Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone Page B

to sleep. It had happened to him before, in childhood—absolute fear succeeded by sleep. When he woke up in the rack he put on his gear, climbed up on deck into the sleet and went to work. The captain of the boat, an active member of the Alaska Independence Party, had a procedure for men demanding to quit once aboard, which was the impulse of every man jack who had never been at sea before. Quitters had to wait until an inbound boat was sighted. The captain would then sell them a drysuit. The price of the drysuit was deducted from the pay due them, and the price was high. They wore the drysuit to jump overboard into Norton Sound, and assuming they got pulled out successfully the rest of their pay—plus—went for the other skipper’s trouble. For the genuinely ill, Brookman’s captain might provide a breeches buoy. Appendicitis might eventually get you a Coast Guard helicopter. Brookman had other tough jobs, at sea and ashore, and he had done time in jail for no good reason.
    The college’s midnight music station was playing Chet Baker’s version of “But Beautiful.” As he poured himself a last drink, his wife’s cat, Fafnir, came into his study and sat down on the sofa, a privilege he was not allowed when the mistress was at home. Fafnir looked at Brookman as though he’d like Chet Baker explained to him. Brookman leaned over and gently brushed him off. Fafnir seemed to like music but he was very stupid. He had to be brushed off things gently because he did not command cat-like grace and was capable of falling on his ear.
    Fafnir licked his whiskers and promptly climbed back on the cushion, knowing Brookman lacked his wife’s authority and persistence. Persian cats are dumb, Brookman thought, but some possessed mystical powers, and Fafnir was one of these. He could summon the presence of distant people from far places and reflect them in his vapid blue eyes. On this evening Brookman looked into Fafnir’s eyes and saw there Ellie and his daughter, Sophia. Behind them, a snowfield stretched to the ends of the earth. In late summer the field would be gold with wheat, but now there was snow and also the biggest feedlot anywhere near White Lake, Saskatchewan. Ellie and Sophia were wearing little starched caps, looking like a couple of local Mennonites, which was essentially what they were. Sophia would be spending her days being instructed in her mother’s faith, relearning the Gothic alphabet and reciting edifying verses in High German. There they dwelled in an eternal Sabbath.
    Perceiving them in the occult cat’s eyes, Brookman was suddenly overcome with terror. What if they’re dead, the plane’s wings icing, the pilots talking shop. What if Justice was on its way, striking as it will at the innocent and good? Chet Baker was singing “Moonlight in Vermont.”
    Brookman had met Ellie Bezeidenhout at his first teaching job, which was in Nebraska, where he came from. He had got the job after his Bhutan book was commissioned and completed. The position was at what could only be called a teachers’ college, formerly a state normal school, which was now naturally called a university. Certainly not a normal, a term that opened vast caverns of misunderstanding. On one of his first days there he had picked up the course catalogue. The place may have been a normal, but as a university it was quite absurd. Its directory featured maniacally joyous photographs of faculty members beside their names and degrees that made them appear as a band of merry pranksters who did animal voices on a kids’ cartoon show—
quack, baaa, oink.
    One faculty entry stopped him:
     
Professor of Anthropology Dr. Elsa Bezeidenhout, Ph.D.
B.S., Nazareth College, Saskatoon, SK
M.S., University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC
Ph.D., University of California, Davis, CA
     
    Elsa Bezeidenhout looked like a teenager. She was very blond, as—he later learned—was everyone in White Lake, SK. Her smile was wide but her face was long and her