There, in the window of a freshly painted clapboard building, just off the road, a bewitching and seductive red neon sign spoke to him in a universal tongue: COCA-COLA, it announced, COCA-COLA, and he went faint with gastric epiphany.

He knew them. Americans. They killed each other over dinner, shot one another for sport, mugged old ladies in the street. Help like that he didn't need.

I'd read somewhere that nine out of ten adults in Alaska had a drinking problem. I could believe it. Snow, ice, sleet, wind, the dark night of the soul: what else were you supposed to do?