Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 05 - Play With Fire

by Play

  "But that was funny," an incredulous voice protested.

  He ignored it and picked up the third book, a fat anthology, and thumbed through the pages. "And so is this poetry:

  It little profits that an idle king ... "

  To sail beyond the sunset, Kate thought dreamily afterward, to touch the Happy Isles, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield, no, never to yield. She strode into Mr. Hauptmann's bonehead science class with pennons snapping in the breeze. Mr. Hauptmann, disillusioned from years of teaching science to incoming freshmen who lay false claim to having a high school education, began with the atom.

  Atoms, thought Kate scornfully, atoms when she had just set sail on the Aegean Sea in company with Ulysses. She had no patience with atoms.

  But then something caught her attention. Atoms, Mr. Hauptmann told them without much hope of being heard, much less understood, were the smallest part of the elements and the building blocks of molecules.

  Kate examined her palm, as if she could look close enough to see the individual protons and neutrons of the nuclei and the electrons buzzing around them. Her bones, her skin, her hair, the very blood in her veins, all were made of these energetic individual parts, all in constant motion. The idea dizzied her, and for a moment she felt as if every atom in her body was taking off in a different direction.

  And then she thought, but I am an atom, too, my whole self is an atom.

  I am an atom of the earth, and the earth is an atom of the solar system, and the solar system is an atom of the Milky Way, and the Milky Way is an atom of the universe. A line from the Tennyson poem flashed through her mind and she thought with amazement, I am a part of all that I have met.

  The astounding discovery that poetry could make sense of science and science of poetry was Kate's intellectual awakening. Until then most of her education had taken place outdoors; she could track a moose, bring it down with one shot, gut it, butcher it, pack it out and cut and wrap it with the best of them. In the bush, she had to eat to live. She didn't have to read to live, and indoors had been an indifferent scholar at best.

  All this changed her sophomore year in college. In reading she found her escape from the lonely days away from home and family and everything familiar to her. She read everything, in bulk and indiscriminately, too shy to ask her teachers for guidance. The process was not all joy. The sugary excesses of Rupert Brooke and Gerald Manley Hopkins put her into a mild diabetic coma, Yeats and Eliot made her feel miserably ignorant, but when Mr. Winklebleck by accident learned of her determination to read through the Rasmuson Library from A to Z and managed tactfully to steer her toward the practical acerbity of Wallace Stevens and the sly forked tongue of Robert Frost, she fell instantly and forever in love.

  She smiled now, thinking of that semester of discovery, and Tom Winklebleck saw the smile and knew instantly what she was thinking.

  "How the hell did you wind up in my poetry class anyway, Kate?" he said.

  "I've always wondered."

  "I needed three more credits in English and I couldn't bear the thought of another composition course. I petitioned the English department and they let me substitute."

  "You weren't that bad a writer, as I recall." He motioned her to a seat.

  "What was wrong with composition?"

  "I don't know." She sat down and tilted the chair up on its back two legs, hands linked across her stomach, considering. "It was too--I don't know-too personal."

  He knew immediately what she meant, but then he'd always been better than average bright. "You couldn't write without revealing more about yourself than you wanted to expose."

  Still uncomfortable with it, a dozen years later, she shrugged dismissively. "I guess."

  He saw her discomfort and changed the subject. "So how have you been, Kate? Railroaded any innocent victims into the hoosegow lately? Violated anyone's First through Fifth Amendment rights?"

  "I'm not with the D. A."s office anymore."

  His eyes dropped for a moment to the scar on her throat. "I know."

  She was surprised. "How? They managed to keep most of it out of the papers."

  He shrugged. "I've lived in Alaska a long time. You get to know people.

  They tell you things you probably have no business knowing."

  "The mukluk telegraph," she suggested.

  He chuckled. "Told you you should have switched your major to English."

  Her answering smile was wry. "Yes, you did, didn't you." "Well," he said. "

  "Let us not burden our remembrances with a heaviness that's gone."

  "Let's not," she agreed. "How's the pedagogical prestidigitation going?

  Still brainwashing students too young and too inexperienced to resist?"

  "I try like hell."

  "Good."

  A corner of his mouth pulled down. "Summer semesters aren't bad, we get a lot of continuing ed students then, and they're mostly adults who know what they want and are working toward a goal. It's when the high school kids arrive in the fall that it gets really depressing. You get entire classes filled with students glorying in their own ignorance."

  "With foreheads villainous low,"" she said, pleased and proud to have remembered the right quotation at just the right time, instead of at two a.m. the following morning.

  He laughed, but shook his head. "Sometimes I'd kill for just one student sitting in the back row, upright and awake."

  "You'd kill anybody who tried to take the job away from you," she said shrewdly, and he laughed again and admitted it.

  "What's up with you? To what do we owe the honor?" He made a pretense of dusting the front of his shirt.

  "I was in the area, didn't want to pass through without saying hello."

  She hesitated. He was a teacher, and the best of a dying breed. "You ever hear of a village named Chistona?"

  He laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back in his chair, his gaze on her face speculative. "Yeah. They're picking mushrooms somewhere around down there, I hear."

  "So was I, until Friday."

  "Oh?" She told him.

  "Ah yes," he said meditatively, "I remember now, I heard something about that. Via mukluk telegraph, with maybe a little assist from Denise Gallagher over at the education department. More of it coming, too, I imagine, the more active the Bible Belt gets. The creationists.

  Interesting if implausible theory, God creating the world and four and a half billion years of evolution and history in the snap of his--or her--fingers. Amazing what people can talk themselves into believing."

  He was silent for a moment, a pensive expression on his face. "Have you ever heard of the Paluxy Creek discovery?"

  She shook her head.

  "Ah. Well, Paluxy Creek is in Glen Rose, Texas. It hosts the site of an archaeological dig in which a dinosaur's footprint and a human footprint were said to have been found in the same bed of limestone." He smiled at her expression. "Yes, it was a, shall we say, God-given sign for the fundamentalists. A graven in stone, so to speak, affirmation of the book of Genesis. They could point to Paluxy Creek and say, "See! God did make man and all the animals in one week!"

  "

  "And?" Kate said, skepticism writ large upon her countenance.

  He gave a faint smile. "You're quite right, of course. Some nasty, suspicious little paleontologist got wind of the discovery and went down to Glen Rose to take a look. It turns out that the Paluxy '' prints were as much as twenty inches long. Subsequent tests proved the prints to be those of a tridactyl, a three-toed dinosaur walking through soft mud. Of course, some nasty, suspicious little journalist got wind of the nasty, suspicious little paleontologist's doings and wrote them up. Got a lot of publicity, as you may well imagine. The upshot was that the evidence against was so substantive and so convincing that a self-proclaimed creation scientist subsequently rejected his authentication of the Paluxy Man and caused his publisher to recall the book he'd written about it." He paused, looking at her expectantly, and she caved. "Okay.
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br />   What's the punchline?"

  "The punchline, Kate, is that the true believers have never lost faith in the Paluxy Man. They say the prints were made by a biblical giant, a man thirteen feet tall, a man weighing six hundred pounds." He clicked his tongue disapprovingly. "Don't look so surprised. What's a little concrete evidence in the face of divine revelation? Remember the Red Queen."

  "Why the Red Queen?" Kate said, mystified.

  "What, don't tell me I've never exposed you to the Red Queen Theory of Religion?" he asked in mock reproach, and wagged his head sorrowfully at her reply. "How remiss of me. I should probably be defrocked. It reads as follows: Believe six impossible things before breakfast. It'll get you in practice for the Virgin Birth and the Second Coming."

  Kate admitted, "I never have understood the concept of saving up good behavior in this life as payment for passage into the next."

  "You're Aleut, right?" She nodded, and he said, "What do you believe?"

  "Me, personally? Or the entire Aleut race?"

  "Both," he said, unabashed.

  She shrugged. "Me, personally, wasn't raised religious. Abel, my foster father, believed in capitalism." Winklebleck chuckled. "My grandmother was raised Russian Orthodox and she pays it lip service for political purposes, but that's about as far as it goes. I've never read the Bible, although I regret that sometimes when I don't get the references made to it in the books I read." She looked at him and smiled. "And in the poems. John Donne gets to be something of a mystery."

  He smiled back. "And the Aleuts?"

  "The Aleuts believed that everything, animate and inanimate, had its own soul, its own spirit, its own anua." She reached into her pocket and pulled out a tiny velveteen bag. Untying the drawstring, she produced a tiny otter, no more than three inches tall, standing erect on its hind legs, thick tail curved in a broad swath, front paws held just so, head cocked to one side, black eyes regarding him with a bright and inquisitive gaze.

  The front legs of his chair came down with a thump. One stubby forefinger touched the back of the otter's head, caressed the sleek fur down the back to the tail. "Look at him, he looks like he might drop down on all fours and scamper off to the nearest creek any second now."

  She smiled, pleased that the otter had struck Winklebleck the same way he had her that first moment in the art gallery. He hadn't been out of her pocket since. "A couple of hundred years ago, a hunter might have worn a carving like this to hunt sea otters."

  "To honor the otter's sacrifice to the hunter's greater need," he said.

  "Yes. They believed that everything in life was connected with everything else, depended on everything else. For example, in the Aleut view of life, the salmon knew it was food and accepted the fact that it would die so that the People would live."

  "Practical."

  "That's why when a hunter went hunting, he did so in new clothes, with his harpoon and his kayak decorated with walrus whiskers and ivory charms and beads." She thought of the hunter's tunic on Russell Gillespie's wall. "It was to show respect for the salmon's sacrifice--"

  "Or the otter's," Winklebleck said, nodding at the carving.

  "--or the otter's, or the walrus's, or whatever he was hunting that day.

  You don't find a lot of that in the fundamentalist concept of Christianity," she added.

  "A lot of what? Sacrifice?"

  "Respect. The Christian God doesn't respect his followers enough to allow them to make their own choices, and they don't respect Him enough to look out for them enough to stop their everlasting petitioning for help." Curious, he said, "Have you ever felt the call? Ever felt the spirit move you?"

  Kate looked past him, out the window and into the hazy afternoon.

  There had been those moments next to the stream in the forest, the kiss of the wind on her skin, the strong and joyous pulse of the earth beating up through the soles of her feet. And she would never forget the animate, vindictive menace of the sea on board the Avilda during the ice storm. Or the enchanted dance with the aurorae on top of Angqaq. "I've felt what I thought was a presence from time to time," she said cautiously. "It was real to me." Suddenly self-conscious, she said,

  "Talking out loud about that kind of stuff always sounds so idiotic."

  "No," he said after a moment, somewhat heavily. "If anything, I'm envious. I've never had that leap of faith, myself."

  She laughed at him and he looked at her, startled. She pointed at the books, lined up on shelves, floor to ceiling, on all four walls. "You don't need religion; you have literature." "True," he said, brightening.

  "Did you know that the King James version of the Bible has a vocabulary of only eight thousand words? In contrast to Shakespeare, who has more than thirty-two thousand?" Amused, Kate said gravely, "I believe Shakespeare made up quite a few on his own."

  "True again," he said, inclining his head, and they passed an hour talking of old times and mutual friends.

  As they rose to their feet, Kate having invited him to lunch, she said suddenly, "Why do people cling so strongly to faith in God, do you think? Is it only the comfort of a belief in what happens after? In that something comes after at all?" He paused, thinking it over. "No," he said finally. "They cling so strongly to it because it's easy."

  She was startled. "Easy?"

  "Sure. Well, easier, anyway."

  "Easier than what?"

  "Easier than doing it yourself. Easier to know you can sin and be forgiven than to keep yourself from sinning in the first place."

  Kate was silent for a moment. "I never thought of it that way."

  "Plus," he added, "any form of organized belief in God is an excuse for one person to say to another, "Believe as I do or you'll go to hell, or I'll burn you at the stake, or I'll kill you and the horse you rode in on and everyone else who thinks like you."

  Deep down, Kate felt it had been worth driving 269 miles just to hear those words. "So it's about power?"

  "The most powerful and destructive of all the aphrodisiacs. There was a bishop during the Albigension Crusade in southern France, the one against the Cathars. Riding into battle, he gave the order to take no prisoners, to kill anything and everything that moved. One of his subordinates said, "Even the children, monseigneur?" His reply was,

  "Kill! Kill! God will know his own!" " He paused, fiddling with a pencil. "Kate," he said without looking up, "if you decide to go up against these people ..

  "Yes?"

  He looked up then, at the direct eyes, the firm chin, the stubborn line of jaw, and sighed inwardly. "Just remember one thing."

  "What?"

  "There are no tricks in plain and simple faith."

  He watched the intent look come into her eyes as she traced the quotation to its source, the triumphant smile that curled the corners of her mouth. "Julius Caesar."

  He inclined his head in approval. "Shakespeare always gets the last word."

  She picked the otter up and put him back in his bag and put the bag back in her pocket. Tom held the door for her. "Where are you staying?"