captain MacLeod took over from Justin and cut back the throttle. Rowley loosed the boathook from its lashings atop the doghouse roof as Justin, in jeans and blue chambray shirt, burst from the galley and dashed for the stern. He snatched the boathook from Rowley. "Keep an eye on those boys, Chief. I don't think they're working well together."

Rowley moved a little way forward along the side of the doghouse, but kept his eyes on Justin. The engines throttled up again, the deck plates trembling underfoot as the screw thrashed water to stop the tug. Scooby leaned over the bulwarks, his gloved hands grabbing the barge's bridle. Then he began to heave it in, cursing as snags on the rusty cable raked his leather-clad palms. Justin stood by, holding the boathook aloft like a lance. Rowley came aft to the winch and dragged the towline eye to Scooby. Justin seemed to realize that he should have done that already, but instead of looking embarrassed he scowled. He reached for the mooring bouy with the hook as the tug drifted slowly toward it, while Rowley helped Scooby heave in the bridle.

"If Justin rams the barge today, your cake might fall," whispered Rowley.

"Tell me about it," Scooby puffed.

Water frothed under the counter again as MacLeod powered up to hold the tug steady. Justin's hook clanked on the buoy as he grappled for the shackle on top. Buoy and boat met with a hollow clang. Rowley pulled pliers from his pocket as Justin hooked the shackle, then Rowley cut the safety wire and unscrewed the shackle pin. Scooby, an overall strap snapping loose to reveal the massive slabs of his chest, struggled to keep the bridle from slipping back overboard. From up in the bow came a curse from Tuna:

"Stop askin' me that!"

Justin frowned. "What's Russel doing to him?"

Rowley smiled. "I'd say trying to play nice."

"This isn't a game!" Justin snapped.

"Then why are you always trying to win?" Rowley clapped the shackle through the towline eye and rammed in the pin. "Yo, Scoob! Hope you put some concrete in that cake."

Scooby made a face and dropped the bridle. Justin jerked his hook free of the buoy, and everyone jumped out of the way as the towline slithered overboard, flaying rust from the gunwale. Puffing and dripping sweat, Scooby moved up against the winch. Justin passed the boathook to Rowley, then signaled to Captain MacLeod. Water creamed astern once more and the tug moved away from the bouy. Air blasted below in the engine room as the steering ram swung the rudder hard-over.

Rowley released the winch brake, letting the towline run out as Vulcan cut a tight circle to aim her bow at the barge's midships. Waves from her maneuvering slapped the rocky shore, and crows and seagulls squawked in the trees. Rowley skidded the boathook back on the doghouse roof and threw a lashing around its shaft. "Probably been a damn good cake. The good die young."

"Oh, shut up," growled Scooby.

Justin dashed for the galley door. "Watch those boys, Chief!"

"Gonna check my cake," said Scooby. "Back in a minute."

Rowley looked forward as the tug coasted up to the barge. Tuna stood trembling in the bow, staring up at big rusty cleat above the L of Valdez. The black iron wall loomed closer. Tuna looked over his shoulder where Russel was taking turns of line around the capstan drum. "Um... what would happen if I fell? Between the boat an' the barge."

Russel laughed. "You'd be flatter than Scooby's cake is probably gonna be in a minute. Then Justin would chop you up with the screw an' say it was all your fault. ...Sure you don't wanna be friends?"

"Shut up goddammit! I can't concentrate!"

Russel moved up beside Tuna. "If I was drivin'... but I'm only a deckhand... I'd back her right about now."

That moment passed, and several more while Vulcan kept on toward the barge. Her engines murmured at idle, and the bubble and splash of her bow wave sounded loud in the cove's sunny peace. Scooby came out of the galley, grimaced at the approaching barge, then lumbered back to the stern. Rowley glanced up at the wheelhouse windows, seeing Justin tense at the helm while MacLeod stood grimly looking on.

Russel patted Tuna's back. "Might be your last chance to be friends."

"Shut up an' tell me what to do!"

The engines suddenly roared as Justin throttled full-astern. Smoke billowed skyward seconds too late. The rubber bow armor screamed against steel as Vulcan rammed the barge. Tuna pitched forward, but Russel grabbed the back of his jeans, barely keeping Tuna's head from bashing into the L.

"Now!" yelled Justin.

"No!" hissed Russel just loud enough for Tuna to hear while holding on to his jeans.

The tug bucked back from the impact, lurching away from the barge.

"Belay that!" roared Captain MacLeod, pushing Justin aside and taking the wheel.

"That means don't do it," said Russel. "An' you can trust the captain even if you don't trust me."

The engines throttled up again, and Vulcan nosed gently against the barge. "Now!" the captain called.

Grabbing Tuna around the waist, Russel boosted him up the barge's side. The hawser's eye slipped from Tuna's fingers, dropping neatly over the cleat.

"Good work, lad!" called MacLeod.

Releasing a surprised-looking Tuna, Russel yanked the hawser tight around the capstan drum and shoved the control handle down. Airmotor chugging below, the capstan wound in the line, pulling Vulcan's bow against the barge. Russel snagged a bight of line spooling off the drum, wound it on a bitt, then centered the control handle. "C'mon," he called to Tuna.

The barge began to swung around. Vulcan, her bow to the barge's midships, trailed along behind, her stern slewing out as tons of iron made a ponderous pirouette. Rowley went to the winch controls as Tuna followed Russel aft.

Vulcan's screw thrashed again in reverse. Rowley engaged the winch, winding Vulcan back until she was harnessed along the barge, her bow secured amdships, her towline tight on the bridle.

Scooby joined Rowley. "That wasn't so bad... after MacLeod took over. Maybe this new kid's gonna work out."

Rowley nodded. "He's doin' all right, considering he's got about half a drugstore an' a beer truck in his blood."

He cranked down the winch brake, then signaled to Captain MacLeod. Again the engines thundered, pouring black smoke against the blue sky. The barge came slowly about, and Vulcan pushed her from the cove into Prince William Sound. Russel plopped down on the base of the winch and dug out a pack of Camels. Tuna asked, "Can I have one?"

Russel held out the pack. "Sure, shipmate."

"You guys don't really talk that way, do you?"

"Nah, but it's fun sometimes. Didn't you never play pirate?"

"Yeah, when I was your age."

"Oh, I get it, that's an insult." Russel struck a waterproof match, and Tuna leaned close for the flame.

"Now can we be friends?" asked Russel.

"Stop asking me that, it sounds gay."

"I didn't rape you in the shower."

"Then it's just retarded. Like somethin' a little kid would ask."

"Little kids like havin' friends. It's like a natural thing."

"I'm not a kid anymore. ...Thanks for the smoke." Tuna walked away, stumbling as the tug hit a wave and spray flew bright from the bow. Then he collapsed against the bulwarks and drew up his legs like a tired little kid.

Russel called, "You done a good with the bow line, man."

"...Thanks."

Scooby was studying Russel, who lounged against the winch drum in his usual sloppy pose, then he turned to Rowley. "Your son's gettin' real out of shape."

Rowley shrugged. "You ain't the only one who wants to change his shape."

Russel pointed to Tuna. "You mean I could have a shape like his?"

Tuna glanced down at himself and hardened his chest a little.

"He's got a lot of potential," said Scooby.

"So do most kids," said Rowley. "No matter what shape they're in."

Justin bawled from the wheelhouse. "Unharness!"

The engines slowed to idle. Russel got up and went over to Tuna. "We gotta cut loose the bow."

"Just stop asking me to be friends."

"Don't you like black people?"

Tuna shrugged. "I never knew any."

"Bet you thought we all lived in the 'hood, rapped, sold crack, an' capped each other."

"Most of you do."

Rowley threw back a lever and reversed the winch, paying out line. In the bow, Russel slacked the capstan. Then he grabbed Tuna before he could protest and boosted him up the barge's side. "Take the line off."

Tuna pulled the eye from the cleat, and Vulcan swung away from the barge, the towline trailing behind her. She cut a tight circle then surged ahead. Rowley let the towline run until Justin called to stop, then he screwed down the brake wheel. The winch drum shuddered to a stop, the towline tightened, rising a moment out of the water dripping sheets of sliver, and the barge now followed Vulcan about three-hundred yards astern. Russel led Tuna aft again and showed him how to set the guide pins in their gunwale sockets, then pulled a red rag from his pocket and tied it on the towine.

"What's that for?" asked Tuna.

"So you can tell if the winch brake slips. See? The rag's five feet from the guide pins. If it starts movin' back..."

"I get it," said Tuna.

"Sure you don't wanna be friends?"

"Shut up."

"Fresh coffee!" Scooby called from the galley.

"C'mon," said Russel. "Want a cookie? I made 'em myself."

Tuna wiped sweat from his face. "Stop fuckin' with me, I don't feel good."

"I'm tryin' to make you feel better."

"I don't wanna feel better, just leave me alone."

Tuna headed for the galley and Russel trailed behind, his shoulders slumped and head down. Tuna looked back and glared. "Now what are you doin'?"

"Not fuckin' with you."

Scooby's cake had somehow survived Justin's ramming the barge, and Scooby was adding buttercream frosting. Now clad in an apron, he looked like a cooking show Cujo.

Russel took the big coffee pot off the stove. "Want some, Tuna?"

"Yeah. ...Thanks." Tuna sank down on a bench at the table. He dumped canned milk into his mug and added three spoonfuls of sugar. Russel plopped down beside him and studied the saber-toothed tiger tattoo shiny with sweat on Tuna's shoulder. "That's a cool tat."

Tuna turned to Rowley. "Please make him stop that."

"Stop what?" asked Justin, coming down the steps from the wheelhouse.

"Nothin'," sighed Tuna.

"Say, sir," said Russel.

Justin scowled. "He doesn't have to say that."

"Say what?" another voice asked from above.

Justin stepped aside as Captain MacLeod came down from the wheelhouse. "Russel told the new deckhand to call me sir."

Vulcan was now on auto-pilot, her engines singing a booming quartet that vibrated through her structure, rattling the coffee pot and the thick crockery in the racks. Captain MacLeod poured a mug of coffee. A lean and leathery figure, he might have been fifty or ninety. The company's retirement age was a mandatory sixty-five, and Justin had often speculated -- though never to his face -- that MacLeod was probably older but had doctored his records to keep his command.

MacLeod was clad in Wellington boots, baggy tan trousers, black wool sweater, with a brown fedora on his shaggy gray head. A charred wooden pipe was clamped in his teeth. His blue eyes were bright beneath bristling brows like Q in the James Bond movies, and he had a similar aquiline face. "What's wrong with the lad showing you respect?" MacLeod asked, burring his R's. "A man gets damn little of that these days."

"Nothing, sir," answered Justin. "I was just saying he didn't have to. It's not a company rule."

MacLeod snorted. "That's the trouble with boys nowadays; none of 'em have to do anything and that's what keeps 'em boys all their lives." He nodded at Rowley. "Chiefy could tell you that. Look at his son, does a man's work and it's made him one!" He clapped a gnarled hand on Russel's shoulder. "Reminds me of myself at his age... and we called our officers, sir, back then."

He smiled at Tuna. "Russel is teaching you right, lad."

Russel scooted close to Tuna. "Gimmie a week, an' I make you a man."

MacLeod turned to Rowley again. "How's she doin', Chief?"

Rowley wondered if he replied that boiler draft was steady, pressure maintaining at one-twenty pounds, revolutions ninety and bunkers adequate, the old man wouldn't bat an eye. "Number three's smoking a little. I'll run the racks after we dock, sir."

"Very good, Chief." MacLeod sat down next to Russel. "You keep showin' our new lad the ropes and he will be a man in a week."

Taking a mug of coffee, Rowley went out to sit on the doghouse, enjoying the unaccustomed sun. Russel joined him a moment later. A mile ahead to port stood the gaunt concrete shell of the old power plant, the skull-like eyes of its shattered windows staring blackly across the bay like a vampire-haunted castle. Below it was the abandoned wharf. Farther ahead was the railroad wharf with its line of old warehouses weathered and grim. Out in the bay to starboard was the anchored Grizco ship.

Justin stepped out of the galley, hesitated a moment, then came aft to sit on the doghouse, though keeping a distance from Russel and Rowley. Tuna appeared in the galley doorway and hesitated like Justin had.

"Are you all right?" asked Justin.

Behind Justin's back, Russel pantomimed writing.

"Yea... yes, sir," said Tuna.

"You don't... You did okay with that harnessing."

"Russel told me what to do."

Justin shrugged. "That's what he gets paid for."

The air chilled a little as Vulcan churned past a growler the size of a garbage truck, the sun striking indigo sparks from its heart. The ice rolled astern, making the sounds that gave it its name as the tug's creamy wake slapped its sides. The tug listed to starboard as MacLeod, now back at the wheel, kept the barge clear of the ice.

Russel fired a cigarette and offered it to Tuna. Tuna hesitated again, then came to sit beside Russel. He sucked smoke deep and sighed out a cloud. "Thanks."

Justin frowned. "I came out here to get away from MacLeod's pipe. Second-hand smoke kills."

Rowley lit a Camel. "It's not a reliable method."

MacLeod called from the wheelhouse, "Time to harness up!"

Justin rose and headed forward, while Rowley went to the winch controls. Tuna turned to Russel. "What now?"

Russel pointed. "We gonna be dockin' our barge at that wharf... if Justin can get her past the mudbank." He led Tuna back to the stern, untying the rag from the towline and pulling the guide pins out of their sockets to stow them back in their bulwark racks. "That's part of your job from now on."

"I got it," said Tuna. "Now what?"

"Now we go up to the bow again... friend."

Tuna sighed. "Don't start that shit. I don't want no friends, they just blow you off."

"Not if they really your friends."

"Just tell me what to do."

Rowley unclamped the brake wheel and shoved the control lever down. Below in the engine room, the generator throttled up to take the electrical load. The winch drum revolved, its big motor straining, reeling in the towline as Vulcan began to slow. MacLeod swung her back to the barge's side, and Rowley watched the boys in the bow: Tuna knew what to do this time, but his body would barely obey. There was no help for that: life at sea made real demands, and there were no child psychologists, teachers or well-meaning fools to tell a kid that his suffering was someone else's fault.

Harnessed again, her bow to the barge, Vulcan approached the old wharf. MacLeod gave the mudbank a wide, careful berth, then turned the wheel over to Justin. Russel boosted Tuna up on the barge's deck. Then he jumped and grabbed the cleat, but struggled to pull himself up. Tuna finally offered a hand. "You're really out of shape."

Russel smiled. "Guess I am, huh." Yanking up his slipping jeans, he led Tuna across the four rusty sets of railroad tracks, scattered binders and freight car jacks, to the barge's bows. Rowley boarded after them, followed by Scooby, and walked to the stern. The old wharf loomed closer, grass growing thick on its rotting planks. Justin slowed their approach, not wanting to ram three-hundred tons into the ramshackle structure. Russel leaped to an uncertain ladder as the barge crept close to the wharf, scampering up like a chubby spider and almost losing his jeans again. Tuna stood in the barge's bows, a two-inch line in his hands. Rowley climbed another ladder from the barge's stern, and Scooby heaved a line up to him. Tuna got his line to Russel on the second try. Ancient pilings creaked, and the whole structure swayed as the barge came to rest. Rowley and Russel wound the lines on rusty bollards, slacked them a bit to allow for the tide, then climbed back down to the barge. Scooby returned to the tug to start supper, and Russel patted Tuna's back. "Good work with the line."

Tuna wiped sweat from his face. "Thanks. Now what?"

"Kick back till supper."

"I'm gonna lay down for awhile."

"Still don't feel good?"

"No, an' don't try to make me feel better." Tuna walked wearily back to the tug.

Rowley sat down on a rail and Russel came over to join him. "We gonna be friends," Russel announced, sitting beside his father.

"Go easy, son, he's got lots of cracks an' he's leakin' below the waterline."

"That's what's worryin' me."

"You can't save people who don't wanna be saved."

"Too bad he ain't a polar bear, then everybody would wanna save him."

On the cliff above, the old power plant seemed to lean over, cutting off sunlight and casting cold shadow. From inside there were faint water-sounds that carried over the lapping of waves, snowmelt runoff from the cliffs, flowing in through shattered windows and splashing across the broken floors. The barge nudged the wharf on the falling tide, and the ancient structure swayed and creaked.

Russel asked, "Remember your note?"

Rowley drew Russel close in a hug. Russel lay his head on Rowley's shoulder. "Thanks for savin' me."

Rowley smiled. "It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it."

Down on Vulcan, Scooby bawled from the galley doorway. "Dinnertime!"

MacLeod leaned out of a wheelhouse window as Rowley and Russel climbed down from the barge. "Draw the fires, Chief."

"Yes, sir." Rowley walked aft past the galley doorway. Scooby was busy at the stove stirring a pot of boiling green beans. There was the scent of steak in the broiler and baked potatoes in the oven. Russel went in and plopped down at the table while Rowley went around back of the winch and slid open the doghouse scuttle. Heat waves shimmered out like ghosts. He watched them swirling skyward, then noted dark clouds creeping over the mountains: it would rain again in a couple of hours. Descending the steps, he moved around the idling engines to the control station forward and pulled the stop handles one by one, flicking off each alarm switch just as the bell sounded, until only the generator was running. He checked the generator's glass strainer bowl for candlefish or herring, then logged the engines' shutdown time and went through forecastle's watertight door. Tuna was sprawled on his bunk asleep. The kid really stank, but Rowley smiled and touched his shoulder. "Time for supper, Tuna-man."

"...Huh? ...Oh. I'm not hungry."

"Better come up an' eat something or Justin might write a report."

"Okay... sir."

"An' you really don't have to call me sir."

"What about the captain an' Justin?"

"The captain deserves it, an' Justin expects it no matter what he says. 'Least if you want a good report."

"You mean I should suck up to Justin?"

Rowley shrugged. "Some people call that getting ahead... no pun intended."

"Is that why Russel calls him sir?"

Rowley laughed. "Guess you two ain't friends yet."

Scooby had loaded the table with thick juicy steaks and steaming potatoes, buttered green beans and big bowl of gravy. He added a stainless steel pitcher of milk and another of orange juice. There was a loaf of his own baked bread, and the buttercream-frosted cake for dessert. Russel squeezed beside Tuna as Rowley and Justin sat down, and Tuna looked too exhausted to protest as Russel piled food on his plate and poured him a glass of OJ. MacLeod came down from the wheelhouse and took his place at the head of the table. Tuna half-heartedly picked up his fork, but Russel whispered to wait.

Captain MacLeod bowed his head and murmured a brief burry prayer for all in peril on the sea. Amens were murmured all around, Tuna's after a poke from Russel, and Justin's sounded cynical. Russel ate like a starving wolf-child, while Tuna just picked at his food. This might have been the first real meal that Tuna had had in years, but despite Scooby's skills and Russel's urging, he ate very little. Finally he mumbled excuse-me and rose to go back to his bunk.

MacLeod smiled. "You've done a man's work today, lad."

"Thank you, sir."

The rain had returned around 22:00, pattering over the wheelhouse roof, running in rivulets down the windows and trickling to the deck outside. Inside it was dark, lit only by the amber eye of the radio's little pilot lamp and the glow from the galley companionway. A cigarette dangled from Rowley's lips, its ruby ember adrift in the shadows as he sat behind the big brass wheel. His elbows were propped between the spokes to steady the massive Navy night-glasses trained on the distant Grizco ship. The sky was somber twilight, and even with the heavy clouds this was as dark as it got in July in the few short hours of Alaskan night. The radium hands of the bulkhead clock glowed a ghostly green, creeping toward 00:00 when Rowley's watch was over.

Vulcan lay secure to the barge, and the barge was safely moored to the wharf. There was almost no breeze, and all seemed peaceful, yet Rowley didn't feel at peace. MacLeod might have said something about ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night.

Vulcan was quiet except for the drone of her generator, which nobody really heard except Rowley when he chose to listen. The patter of rain was soothng, conjuring visions of Jana's cabin and long lazy mornings in bed. Or making love like kids on the couch in front of a crackling fire. He should really find a polar bear rug -- an antique of course -- after all, the bear wouldn't care.

Captain MacLeod was ashore, probably up as usual with his own generational homey, Clyde McPhearson at the railroad office; another Alaskan movie-set with a moldy moosehead and a pot-bellied stove. Nocturnal in his own way, he sometimes stayed up there all night, especially during the long winter dark when Vulcan lay sheathed in ice. Maybe he and McPhearson played checkers? Rowley didn't know much about MacLeod's life, though part of that was probably due to the distance a captain kept from his crew; but there was also the gulf of age with little common ground to bridge it.

Rowley included the forecastle in his hourly rounds of the tug; the safety of any ship included her fragile flesh and blood. Scooby was snug in his bunk, sleeping the sleep of the morally righteous, the physically-fit or the mentally-challenged. Tuna was curled on his blankets, still wearing his shoes and sweat-stained jeans, his drug-soaked body trying to rest without any chemical comfort. He was almost in a fetal position, a hand protectively cupping his crotch as if afraid of losing something. Rowley had knelt and eased a blanket gently over him. Russel in his upper bunk lay peacefully naked on his back in the steamy warmth from the radiator, his shaft peeking up below his belly and blatantly half-erect. He didn't sleep with his eye patch, and his chubby face looked perfect in slumber. Rowley had gazed at him for a time in the glow down the galley companionway, then softly kissed his forehead.

Rowley set the binoculars back in their place on the wheelbox and sat gazing out at the rain: night watches had probably been lonely for as long as men had sailed the seas. There was always plenty of time in the dark to dig up things better left buried and bring them to back to haunt yourself. He wondered a moment what Jana was doing, but then put her out of his mind.

Vulcan nuzzled her barge and the tire-fenders whimpered softly. The barge moved gently against the wharf, and the old pilings swayed and creaked. If Rowley listened hard he could hear the night breeze crying through the emptiness of the old power plant where lights had once blazed and huge engines pounded. He glanced up at the gaunt skullish shell, then took a last pull on his cigarette before crushing it out in a sardine can kept on the wheelbox for MacLeod's pipe ashes.

One of the galley doors squeaked open and wet air wafted up the companion. A moment later Justin ascended. The raindrops in his confused crewcut glittered like gold in the pilot lamp's glow. Rowley wondered if he'd been outside looking for something to bitch about, or maybe trying to walk off his ghosts.

"Does your son have a racial problem?" Justin asked without preamble.

Rowley reached for another cigarette and spoke to Justin's reflection in the rain-washed window glass. "Besides being what the world seems to call one?"

Justin made an impatient noise. "Is he prejudiced?"

Rowley struck a match. "Yeah. He don't suffer fools."

Justin frowned. "There's a company rule against hazing crew members. I saw what he was doing today."

Rowley sighed smoke at Justin. "Like when he kept Tuna from bashing his head when you rammed the barge?"

"That's his job."

"Seems like he's been doing it. Tuna survived his first day."

Justin's frown only deepened. "That's another thing, Rowley. You should have reported that boy's condition as soon as he came aboard, instead of covering for him."

Rowley shrugged. "The kid was drunk. They usually are. It's a old seafaring tradition."

"So, you'll sign my report to that effect? Or I'll have to send him to Anchorage to be drug-tested next week."

"You don't have to send him."

"I won't if you sign my report that he came aboard intoxicated."

Rowley rolled his eyes. "Why not? What good is a computer if you can't fill it up with petty shit to threaten people with." He turned back to the window, looking out through Justin's indignant face. "The only time anyone reads that crap is when they need somebody to burn. Just like the skipper of the Exxon Valdez; he didn't do anything different than any other captain would have, but somebody had to be nailed up for makin' all that mess."

"I'm surprised to hear you say that, Rowley. I thought your... er, wife... was an environmental activist."

Rowley smiled a little. "One, Jana ain't my, 'er,' anything. She's her own woman with her own opinions, an' I might or might not agree with them. Two, it's none of your... an' by logical extension the company's... goddamn business what I think as long as this boat is ready to move whenever the captain wants her to. An', three, I'm surprised that some computer hasn't added up all the time you waste on writing reports an' reported you for wasting that time."

Justin scowled. "And I'm surprised that you and your son are protecting that boy. After all, he's white."

Rowley raised an eyebrow. "Kids come in all colors... just like fools. An' we're making our own evolution these days to favor fools an' endanger kids by turning them into bigger fools."

Justin snorted. "You're starting to sound like a tree-hugger."

Rowley blew smoke at Justin's face. "Trees don't give me a warm fuzzy feeling."

Justin scowled again. "This is a commercial vessel, and its sole purpose for being here is to earn a profit for the company. It's not some rite-of-passage project for turning troubled boys into men."

Rowley crushed out his cigarette. "It sure ain't worked for you."

Justin stiffened. "Who in hell do you think you are, talking to me like that? My mother was... light. I was raised white. I went to an all-white school. My friends were white, and they thought I was, too! I'm a product of my environment, Rowley. Just like you."

Rowley laughed. "Who said anything about race? I was talking about fools."

"It's always about race with you people."

"Funny, 'cause you brought it up. ...Twice so far. Something on your mind tonight besides writing another report?"

Justin seemed to consider. "This company has never had a black skipper. And... well, MacLeod has to be nearing retirement age. If he hasn't already reached it. There's a good chance I'll get this boat when he's gone."

Rowley shrugged again. "An' the company still won't have a black skipper."

Justin spread his hands. "You're a good engineer. And your son's a good deckhand. I'd like to have you both aboard when I get this boat."

"Y'all flatter us, suh," said Rowley.

Justin went on: "As a captain I could recommend Russel to the academy. He could become an officer. Maybe even a skipper someday."

"He wants to be an engineer, an' that color line's already been crossed."

Justin seemed to dither a moment. "The company will want your opinion... of me."

Rowley chuckled. "Your record speaks for itself, sir."

"Dammit, Rowley! Can't we just be friends?"

"That's all Russel was asking of Tuna... what you called hazing today."

"...Oh." Justin came to the wheel and stood behind it, fingering the spokes. He noted the uncased binoculars, then looked out across the Sound to the anchored Grizco ship. "We're supposed to help them dock in the morning and unload the generators. You think Tuna...? That's not his real name. It's..."

Again, Rowley shrugged. "If that's what he wants to call himself it's good enough for me. An' I think he'll be okay as long he gets a good night's sleep."

"I... guess withdrawal is hard."

"It's a lot harder without real friends. ...Just like life."

Justin took the binoculars and trained them on the ship. "I don't see any generators. There's nothing on deck except those big tanks."

"They might be government surplus," said Rowley. "The military packs machinery in steel containers like those so it doesn't deteriorate in storage. There's all sizes; little ones for Jeep engines, bigger ones for truck motors, and great big ones like those. They're airtight, with valves to pump in nitrogen to keep whatever's inside from rusting. They were selling World War Two Emergency Maritime Commission engines down at a place in Oakland when I was a kid. Fifty years old, but they come out those cans lookin' brand new. Sometimes they scrap the obsolete stuff an' sell the containers for storage tanks. We got one at the cabin for stove-oil." Rowley smiled. "I got most of my engine manuals by boostin' 'em off the containers they stored at the old Navy yard in Oakland. There's a little box welded on the side. Just takes a wrench to open it. 'Course, all I wanted was the marine engine books." He glanced out at the ship. "A stationary engine for a generator is set up different... electric throttle an' govenor, radiator cooled."

Justin looked thoughtful. "You certainly know a lot."

"Guess I'll take that as a compliment. But most of it's obsolete knowledge."

Justin glanced at the clock. "Are you going to take your son's watch?"

"Yeah, I ain't sleepy."

"Well... I'm not either," said Justin. "I'll take it for him if you want. ...And I won't write a report about it."

"Thanks, Justin." Rowley got up. "Maybe I'll go for a walk ashore."

Justin fingered the wheel again. "Goodnight, Rowley. ...And maybe you're right about all those reports."