The Park Post was the Park equivalent of jungle drums, putting the father in touch with the fisherman, the fisherman in touch with his banker, the banker in touch with the deadbeat, the deadbeat in touch with the Brown Jug Liquor Store. During cold snaps, when the mercury hit minus double digits and the wind howled down out of the Quilaks, forcing everyone to huddle inside around the woodstove, they turned on the radio to hear Bobby Clark tell them that George was holding their Costco mail order at the hangar until it warmed up enough to hitch the trailer to the snow machine, or that their husband had been weathered in on a caribou hunt ("a likely story," Bobby's invariable comment), or that their daughter had just become engaged, married, or pregnant.

"And last but not least," Bobby said, tossing another crumpled scrap, "Billy and Annie Mike are throwing a pot-latch at the school gym this Thursday afternoon in honor of their new son, Cale. Everybody come on by and meet him and have something to eat, and there might even be a dance or two. Okay, time for some music, and none of that wishy-washy, weak-kneed, warbly boy band stuff we got going around today, no sir." Bobby flipped open a case and put a CD in the player. "Here's the Temptations' Seventeen Greatest Hits coming at you, except I'm going to skip to the second cut. Why? Because it's my favorite, and because I can! Bye!" He flipped off the mike and punched the play button, and the strains of "My Girl" came out of speakers almost as tall as Jim was, four of them, mounted one to each wall of the room.

"It's enough to make you believe in stereo," Jim said to Dinah.

Bobby wheeled around. "Jim Chopin! As your chopper didn't fill up my show with a bunch of goddamn background noise, I have to assume you were reduced to driving in."

"Yeah, I borrowed Billy's truck."

Bobby's eyes widened. "Holy shit! He let you borrow his new Explorer?" He zipped to the window in his wheelchair, which, given the way he operated it most of the time, seemed like it was jet-propelled. Jim stepped nimbly out of the way of the wheels.

It was easy to remember that Bobby was black—all you had to do was look at him—and, as such, part of a minority measured in the single digits in the Park. It was, however, sometimes hard to remember that he had lost both his legs from the knee on down in a Southeast Asian jungle before he was twenty. His personal history was hazy in between his time in a veteran's rehab clinic and the time he appeared on scene in the Park somewhere around 1978, but whatever he'd been doing in the interim had to have been lucrative, because he'd had enough cash in hand to stake a claim on Squaw Candy Creek, build his A-frame, stock it with enough electronic equipment to keep NASA in business, and buy a vehicle each for air, land, sea, and snow, specially modified, in Bobby's exact phrase, "to get a no-legged gimp anywhere he wants to go in as short a time as possible." He was now the NOAA observer for the Park, calling in weather observations twice a day. Other than that, he seemed to subsist on barter and air, a neat trick, since two years ago Dinah had moved in with him, and a year after that, she presented him with Katya. Dinah, a budding videographer, wasn't pulling in a lot of money herself.