Tales of the City 03 - Further Tales of the City

‘Fraid not. I’m just a construction worker.”
    Just a construction worker! Jesus God, had he died and gone to heaven? Why hadn’t someone told him there was a place he could go to slow dance with a construction worker?
    “What do you do for … this … in Salome?” Michael asked.
    The man pulled away from him just enough for his smile to show. “I go to Phoenix.” He leaned down and kissed Michael clumsily on the edge of his mouth. “You’re a nice guy,” he said.
    “You too,” said Michael.
    They danced for another minute in silence. Then the man spoke huskily into Michael’s ear. “Look … would you like to make love tonight?”
    Make love. Not have sex. Not get it on. Michael’s voice caught in his throat. “I’m actually … here with a friend. He’s just … off right now.”
    “Oh.” The disappointment in his voice warmed Michael to the marrow.
    “I could give you my phone number. Maybe, if you’re ever in San Francisco …”
    “That’s O.K.”
    “Never go there, huh?”
    “Not yet,” said the man.
    “I think you’d like it. I could show you around.”
    “I don’t travel much,” said the man.
    Michael decided against suggesting a trip to Salome. “Look,” he said, “would you believe me if I told you that this is better than all the sex I’ve had this year?”
    The man grinned. “Yeah?”
    “Infinitely,” said Michael.
    “I’m stepping all over your …”
    “I don’t care. I love it.”
    The man’s chest rumbled as he laughed.
    “You’re doin’ just great,” said Michael. “Just keep holding me, O.K.?”
    “Sure.”
    So Michael settled in again, lost in a sweet stranger’s arms until Bill came back with the poppers.

Over the Glacier
    W HEN THE SAGAFJORD REACHED JUNEAU, PRUE and Luke went ashore with the other passengers and explored the tiny frontier town—a place heralded by the local chamber of commerce as “America’s largest capital city.”
    “It must be a joke,” said Prue, puzzling over the brochure in her hands.
    Luke shook his head. “They mean land mass.”
    “But how …?”
    “It covers more square miles than any other capital city. Everything’s out of whack up here. It’s further from here to the Aleutians, at the other end of the state, than it is from San Francisco to New York.”
    Prue thought for a moment. “That’s a little scary, somehow.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know. It makes you seem so much smaller, I guess. Like the landscape could … swallow you up. You could just disappear without a trace.”
    Luke smiled at her. “People do. That’s the point.”
    Prue shivered. “Not to me, it isn’t.”
    “Wait till you see the glacier.”
    “What glacier?”
    Luke slipped his arm around her waist. “I thought we’d rent a float plane and fly over the ice fields. They say it’s as close to God as you’ll ever get.”
    Prue looked troubled. “Can’t He just come to us?”
    Luke touched the tip of her nose. “What’s the matter, my love?”
    “Nothing … I just … well, those tiny planes and my tummy don’t always get along.”
    “It’s just forty-five minutes.”
    He pulled her closer until Prue relented. In many ways, she realized, he had already become her talisman against harm.
The float plane skimmed the surface of the water like a low-flying dragonfly, then lifted them into the slate-gray sky above Juneau. Besides Prue and Luke, there were four other passengers: a youngish couple from Buenos Aires and two lady librarians, traveling together.
    Luke sat directly behind the pilot and conversed with him inaudibly, while Prue watched the alien world beneath her turn from dark blue to dark green to white. No, gray. A pale gray plateau as far as the eye could see—a living entity, sinuous as lava at the edges, brutal and beautiful and unexplainably terrifying.
    It relieved her somewhat to see that the glacier had boundaries. Splintering and hissing, it tumbled into a dark sea where the water crackled like electricity. As the float plane dipped lower, Prue peered into fissures so brilliantly blue that they seemed unnatural, blue as the lethal heart of a nuclear power plant.
    “Look, Luke … that color!”
    But her lover was deep in conversation with the pilot, their voices drowned out by the engine sounds.
    Prue leaned closer. “Luke …”
    He didn’t hear her. He continued to interrogate the pilot, a rapt expression on his face. Prue could make out only two words. Oddly enough, the pilot repeated