Wildfire at Larch Creek

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

As Macy Tyler prepared for it, she regretted saying yes to a date with Brett Harrison. She regretted not breaking the date the second after she’d made it. And she hoped that by the time the evening with Brett Harrison was over she wouldn’t regret not dying of some exotic Peruvian parrot flu earlier in the day.

Just because they’d both lived in Larch Creek, Alaska their entire lives was not reason enough for her to totally come apart. Was it?

Actually it was nothing against Brett particularly. But she knew she was still borderline psychotic about men. It was her first date since punching out her fiancé on the altar, and the intervening six months had not been sufficient for her to be completely rational on the subject.

After fussing for fifteen minutes, she gave herself up as a lost cause. Macy hanked her dark, dead straight, can’t-do-crap-with-it hair back in a long ponytail, put on a b*a just because—it was mostly optional with her build, and pulled on a t-shirt. Headed for the door, she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror and saw which t-shirt she’d grabbed: Helicopter Pilots Get It Up Faster.

She raced back to her bedroom and switched it out for: People Fly Airplanes, Pilots Fly Helicopters. And knocked apart her ponytail in the process. Hearing Brett’s pickup on the gravel street, she left her hair down, grabbed a denim jacket, and headed for the door.

Macy hurried out and didn’t give Brett time to climb down and open the door of his rattletrap Ford truck for her, if he’d even thought of it.

“Look nice, Macy,” was all the greeting he managed which made her feel a little better about the state of her own nerves.

He drove into town, which was actually a bit ridiculous, but he’d insisted he would pick her up. Town was four blocks long and she only lived six blocks from the center of it. They rolled down Buck Street, up Spitz Lane, and down Dave Court to Jack London Avenue—which had the grandest name but was only two blocks long because of a washout at one end and the back of the pharmacy-gas station at the other.

This north side of town was simply “The Call” because all of the streets were named for characters from The Call of the Wild. French Pete and Jack London had sailed the Alaskan seaways together. So, as streets were added, the founders had made sure they were named after various of London’s books. Those who lived in “The Fang” to the south were stuck with characters from White Fang for their addresses including: Grey Beaver Boulevard, Weedon Way, and Lip-lip Lane.

Macy wished that she and French Pete’s mate Hilma—he went on to marry an Englishwoman long after he’d left and probably forgotten Larch Creek—hadn’t been separated by a century of time; the woman must have really been something.

Macy tried to start a conversation with Brett, but rapidly discovered that she’d forgotten to bring her brain along on this date and couldn’t think of a thing to say.

They hit the main street at the foot of Hal’s Folly—the street was only the length of the gas station, named for the i***t who drove a dogsled over thin ice and died for it in London’s book. It was pure irony that the street was short and steep. When it was icy, the Folly could send you shooting across the town’s main street and off into Larch Creek—which was much more of a river than a creek. The street froze in early October, but the river was active enough that you didn’t want to go skidding out onto the ice before mid-November.

Brett drove them up past the contradictory storefronts which were all on the “high side” of the road—the “low side” and occasionally the road itself disappeared for a time during the spring floods. The problem was that almost all of the buildings were from the turn of the century, but half were from the turn of this century and half were from the turn before. The town had languished during the 1900s and only experienced a rebirth over the last four decades.

Old log cabins and modern stick-framed buildings with generous windows stood side by side. Mason’s Galleria was an ultramodern building of oddly-shaded glass and no right angles. One of the town mysteries was how Mason kept the art gallery in business when Larch Creek attracted so few tourists. Macy’s favorite suggestion was that the woman—who was always dressed in the sharpest New York clothes and spoke so fast that no one could understand her—was actually a front for the Alaskan mafia come to rule Larch Creek.

This newest, most modern building in town was tight beside the oldest and darkest structure.

French Pete’s, where Brett parked his truck, was the anchor at the center of town and glowered out at all of the other structures. The heavy-log, two-story building dominated Parisian Way—as the main street of Larch Creek was named by the crazy French prospector who founded the town in the late-1800s. He’d named the trading post after himself and the town after the distinctive trees that painted the surrounding hills yellow every fall. French Pete had moved on, but a Tlingit woman he’d brought with him stayed and bore him a son after his departure. It was Hilma who had made sure the town thrived.

There had been a recent upstart movement to rename the town because having the town of Larch Creek on Larch Creek kept confusing things. “Rive Gauche” was the current favorite during heavy drinking at French Pete’s because the town was on the “left bank” of Larch Creek. If you were driving in on the only road, the whole town was on the left bank; like the heart of Paris. The change had never made it past the drinking stage, so most folk just ignored the whole topic, but it persisted on late Saturday nights.

Macy took strength from the town. She had loved it since her first memories. And just because she’d been dumb enough to agree to a date with Brett, she wasn’t going to blame Larch Creek for that.

Well, not much. Perhaps, if there were more than five hundred folk this side of Liga Pass, there would be a single man that she could date who didn’t know every detail of her life. She still clung onto the idea that she’d find a decent man somewhere among the chaff.

Dreamer!

That wasn’t entirely fair. After all, some of them, like Brett, were decent enough.

The problem was that she, in turn, knew every detail of their lives. Macy had gone to school with each of them for too many years and knew them all too well. A lot of her classmates left at a dead run after graduation and were now up in Fairbanks, though very few went further afield. The thirty-mile trip back to Larch Creek from “the city” might as well be three hundred for how often they visited. The first half of the trip was on Interstate 4 which was kept open year round. But once you left the main highway, the road narrowed and twisted ten miles over Liga Pass with harsh hairpins and little forgiveness. It didn’t help that it was closed as often as it was open in the winter months. The last five miles were through the valley’s broad bottom land.

The town was four blocks long from the Unitarian church, which was still a movie theater on Friday and Saturday nights, at the north end of town to the grange at the south end. The houses crawled up the hills to the east. And the west side of the fast-running, glacier-fed river, where the forested hills rose in an abrupt escarpment, belonged to bear, elk, and wolf. Only Old Man Parker had a place on that side, unable to cross during fall freeze-up or spring melt-out. But he and his girlfriend didn’t come into town much even when the way was open across running water or thick ice.

The main road ran north to meet the highway to Fairbanks, and in the other direction ended five miles south at Tena. Tena simply meant “trail” in the Tanana dialect and added another couple dozen families to the area. The foot trail out of Tena lead straight toward the massif of Denali’s twenty-thousand foot peak which made the valley into a picture postcard.

Macy did her best to draw strength from the valley and mountain during the short drive to French Pete’s. Once they hit Parisian Way, a bit of her brain returned. She even managed a polite inquiry about Brett’s construction business and was pretty pleased at having done so. Thankfully they were close, so his answer was kept brief.

“Mostly it’s about shoring up people’s homes before winter hits. There are only a couple new homes a year and Danny gets most of those.” He sounded bitter, it was a rivalry that went back to the senior prom and Cheryl Dahl, the prettiest Tanana girl in town.

The fact that Brett and Danny drank together most Saturdays and Cheryl had married Mike Nichol—the one she’d accompanied to the prom—and had three equally beautiful children in Anchorage had done nothing to ease their epic rivalry.

Or perhaps it was because Brett’s blue pickup had a bumper sticker that said America Is Under Construction and Danny’s blue truck had a drawing of his blue bulldozer that read Vogon Constructor Fleet—specialist in BIG jobs.

“Small towns,” Macy said in the best sympathetic tone she could muster. It was difficult to not laugh in his face, because it was so small-town of them.

“This place looks wackier every time,” they’d stopped in front of French Pete’s. “Carl has definitely changed something, just can’t pick it out.”

Macy looked up in surprise. The combined bar and restaurant appeared no different to her. Big dark logs made a structure two-stories high with a steep roof to shed the snow. A half dozen broad steps led up to a deep porch that had no room for humans; it was jammed with Carl Deville’s collection of “stuff.”

“Your junk. My stuff,” Carl would always say when teased about it by some unwary tourist. After such an unthinking comment, they were then as likely to find horseradish in their turkey sandwich as not.

There was the broken Iditarod sled from Vic Hornbeck’s failed race bid in the late 1970s piled high with dropped elk antlers. An Elks Lodge hat from Poughkeepsie, New York still hung over one handle of the sled. The vintage motorcycle of the guy who had come through on his way to solo climb up Denali from the north along Muldrow Glacier and descend to the south by Cassin Ridge was still there, buried under eleven years of detritus. Whether he made the crossing and didn’t come back or died on the mountain, no one ever knew.

“Man asked me to hold it for him a bit,” Carl would offer in his deep laconic style when asked by some local teen who lusted after the wheels. “Don’t see no need to hustle it out from under him. ‘Sides, the baby girl he left in Carol Swenson’s belly whilst he was here is ten now. Mayhaps she’ll want it at sixteen.”

There was an old wooden lobster pot—that Macy had never understood because the Gulf of Alaska to the south wasn’t all that much closer than the Beaufort Sea to the north and the pot looked like it was from Maine—with a garden gnome-sized bare-breasted hula dancer standing inside it; her ceramic paint worn to a patina by too many Alaskan winters spent topless and out of doors. A hundred other objects were scattered about including worn-out gold panning equipment, a couple of plastic river kayaks with “For Rent” signs that might have once been green and sky blue before the sun leached out all color—though she’d never seen them move. And propped in the corner was the wooden propeller from Macy’s first plane that she’d snapped when her wheel had caught in an early hole in the permafrost up near Nenana. That was before she’d switched to helicopters. She’d spent a week there before someone could fly in a replacement.

“Looks the same to me.”

Brett eyed her strangely as he held open the door.

And just like that she knew she’d blown what little hope this date had right out of the water. Brett had been trying to make conversation and she’d done her true-false test. It wasn’t like she was anal, it was more like everyone simply treated her as if she was.

Inside was dark, warm, and just as cluttered. A century or more of oddbits had been tacked to the walls: old photos, snowshoes strung with elk hide, a rusted circular blade several feet across from the old sawmill that had closed back in the sixties, and endless other bits and pieces that Carl and his predecessors had gathered. He claimed direct lineage back to French Pete Deville, through Hilma. It wasn’t hard to believe; Carl looked like he’d been born behind the bar. Looked like he might die there too.

The fiction section of the town library lined one long wall of French Pete’s. Most of the non-fiction was down at the general store except for religion, movies, and anything to do with mechanics. They were down in the movie house-church’s lobby, the mechanical guides because the pharmacy-gas station was next door.

Though Carl didn’t have any kin, Natalie, the ten-year-old daughter of Carol Swenson and the mountain climber with the left-behind motorcycle, was sitting up on a high barstool playing chess against Carl. It was a place she could be found most days when there wasn’t school and Carol was busy over at the general store and post office. She was such a fixture that over the last few years everyone had pretty much come to expect Natty to take over French Pete’s someday.

Macy scanned the tables hoping that no one would recognize her, fat chance in a community the size of Larch Creek.

And then she spotted the big table back in the corner beneath the moose-antler chandelier. It was packed.

Oh crap! She’d forgotten it was Sunday.

Too late to run for cover, she guided Brett in the other direction to a table in the corner. She managed to sit with her back to her father’s expression of mock horror. That she could deal with.

But it would have been easier if Mom hadn’t offered a smile and a wink.