Chapter 24: Midnight Sun

The jeweler picked up the string.

She didn't laugh. She'd clearly seen worse.

She stretched it along a steel ruler, squinted through her loupe, and wrote a number on a pad.

"Ten and a half," she said. "Big hands."

"He hauls boxes."

"Pilot?"

"Captain. Sometimes first officer. Depends on the day."

She took a plain band out of the tray. Brushed gold, heavy, no stone.

"Anything inside?"

I thought about it for a long time.

Then I told her.

She wrote it down. She didn't ask what it meant.

"Three weeks," she said.

It took two.

The barbecue was the twentieth of June.

Every year Bering Freight shuts down the ramp in front of hangar two for one night and grills until morning.

In June the sun doesn't really go down, and nobody can sleep anyway.

The ramp crew rolled out three oil-drum grills.

Pop took over the biggest one before anybody could stop him.

He'd brought sausage and peppers, and a pan of lasagna the size of a car door.

He stood over the coals in his O'Hare union jacket.

The hangar lead tried to help.

Pop handed him the tongs and took them back two minutes later.

"You flip it like it owes you money."

"That's what you said to Haldane."

"I say it to everybody. Nobody listens."

Tommy was running the second grill, in a hangar jacket with his new inspector's patch already sewn on crooked.

The landlady sat in a lawn chair beside Pop's grill with her one cigarette, which tonight she'd lit at midnight instead of five.

"Special occasion," she said, when I raised my eyebrows.

She knew.

Everybody knew, except Ryder.

The kid from Fairbanks knew.

The dispatcher knew.

The chief pilot knew, and had told me that if I did this on her ramp it had better be good.

At eleven-thirty the sun was still up over the inlet.

It hung low and gold over the water and turned the Chugach pink.

Every freighter on the ramp threw a shadow half a mile long.

Sunny was wearing her flight jacket, which was getting short in the sleeves.

She'd been patrolling the ramp all night with a walkie-talkie the dispatcher had loaned her.

Every few minutes it crackled.

"Lookout to Captain," she'd say, very serious. "He's at the pie table. He's eating pie. Over."

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