Spoils of the dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “Dom,” Jeff said in a resigned voice. “To what do I owe the honor?”

  “Just starting the day off right, Jeff.” She made even that innocuous statement sound seductive. She strolled over to stand next to the man confronting Berglund. A more unlikely couple would have been impossible to find. She was perhaps in her early forties and he looked at least twice her age and a quarter her weight. She stood erect, shoulders back, those amazing breasts thrust out in front of her like bazookas taking aim, skin glowing with health and vigor. He was thin to the point of emaciation, stooped over a chest caved in by age, all exposed skin freckled with liver spots, only wisps of colorless hair remaining in the barest fringe above his ears. His eyes were red and watery with swollen lids and his right hand was curled arthritically over the head of a massive diamond willow cane with a braced handle that looked as if it weighed as much as he did. His remaining energy was directed in what could only be described as a homicidal glare at Erik Berglund. His voice was high and raspy and vicious. “You ignorant lout, you puppy, you—you—” Spittle flew as the old man spluttered to a halt.

  “Hey, old man,” Berglund said, impervious. He gave the woman a long look, head to foot, and his mouth curled up on one side. “Domenica. Looking good, as always.”

  She gave as good as she got, a sultry once-over that made Liam glad it had passed him by because he was afraid of what would have happened if it hadn’t. “Erik.” She turned to the older man. “Leave it, Hilary. Erik’s, quote, findings, end quote, will never hold up. No point wasting your energy in a quarrel that will never go anywhere. RPetCo needs you in fighting form for when we get to court.”

  Liam was standing a little behind and to the right of the group and he could see everyone’s expression but Jeff’s pretty well. He saw Erik’s lethal grin flash out at both opponents impartially, and there was a broad chuckle in his voice when he replied. “Whatever makes you sleep better at night, Dom.” He winked. “I’m always, ah, up, for that.”

  Dom, or Domenica, was not one to be outfaced or even the least little bit embarrassed. She smiled back at Berglund. Jesus. Liam hadn’t seen such a blatant come-on since watching J.Lo strip on screen. “I seldom repeat myself, Erik.”

  Erik’s beam edged into a knowing smirk. “More than three or four times, anyway.”

  Dom slid her arm through Hilary’s and urged him past Erik and Jeff. “About opening time, isn’t it, Jeff?” She caught sight of Liam and paused, infinitesimally, but it was long enough for Liam to feel an interest that was as searing as it was brief. He found himself blowing out a breath after she had passed by and looked up to find Berglund’s knowing gaze on him. “Careful there, dude. She will eat you alive.”

  “I’m a married man,” Liam said.

  “Keep telling yourself that.”

  It took a moment for his vision to clear completely and when it did he saw the old fart with the walker was a step behind the old fart with the cane. He glanced at Liam in passing and slammed to a halt. “Trooper.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Recognized you from your photo. Blue Jay Jefferson. I’m kind of a fixture in these parts.”

  “Sergeant Liam Campbell. Nice to meet you, sir.”

  “You were the cop who figured out the prop murder,” Jefferson said. “Tricky.” He held up his left hand. The middle finger had been broken between the first and second joints and healed crookedly. “Made that mistake once myself. Easy enough to do when you’re not paying attention.”

  Liam wondered what Wy would say when he told her that.

  “You’re out of uniform,” Jefferson said.

  “It’s at the cleaners in Anchorage,” Liam said.

  “Hey, Blue Jay.” Erik saluted Jefferson with the growler, hopped into a dusty Ford F-150 old enough to be carrying its own cane, and chugged out of the lot.

  Blue Jay Jefferson stomped past with his walker to Backdraft, where the woman was holding the door open for him.

  “Who the hell is that?” Liam said.

  “I’m guessing you mean her,” Jeff said, heavy on the irony. “That’s Domenica Garland. President and CEO of RPetCo Alaska.”

  “Oh.” It was a weak response and Liam knew it. Trying to recover some portion of the genitalia that had followed Domenica Garland into the brewpub, he said, “Who are the old farts?”

  Jeff sighed. “The one who was foaming at the mouth is Hilary Houten. Also an archeologist. He and Erik have, ah, professional differences. Blue Jay Jefferson is so far as I know the oldest living inhabitant of the Bay who was born here, white or Native. He knows where all the bodies are buried, including the ones he buried himself.” He changed the subject, by chance or design Liam couldn’t tell. “What does your wife think of the house?”

  Liam thought of the three-bedroom, four-bathroom house on the edge of a 600-foot bluff that overlooked even more of the Bay than the brewpub did. “She’ll see it today.”

  “My wife would have killed me dead if I’d bought a house before she’d had a chance to look at it.”

  Liam smiled. “If it’s clean and warm and there is hot water, Wy will be fine with it. She cares more about what she flies than where she sleeps.”

  “That’s right, you said she was a pilot.” Jeff cocked his head. “Commercial?”

  “Bush. Owned her own air taxi in Newenham. Sold up when this job came along.”

  “When does she get here?”

  Liam looked out the window at the clear skies beyond. The Bay was flat as a skating rink. “This afternoon, if the weather holds.”

  And if Wy hadn’t changed her mind, again, and turned around halfway.

  Three

  Monday, September 2, Labor Day

  SHE HADN’T.

  She was taking her time, however. Leaving behind the place where she’d lived much of her life and owned and operated a successful business had not come easily. When Liam had been offered the job in Blewestown they had half-heartedly discussed the possibility of a long-distance marriage. She was a pilot, after all, with two paid-for airplanes with her name on the titles, one of which, if she pushed it, had a cruising speed of upwards of a hundred fifty mph. Liam’s new posting was only about two hundred fifty miles from Newenham, less than two hours in the air in the Cessna, wind and weather permitting.

  Not that she would push it because of the wear and tear on the engine, but in the end, neither of them could face the time apart. Newenham had changed on them, too, and recent events made leaving sound more attractive than staying. Her adopted son, Tim Gosuk, was déjà vu, at AvTec in Seward, a town a hundred fifty miles from Blewestown with an actual paved and maintained highway connecting the two, a rarity in Alaska. His current proximity to Liam’s new post was another incentive.

  She was still smarting from the sale of Nushugak Air Taxi, though. Fifty percent of small businesses failed by their fifth year. Hers had not failed, it had thrived, and she was leaving behind a decade of experience and goodwill to begin cold somewhere else. It was not an attractive prospect.

  Housing in the Alaskan Bush was always at a premium and commanded what one might kindly term extortionate prices, but she wasn’t ready to sell so she rented her house to a young couple from Icky who said they were ready to move into town. Wy suspected it was more about them escaping the too-attentive eye of their relatives, most of whom lived in Ik’iki’ka. She had relatives in Icky, too, and she knew how that went. The husband had a job working road maintenance for the state and she worked at the hospital and Wy knew them to be good people, so she signed the lease and arranged for the rent to go into her account at the local branch of First Frontier, which she also kept open. No harm in keeping all her bases covered, she thought. She didn’t mention it to Liam. Not that he ever asked. He was pretty smart that way.

  It startled her, when it came time to pack, to realize how little she had in the way of personal property. Almost everything she owned was business-related, from the two planes down to her tools, pilot handbooks, aircraft manuals, wor
k clothes, and four survival kits, winter and summer times two, one for each aircraft. Her photographs were on her phone. Her only jewelry was her wedding ring and a pair of diamond stud earrings and she never removed either.

  What she owned more of than anything else was books, and those she had packed and shipped. She downloaded the Kindle app to her phone and filled it with favorites and to-reads to tide her over until her books appeared in Blewestown. Since they would travel by barge to Anchorage and then by truck to Blewestown, that wouldn’t be tomorrow. Her music had already been transferred to iTunes. Everything else she packed into 68 Kilo and lashed it down with cargo nets. 78 Zulu was already in Blewestown, ferried there by a Newenham pilot Wy trusted who had family in Cook’s Point.

  Her last night she walked through the little clapboard cottage, looking to see if she had missed anything. Liam had bought a house fully furnished in Blewestown and she was renting hers the same way, which was going to save on freight. Everything had worked out so smoothly she was inclined to be a little suspicious of the whole process, because nothing in her life had ever been this easy before. She walked out onto the deck that reached the edge of the bluff and stood looking out at the great river, gray with glacial silt that made it look like a flow of molten lead moving rapidly toward the sea. A fish jumped and smacked back into the water. Probably a late silver.

  She would miss this view, and this deck. Here it was that she had practiced form with her grandfather, Moses Alakuyak, almost every morning. Without thinking about it she dropped down into horse stance, feet shoulder width apart, knees bent, spine straight, arms bent at the elbows, palms cupped to face inward, body weight centered. Root from below, suspend from above. Without her willing it her limbs flowed into commencement, ward off left, right push upward, pull back, press forward, push. Below, needles rattling, a porcupine with the rolling walk like a drunken sailor characteristic of her species trundled into the middle of a dense patch of high bush cranberries and began to eat her way out again.

  Moses had strong-armed Liam into form on Liam’s first morning in Newenham, and in memoriam to that diminutive, irascible old shaman the two of them continued to practice together each and every morning they woke up in the same place. Moses was gone now, killed by a stray bullet, one of a swarm of bullets loosed by an idiot who had no business anywhere near firearms, and, too late for Moses, never would be again.

  Fist under elbow, step back and repulse monkey, slanting flying, raise hands, stork spreads its wings. Bill was gone, too. Bartender extraordinaire, local magistrate, longtime lover of Moses Alakuyak, and one of Wy’s few really close friends in Newenham. Bill had sold her bar the month after they buried Moses and made good on a lifelong threat to move to New Orleans. She had written to say that she’d bought a townhouse two doors down from the Terminator’s terminator. There had been no second letter so after a few months passed Wy had had Jim Wiley, Liam’s geeky friend in Anchorage, track down Bill’s phone number. Bill had answered on the first ring. She’d sounded pleased to hear from Wy but said she was on her way out the door to her new job tending bar. She name-dropped at least three Marsalises and one Neville, explained the Terminator reference, and hadn’t called back.

  A vee of Canadian geese flew past, honking steadily, heading south to join up with other flocks at the mouth of the river. There they would spiral up into one gigantic flock and peel out south for warmer climes. It was a sight Wy looked forward to every year. Perhaps she would get a glimpse of them when she took off in the morning.

  Left brush knee and twist step, needle at sea bottom, fan through the back, turn and white snake puts out tongue. A pair of eagles chirped and warbled at each other from adjoining treetops. One of them, as if in punctuation, lifted its tail and squirted a rich stream of yellow poop, just missing a parky squirrel. The squirrel said what he thought. The eagles responded with what sounded a lot like laughter, although Wy told herself she was anthropomorphizing. Something Alaskans often did as a matter of course, seeing as they were surrounded by wildlife designed by nature to eat them first chance it got. They were easier to live with if you ascribed human behavior to them.

  Pull back, press forward, and push, single whip, all four fair ladies working at shuttles, and back into ward off left and through to push. As it always did the form steadied her, calmed her, focused her. Root from below, suspend from above. Her muscles loosened and stretched, supple, elastic, strong. She sank into single whip creeps down and stepped up to form seven stars. The chi that Moses had told them lived behind their bellies held her steady over her own center of gravity. That belly that would never hold a baby.

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Retreat to ride tiger, turn round and kick horizontally, shoot a tiger with bow, step up, parry and punch. She may have put a little extra into the punch. Apparent close up and conclusion as the light faded above and the river rolled inexorably on.

  She repeated the entire form twice more, commencement through conclusion. At the end she straightened, brought her right fist into the palm of her left hand, let her hands fall to her sides, and bowed, deeply. Respect for the form. Respect for the sifu. Respect for Moses. She blinked back tears and went inside.

  In a gift to the last fishermen and the first hunters of both seasons a high had settled in over Southcentral Alaska from Bristol Bay to Prince William Sound on the Friday before Labor Day, and took up residence for the foreseeable future in NOAA’s ten-day forecast. Wy woke very early on Labor Day to clear skies, visibility unlimited, and light, variable winds out of the southwest. The winds were included, she thought, only because the forecasters couldn’t bear to give out a perfect weather report. If she’d submitted a request to the weather gods to facilitate the quickest, smoothest, cheapest, least wearing on the engine flight from Newenham to Blewestown, this would have been it. It was almost as if the fates were conspiring so that she had no excuse not to get in the air and put the nose on east-northeast.

  She put the sheets in the washing machine and did form on the deck until it was time to put them in the dryer. She showered, dressed, and did a final walk-through of the house. She carried a small duffel to the door and locked it behind her, and then had to unlock it again in a scramble to find the current book, the third in the kickass Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr series. She only wished she was that tough. And then she locked the door again and left the keys for Zach and Alexis on the highest shelf inside the arctic entry.

  They’d sold their vehicles because the price of shipping them from Newenham to Blewestown was more than a new vehicle would cost them—another advantage of being on the road system—and she drove her rental to the airport, and turned it in. The girl behind the counter was unknown to her, a relief because she’d been dodging goodbyes for the past three months. They all thought she was running away, and they weren’t entirely wrong, but the sympathy touched her on the raw. Best just to be gone. Like Bill, she’d write.

  Or not.

  She had topped off the tanks the previous afternoon. All that was left to do was the walk-around and to run the checklist. She let 68 Kilo use up most of the runway and they took to the air over Newenham for what might well prove to be the last time. She made a large, slow circle as she climbed, the Wood-Tikchik Mountains to the north and west, the Four Lakes parallel streaks of silver reaching deep into the mountains, the wide river rolling down to Bristol Bay in the south, the town itself spread out over the hills and hollows of the broad north bank of the river, surrounded by thickets of alder and black spruce. The town of Newenham was always more attractive from a thousand feet up.

  She banked right and headed east, following the river up just far enough to fly over the spot where Old Man’s Creek joined it. Moses’ fish camp was still there, although the cabin looked even more dilapidated than it had the last time she’d checked on it. The Arctic was hard on everything.

  “Goodbye, Grandfather,” she said, and was surprised and perhaps even a little forlorn when her eyes remained dry. It seemed she w
as leaving the worst of her grief at her loss behind her, too.

  She banked right, climbing again, leveling out at five thousand feet, and put Carly Rae Jepsen on the soundtrack. Wy preferred real instruments to synthesized but the girl had pipes. She followed the river up to where it petered out into braided lakes and tundra, crossed the Kvichak and emerged onto the southern shore of the massive Iliamna Lake and proceeded up the east shore. There was a tiny bit of chop for about a nanosecond and then, poof, gone. Wy wished Liam were along for the ride, just to prove to him that every flight in Alaska wasn’t a death-defying feat on the order of a shuttle launch. How she had managed to fall for a guy who held up in the air every aircraft he ever flew by the arms of his seat remained a mystery to her. A reluctant smile spread across her face. To both of them.

  The lake was a bright sheet of glare beneath the rising sun. There no sign of the infamous albeit elusive lake monster to be seen over the entire seventy-seven mile stretch, which was disappointing, but she did catch a brief glimpse of some of the lake’s freshwater seals. She’d read that there were only two freshwater seal populations in the world and that predation, pollution, and climate change was eating at their numbers to the point that application had been made to classify them as endangered. She had very little faith left in the government doing the right thing so she was happy to see them while she still could.