Singing of the Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  He must have taken steps to see that it wouldn’t happen, because a week later she caught him with another girl, and that was the end of that. Disloyalty was the one sin Kate Shugak would not, could not forgive.

  At Thanksgiving break, Abel, not usually so slow, woke up to the fact that the UAF campus wasn’t all that large and that his son the junior and his foster-daughter the freshman were both living on it. In December Ethan transferred to the University of Washington, ostensibly because the wildlife-management curriculum was larger and with better teachers, and would round out his degree. There he met Margaret, and married her the month after he graduated.

  Kate, left alone at UAF, went into hibernation, emerging only at the invitation of an inspired English teacher, who taught her how to read recreationally. From that point on, she had never been lonely. She had seen Ethan perhaps a dozen times for brief periods since. She was always civil. He was always courteous. They might have been strangers, instead of almost lovers. Since he had moved back to the Park, family in tow, to start a fly-in bed-and-breakfast on Abel’s homestead, she had seen him perhaps half a dozen times, at the Int-Hout homestead when Mandy had wanted to stop in and say “Hi,” at the post office in Niniltna, and at the Roadhouse. She was still civil. He was still courteous.

  It was obvious by the gleam in his eye that Ethan was remembering a lot of the same things she was. Johnny looked suspiciously from one adult to the other. When Kate looked at him, he sneered, and she could imagine his thoughts. “My dad not dead a year, and you’re ready to jump in bed with somebody else.” She thought of July in Bering and Jim Chopin, and then she did not. “I need a favor, Ethan,” she said again.

  “You said that,” he replied.

  “Yeah,” she said, “sorry.” She nodded at Johnny. “Johnny’s—” She hesitated. “Johnny’s staying with me for a while, but I’m going to be in and out for most of the next month or two. I don’t want him to stay at the homestead alone, so I was wondering if he could park here for the duration.”

  Ethan looked at Johnny, who met his gaze with a sullen expression. “He looks like he wants to move over here, all right.”

  Kate kicked Johnny beneath the table.

  Johnny kicked her back, hard enough to make her jump and swear.

  Ethan laughed, which transformed his face. Johnny relaxed a little.

  Still laughing, Ethan told Johnny, “You’re my kinda guy, kid. Sure, you can bunk in here if you want to.” The laughter faded, leaving him looking glum. “It’s not like I don’t have the room.”

  Voice carefully devoid of anything that might be mistaken for genuine interest, Kate said, “So, when is Margaret coming back?”

  Ethan got up and collected their cups. “She isn’t, according to her,” he said over his shoulder. “She’s filed for divorce.”

  All Kate could think of to say was, “Why?” and then she added hastily, “I’m sorry, Ethan. None of my business.”

  He snorted. “Like it wasn’t all over the Park by sundown the day she left. Where have you been?”

  “Out of town,” she said. “So what happened?”

  He turned around and folded his arms, leaning back against the sink. “She wants to move back to Seattle. That’s where her parents are, and her sister. Says she doesn’t want the kids growing up all alone in the middle of a wilderness. Says they’re going to have a civilized upbringing. I think myself she wants cable back.” He sighed. “Breakup was too much for her, I guess. Or maybe it was breakup and the Park in combination. She wasn’t raised to it like we were. I probably should have seen it coming. She never did like Cordova much, either, and she sure wasn’t happy when we moved back to the homestead. Didn’t like the idea of cooking and cleaning up after strangers, so the fly-in B-and-B idea went west. After that it was one big downhill slide. She and the kids left in May, right after school let out.”

  He looked at Johnny. “You gotta have cable, kid?” Johnny shook his head. “Good. Cause they ain’t any such animal here. Or phones. Got lights, though, and hot and cold running water.” He hooked a thumb at Kate. “Better’n her dinky little cabin.”

  A brief silence. “I’m sorry, Ethan,” Kate said, sounding as inadequate as she felt.

  Johnny gave Ethan a curious look. “Don’t worry,” he said suddenly, “he’s not”

  “Johnny.”

  Ethan stared into the blue eyes so unlike his own. “It’s okay, Kate,” he said finally. “He’s right. I miss the kids.” He smiled again, and again transformed himself from someone who ground men’s bones to make his bread into yet another rueful Alaskan backwoodsman who had picked the wrong woman. “But that’s about all I miss.”

  While Johnny was checking out Ethan’s old room, still filled with Ethan’s old model planes, Ethan walked Kate back to her truck. “I’ve already got him enrolled in school in Niniltna. He knows how to run a four-wheeler, and he knows how long it’ll take him to get there. He’s got the schedule, and his books.”

  “Yeah, but will he go?”

  “He says yes.”

  “That’s not necessarily the whole-hearted endorsement I was looking for, Kate.”

  “He says yes,” she repeated. “He’s young, but he keeps his word when he gives it. He’ll go.” At least for the next two years, she thought, and shrugged it off. Time enough to think about that when it happened.

  Ethan touched her arm and in an instant it was like she was back on the top of Widow’s Peak on a hot, sunny afternoon, with the sky clear all the way to Middleton Island. She moved to one side, out of reach. “What?”

  “Why are you leaving him? He hasn’t been here that long. Why are you just taking off on him?” He paused. “He’s Jack’s boy, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.” She looked over his shoulder and concentrated on a stellar blue jay showing off his shiny blue feathers against the dark green branch of a white spruce. She nodded at the house. “He’s with his mom now, or he’s supposed to be. He ran away.”

  “Ah, shit.”

  “Not for the first time. His mother told him if he ran off again, he could stay lost. He hitchhiked here from Arizona, Ethan.”

  “He’s what, fourteen?” When she nodded, he said, “Ballsy little bastard, isn’t he?”

  Kate ignored the admiration in Ethan’s comment. It was strictly a guy thing. “What Johnny doesn’t realize is, Jane hates my guts. She showed up last night at Bobby’s. Now that she knows he’s with me, she won’t stop looking.”

  “Happy Mother’s Day.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She going to show up out here?”

  “Not here, not yet. My place, maybe.”

  “So you want him here when she does.”

  She nodded. “The reason I’m leaving myself is, I’ve got a job. Sooner or later, I’m going to have to hire a lawyer. That takes money.”

  Ethan scratched his chin. “He’s pissed at you, isn’t he.”

  It wasn’t a question, but she answered it anyway. “Yeah.” It was a relief to share it with someone else, even Ethan. “Yes, he is.”

  “Mad because his dad went with you and got killed.” Again, it wasn’t a question.

  “Yes.”

  “All your fault.”

  She nodded.

  “Like my dad,” he said, surprising her. “That was all your fault, too.”

  She gaped at him. Never once had any of the Int-Hout boys pointed the finger at her for Abel’s death. Not once had any of them so much as whispered the possibility that she might be to blame for his suicide, that if she had let sleeping park rangers and Anchorage investigators lie, Abel might be alive today. Abel, and now Jack. Her fault, she thought bleakly. Her most grievous fault.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Ethan said, surprising her. “Dad was Dad, an unreconstructed Alaska old fart who never got past 1925 in his thinking. Miller, maybe, was an accident. Dahl was deliberate. He wasn’t going to live with that any longer than he had to whether you caught him out or not.”

  She felt a slacke
ning of tension in her gut she hadn’t known was there. His next words made her tighten up again.

  “Last year, you got in the middle of a bunch of crazies. You’re lucky to be alive yourself.” He turned to go, and over his shoulder he said, “And I was damn sorry to hear about Jack Morgan, Kate. Everybody says he was a hell of a good man. I liked him, what I saw of him, when we met at Bernie’s that time.”

  She watched him walk down the trail and she thought, Sure you did.

  About as much as she had liked Margaret.

  5

  Kate hadn’t been in Ahtna since the April before last, when the engine fell off a 747 and crashed through the roof of her cabin, along with fifty thousand dollars in compensation that had to be deposited to her account at the Last Frontier Bank. The teller had goggled at the stack of cash, and the manager had to be called over to okay the transaction. He did, after telling Kate three times that all deposits of more than five thousand dollars had to be reported to the IRS. Kate was sure that the moment she left the building they’d been running the numbers on the bills.

  After repairs to the homestead and the truck, a new snow machine, tires all around for the four-wheeler, a truck load of new tools, a year’s supply of canned goods, and a steady line of mostly deserving Park rats with their hands out, there was less than two thousand left, but when she’d gone to Anchorage that April she’d had money to burn. She’d taken Jack to dinner every night. She’d insisted on buying him a cut-and-style at Jeri’s, where he’d once forced her into the chair. When he said, barely a jest, “Just so long as you don’t make me wear lingerie,” she’d taken him to Nordstrom and had him parade back and forth in a series of sports jackets and yuppy chinos. She would have taken him over to the shoe section if he hadn’t rebelled. “Paybacks are hell,” she’d said.

  “I got paid back that night,” he’d growled.

  The 172 hit an air pocket, and she was jolted out of her reverie. The pilot, a tall, thin man in oil-stained coveralls with a lantern jaw in perpetual need of a shave touched the yoke absentmindedly, not looking up from the book he was reading. Kate had already checked out the title. Round the Bend by Nevil Shute. One of George Perry’s favorite authors, along with Earnest K. Gann. Both men wrote about flying like they’d held a plane up in the air a time or two, something George, full-time Bush pilot, part-time A&P mechanic, and sole proprietor of an air taxi, appreciated in full.

  The plane steadied into level flight once more. They were fifteen minutes out of Niniltna, another fifteen minutes to go. It was a clear day, the sun high in the sky, and the Quilak Mountains loomed at their back like a bridge between earth and heaven, with the right of way reserved only for a worthy few. Beneath them the Kanuyaq River doubled and tripled back on itself as the foothills flattened reluctantly into a broad plateau. Here and there a roof showed beneath the branches of trees that had been encouraged to grow closely to the eaves, the better to protect the owner’s privacy. A skiff was pulled up on a sandbar, the aluminum hull dull in the waning light. A black bear and three cubs took fright at the sound of their engine, and Kate’s last sight of them had the sow frantically pushing one cub up the lone spruce tree in the middle of a meadow.

  She had bought Jack two of the jackets she had forced him to model, because the one he usually wore for court was a disgrace, one of the pockets hanging by one corner and soft-boiled egg stains down the front, and because she rarely had the opportunity to buy him gifts. She had followed him into the dressing room to make sure he didn’t leave them behind. There had been a close encounter in that dressing room that should have got them arrested, and would have if that clerk waiting on them hadn’t . . .

  Ahtna was a small town of two thousand, built where the northern reaches of the Kanuyaq River met the Kanuyaq

  River Highway, which connected the Glenn Highway with Valdez. It was one of the first communities of any size in Alaska, after Fairbanks and Nome, started by one of the smarter stampeders who had seen early on that while the miners themselves made little or no money, the businesses who sold miners their supplies made out like bandits. “Mining the miners,” they called it. Some of the miner miners were bandits, come to that, Kate thought, reminded of certain members of her own family tree, one of whom had been hung for a horse thief back in 1899. Not that Emaa had ever admitted to it, but Kate had done some research for a paper on local history for a school project, and the story of the hanging had been on the front page of what was then the weekly Ahtna Tribune. It had been one of the more well-attended public events in Ahtna’s early days, according to the reporter, who quoted the newly sworn territorial sheriff in every paragraph.

  Now, with her experience as a law enforcement professional, she thought of the article with a more informed perspective. New lawman on the job out to make a name for himself, establish his authority, send out a warning to the other nogoodniks in his jurisdiction not to shit in his nest. Poor Zebulon Shugak didn’t stand a chance. But he had certainly given rise to a great deal of merriment among the student population of Kate’s generation of Niniltna High, which had added not inconsiderably to her own status as well.

  And then there had been the bonus of embarrassing her grandmother. Johnny Morgan, she thought, was an amateur compared to Kate Shugak in her prime.

  Evidently the sheriff’s plan had worked; Ahtna had grown to become a thriving little hub town, and had been the first to embrace flight by building an airstrip out of gravel mined from an oxbow a mile up the river and hauling in tanks to be filled with fuel which was sold at rates just this side of extortion. Ahtna was the Park’s banking hub, its marketing hub, its educational hub, with one of the University of Alaska’s few remaining regional branches, and its bureaucratic hub, with federal offices for the departments of the Forest Service, Housing & Urban Development, the Air National Guard, and everything in between, including, naturally, the National Parks Service. Raven, the Native regional corporation, was doing a brisk business in erecting HUD-backed subdivisions and renting the results to federal employees, many of whom were by now Raven shareholders. One pocket picks the other, Kate thought as they banked over one such subdivision and came in for a landing with George Perry all over it, light as a feather, straight as an arrow; you didn’t know you were on the ground until you’d stepped out of the plane. Bush born and bred, Kate appreciated a good pilot above all else.

  “Somebody meeting you?” George shouted over the roar of the engine. Mutt gave George a swipe with her tongue before jumping out to stand next to Kate, and laughed up at him with her guilty tongue hanging out when he swore and wiped his face on his sleeve.

  “I’m fine,” Kate shouted back.

  “Okay,” he shouted in reply, although he didn’t look convinced that it was. Everyone was treating her like she was breakable these days. Kate shut the door with more force than necessary. George locked down the handle, and the Cessna taxied down to the end of the runway and took off again.

  She hitched a ride with someone she didn’t know, a man at least ten years her junior, his profession made known by the buoys and silver seine in the bed of the truck. He offered to buy her a drink and tell her his troubles. Kate was so pleased at this complete ignorance of her identity and recent history that she let him down a lot easier than she might have, and they parted friends in front of the hotel. Mutt even wagged her tail. She never kissed on the first date.

  Kate paused for a moment, watching the gray, silty current of the river flow powerfully between high, crumbling banks. A spruce tree had given up the fight to maintain the vertical and was laying on its side, roots exposed, its top just above water. Two skiffs passed in midstream going in opposite directions, the upstream one empty, the downstream one piled high with boxes and cans and crates and cartons, the gunnel almost awash. A flock of Canada geese made a low pass in a ragged vee, honking the call that sounded so joyous in spring and so melancholy in fall.

  Mutt stood next to her, the picture of patience. Cars and trucks arrived, doors slammed, gr
avel crunched underfoot. Some people nodded, others said hello with great care, as if they were afraid she might bite. Whispered comments floated back to her. “—lucky to be alive—” “Did you know Jack Morgan? A great guy—” “—World War HI, Denali style—” “—she seems all right, you have to wonder if it was as bad as they say—”

  Near them a car door opened. “Miss Shugak?”

  Mutt’s ears pricked up, and she took a pace forward. The man backed into the doorframe with a thump and said, the words tumbling out, “Mr. Heiman would like to speak to you for a few moments, if you don’t mind.” He looked from Mutt to the handle of the rear door, torn between his duty and his wish to live. Stretching his arm as far as he could, he managed to snag the handle and maneuver the door open, all the while keeping one foot in the well of the driver’s seat.

  Kate was always appreciative of a job done against the odds, and she took pity on him. “It’s all right. She doesn’t bite unless I tell her to.” And then because she couldn’t resist it, “Or unless she’s hungry.”

  The manner of his reentry into the car was less than graceful.

  Peter Heiman was laughing when she bent down to look in at him. When he could he said, “Hey, Kate.”

  “Hey, Pete,” she said.

  “Get your ass on in here and set a spell. You, too, Mutt.”

  With a graceful leap Mutt was sitting down in his open briefcase, papers flying everywhere. Kate climbed in and closed the door.

  “Damn, I love this dog,” Peter Heiman said, scratching behind Mutt’s ears. Kate couldn’t tell for sure, but she thought the backs of the driver’s ears looked a little red. “How you been, Kate?”