At the corner of Main Street, they passed the famous signpost with a dozen different placards showing the distances from there to everywhere else. Los Angeles was 2,871 miles away, the Arctic Circle a mere 141 miles. A couple of tourists were posing for pictures underneath it. Bathsheba craned her neck to get a better look.
“Get me Harley on the horn,” he said, as the van pulled out of the town proper. The lights of Nome hadn’t been much, but the night enveloped them the moment they left. Rebekah called up his brother on the car’s speakerphone, and Charlie heard the ring tone just before he got a burst of static, followed by dead air. Same as he’d been getting for the past couple of days.
“Goddammit!” he said, slapping his palm against the steering wheel.
“It’s an island in the middle of nowhere,” Rebekah said, hanging up. “I don’t know why you ever expected to get any reception.”
“I’m hungry,” Bathsheba said from the backseat.
“We should have eaten in town,” Rebekah said to Charlie. “Now you’ll have to pull over at that roadhouse we passed on the Sound.”
Charlie was about to protest, but he realized that he was hungry, too—it was just in his nature to be contrary—and it was going to be a long drive back. The road between Nome and Port Orlov, if that’s what you could call it, ranged from asphalt to gravel to hardpan—a compacted layer of dirt just beneath the topsoil—and most of it could be bumpy and rutted and washed out even in summer.
And this was sure as hell not summer.
In the snowy wastes around them, it was hard to see much, but mired in the moonlit fields there were old, abandoned gold dredges squatting like mastodons. Occasionally, you could come across one of these that was still in operation—growling like thunder as it devoured rocks and brush and muck in a never-ending quest for the gold that might be mixed up in it. Even more eerily, railroad engines were stranded in the frozen tundra—left to rust on sunken tracks that had lost their purpose the moment the gold ran out. Their smokestacks, red with age, were the tallest things in the treeless fields.
“There it is,” Rebekah said, pointing to the parking-lot lights of the roadhouse—a prefab structure on pylons—perched beside the Nome seawall. The granite wall, erected in the early fifties by the Army Corps of Engineers, was over three thousand feet long and sixty-five feet wide at the base, and it stood above what had once been known as Gold Beach, a place where the prospectors and miners of 1899 had discovered an almost miraculous supply of gold literally lying on the sands, just waiting to be collected.
“You coming in?” Rebekah asked, but they both knew Charlie wouldn’t want to have to climb in and out of the van again. Pulling up onto the gravel, he parked and said, “Bring me a sandwich and get the thermos filled with tea. Peppermint if they’ve got it. And don’t take forever.”
The sisters got out of the car, buried under their long coats, and scurried up the ramp. Since he’d had no luck reaching Harley’s cell phone, he tried calling Eddie’s number, then Russell’s, but they weren’t working, either. What was happening on St. Peter’s Island? Had they found a safe harbor for the Kodiak, and a secluded cave to hide out in? More important, had they started digging and found anything yet? Charlie had high hopes, but not a lot of confidence; he hadn’t exactly dispatched the A-Team and he knew it.
Waves were crashing on the breakwater out beyond the roadhouse. After the gold had been discovered on the beach—in such quantities that 2 million dollars’ worth was gathered in the summer of 1899 alone—steamships from San Francisco and Seattle had carried so many eager prospectors to Nome that a tent city had soon stretched thirty miles along the shore, all the way to Cape Rodney. Charlie had seen pictures of it hanging on the walls of the Nugget Inn in town. Mile after mile of canvas and stretched hides, shacks and lean-tos, all packed with desperate men and women struggling to make their fortunes. He felt the weight of the cross in his pocket and wondered how much had really changed since then? Alaska was still the Wild West in many ways—probably the last of it that was left—where loners and free spirits, people down on their luck or looking to find it in the first place, could come and make a fresh start.
While he waited in the warm car, he kneaded the tops of his dead legs. He couldn’t feel anything below the groin, but he knew that it was a good idea to keep the circulation going and the muscles from atrophying. Everything happened for a reason, that’s what he’d had to keep telling himself every day since the accident, and if this was God’s way of bringing him back into the fold, then so be it.