McMurtry’s Bucket List

McMurtry is tying flies when he first hears the helicopter approaching up the sound. His ears may be sprouting snowy tufts to match what hair peeks out from under his cap, but they’re as keen as they were sixty years ago.

Especially for the sound of a chopper — it still sets him on edge. He’s startled enough to nick himself on the hook, and sucks a bead of blood from his finger. Sweet. The taste of being alive. But choppers meant trouble back then, and they still mean trouble now.

If it was anyone with proper business in this neck of the woods — his neck of the woods — they’d be coming in on the old float plane. Choppers mean city folk, and city folk mean trouble.

“Mr. McMurtry?” Suit #1 enquires, proffering a sun-starved hand as he squelches a shoe from the mud.

“Who’s askin’?” grunts McMurtry, fists wedged in vest pockets. His wary question is only for show. He knows who they are, and why they’ve come. And knows that they know full well who he is.

The letters have been arriving on and off for months. Barbara drops them off with the rest of his bundle from the mail flight, and he promptly files them in the belly of the wood stove after a cursory and contemptuous look at the franking mark.

“Joe Alvarez, Department of Health and Human Services, and this is…”

“Agent Wendy Claybourne, FBI,” she interrupts, with a touch of impatience.

FBI? This is getting serious, McMurtry thinks to himself, though the salt and pepper twists of his eyebrows give him away.

“You received the letters?” she asks, though it’s more of a statement.

“Letters? Got one of ’em. Something about a bioreserve? Whatever in hell that is.”

“Exactly, Mr. McMurtry. The federal authorities…” — McMurtry hawks and spits, quite coincidentally, of course — “… have taken this area of Alaska under government control. To protect and isolate the wildlife population.”

“And as we said in the letters,” Agent Claybourne places snarky emphasis on the ‘s’, “human habitation of the Farrow Sound area is no longer permitted except by federal permit from June 30th. Which is next week.”

McMurtry has known all along that this day would come, though he hadn’t expected it all to happen so fast. And he knows why. Knows better than any of them whitecoat badge-wearers down in DC. He’s seen the critters’ unnatural, bloodshot eyes through the sight of his rifle. Followed the foam flecking their tracks.

“As you are aware, Mr. McMurtry, this land remains federal property of the biological research station, and the lease granted to the current occupants…”

“Expires within a period of ninety-nine years from this date, August 20th, 1967, or whenever the federal authorities should see fit within the purview of the powers vested therein,” McMurtry recites from memory. “I’m not some backwoods simpleton, see?”

It’s the turn of his visitors to betray their thoughts through their eyes.

“Of course, there is a generous compensation package available for those relocated,” Alvarez resumes.

“Sign here,” says Claybourne, snapping a pen and a ream of letterheaded papers from her case.

“Your other neighbors,” Alvarez hesitates for a moment over the word — can anyone really have a neighbor out in this wilderness? — “have already made their arrangements and vacated their, our, land.”

Not all of them, thinks McMurtry. Not the ones who got sick. Appleby was closest to the old bio station — he was the first to go down with it. Bitten by a marten, he said. Kendall not long after. That was when the rest of them started taking the checks and bailing out.

Not McMurtry, though. He’d been packed off from his homeland by the government before, trooped meekly up onto that transport plane. He’d left Applebys and Kendalls behind in the unmarked swamps of his youth. Heard their screams.

It was here he’d found silence. A place to end his days, he used to think.

“As I say,” Good Cop Alvarez cajoles, “it’s a very generous package. Perhaps there’s some place you always wanted to move to, or visit?”

McMurtry thinks for a moment, and remembers something, an idea he once had.

“Well,” he says, “I guess there’s no real choice, is there?”

“Exactly,” says Claybourne. “Sign here.”

He signs the outstretched papers with an elegant flourish, and tucks the check into his vest pocket.

“By the 30th,” comes the final, barked reminder as they turn and squelch back to their chopper.

A week later, and McMurtry is in Anchorage, climbing aboard the biggest plane he’s seen since he was a shit-scared 19-year-old kid.

“Looking forward to Seattle, then?” the flight attendant asks, as she hands him an orange juice and a packet of peanuts.

“Oh, no,” McMurtry replies. “I’m on a connecting flight — off to the other Washington. DC. The Capitol and all that.”

“Long way from Alaska!”

“Especially for an old-timer like me,” he chuckles, “but I always wanted to visit our fine nation’s capital, you know. Visit Congress, all those government buildings. Always been on my bucket list, so to speak. And you never know how long you’ve got left at my age.”

“Oh, I’m sure you have plenty more journeys ahead of you yet.”

“I dunno. This might be the last, before I call it quits for good, you know?”

The next day McMurtry is standing in line for the guided tour of Congress. It’s already hot by 10 in the morning — he’s sweating and rubbing his eyes.

“So, ladies and gentlemen,” the guide announces, “today you will be getting up close and personal with the seat of our national government, seeing firsthand the representatives of the greatest democracy on the planet. I’ll bet you can’t wait to head inside.”

No, thinks McMurtry to himself, I really can’t.

He remembers again the last thing Appleby said to him, when the sores started bleeding and he was trying to suck them dry.

“It’s the darndest thing, McMurtry. It tastes kind of… sweet.”

They all troop in past the security guards, and McMurtry starts to cough, like he’s got typhoid or something.