Singing of the Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  Kate looked around, assessing the room, and picked a spot against the wall opposite the stage. Moving toward it, she said, “I got your letter, and the poem. It meant something, Tracy. Thanks.”

  “It helped me some when my dad died. I thought maybe it might you, too. Look, Kate, I won’t go here more than once, but I want you to know I’m sorry as hell about Jack.”

  Kate could tolerate Tracy’s sympathy, just. “Thanks.”

  “I have to say, I’m glad you made it, though.”

  “Yeah.”

  Tracy gave her a sharp look. “One day, you’ll be glad, too.”

  I don’t know, Kate thought. I don’t know if I want to be.

  “So,” Tracy said, giving a group of men standing not very far away an obvious and provocative once-over, “I hear you’re our new security.”

  Kate found an overlooked chair, unfolded it, and stood on it. “That’s me.”

  Tracy’s attention was divided equally between the group of men, who were by now looking back, and her conversation with Kate. “Jim Chopin talk you into it?”

  Kate looked down from her scan of the crowd. “No. How does he come into it?”

  “He’s the one who told Darlene to hire you.” Looking toward Darlene standing on the stage conferring with Anne, Tracy added, “I’d have liked to have been in the room when he did to see just how well that went over.”

  “I thought it was all Billy’s idea.”

  Tracy shrugged. “I only know what they tell me.” She gave a theatrical sigh. “Who’s the famously hunky Jim Chopin sleeping with nowadays, anyway?”

  Kate stared hard at a high school boy who was lighting up what she was fairly certain was a joint. He saw her looking and choked on the first inhalation. The smoke went down the wrong way. Coughing, tears streaming down his face, he stumbled out of the building. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Because I am most definitely available.”

  “Congratulations,” Kate said.

  “What’s wrong?” Tracy eyed her with an appraising expression. “You sound a little—”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, a little testy, I guess.”

  “Just hungry, I missed my dinner. I met the new owner of the Ahtna Lodge when I checked in.”

  “Who, Tony? Isn’t he precious? No hope there for the heterosexual woman, I fear.”

  Kate grinned. “All I care about at the moment is how good his cook is.”

  Tracy sighed. “Still thinking with your stomach, Shugak. I feel like I’m right back on the fourth floor in Lathrop Dorm.” She watched Darlene aim a long, expressionless look at Kate. She watched Kate meet it with a long, expressionless look of her own. “Oh yeah, right back there. You still pissed at her? It’s been a long time.”

  “I never did like her much,” Kate said, “even before.”

  “I noticed,” Tracy said. “We all did. You didn’t have two words to say to anyone that first year, but you had even less to say to Darlene Shelikof. Did you guys know each other before UAF?”

  Kate watched a thin young man wedge himself into the first row of the bleachers on her left, his head shaved bald beneath a Cordova District Fishermen United cap. No visible tattoos. He was alone—no, a woman appeared and plunked down in his lap and he laughed and kissed her. Kate dismissed him as a suspect at once. Skinheads never laughed, and they almost never got laid. “No,” she said to Tracy. “I didn’t know her before.”

  A stocky young man with his mother’s dark hair and eyes and his father’s quick grin had been introduced to Kate as the candidate’s son, Tom. He came up to them, his eyes admiring the redhead. “Hi, Tracy.” He spared Kate a brief glance and no greeting. “Mom wants you.”

  Tracy hitched up her portfolio and said, “Duty calls. Later, Kate.”

  “Later,” Kate echoed.

  The group of men watched Tracy walk past with identical needy expressions on their faces. One of them was the fisherman who’d given Kate a ride in from the airport. Never say die.

  There were two television cameras trained on the stage, one at the head of each of the aisles formed by three blocks of metal folding chairs, by now most of which were full. So were the bleachers.

  The Gordaoff family was in the center of the front row, and a stream of what Kate from her experience with Emaa holding court at public functions instantly recognized as wannabe toadies formed a more or less continuous line in front of them. Erin, the candidate’s daughter, had a nondescript face and a build that combined her father’s lean with her mother’s padding to make a figure that gave every man in the room whiplash when she walked by. She sat next to a tall blond man, introduced as Jeff Hosford and Erin’s fiancé. Erin’s senior by at least ten years, he had the blunt features and the pumped-up look of a weight lifter. His right hand rested on the back of Erin’s neck. Erin stayed motionless beneath that hand, as if she were on a leash. Kate had been surprised when he was introduced as an attorney with a firm in Anchorage and the campaign’s chief fund-raiser. He looked more like muscle for the mob. His smile had been automatic and without feeling, his handshake damp, and he had tried a little too hard.

  Peter Heiman came in and was immediately surrounded by supporters of his own, fewer in number, and whiter. Kate wondered how indicative this was of the district as a whole. Maybe Darlene was right, although she hated to entertain that notion for more than a second at a time.

  The two candidates took up positions behind their podiums, the two people vying to represent one of the most geographically, culturally, ideologically, and economically diverse regions in a state where, in a gathering of four people there are five marriages, six divorces, and seven political parties. Kate thought of the Park, and she thought they were both crazy, one to want to keep the job, and the other to want to take it away from him.

  The Park, twenty million acres of mountain and glacier and river and plain, deep in the heart of Alaska. North and east were the Quilak Mountains, south was Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska, west was the TransAlaska Pipeline and the Alaska Railroad. Its biggest river was the Kanuyaq, two hundred and fifty miles of twist and turn, broad and shallow and filled with sandbars to the south, narrow and deep and boulder-filled to the north, with a thousand creeks and streams draining into it. Its biggest mountain was Angqaq Peak, known to mountain climbers the world over as the Big Bump, eighteen thousand feet and change of rock and ice, attendant peaks of twelve and fourteen and sixteen thousand feet forming an entourage.

  For every mountain there was a glacier, thick tongues of millennial ice receding reluctantly to reveal a wide, high plateau that sloped into rolling foothills and a long, curving valley that drained into the Kanuyaq. The Kanuyaq was the Park’s well and its breadbasket. It was also the Park’s major highway, navigable by boat in summer and by dogsled and snow machine in winter.

  One road led into the Park, maintained, barely, by a single grader stationed at Ahtna, the town that marked the junction between the Kanuyaq River Highway and the spur of gravel leading to Niniltna. The grader took a week to scrape the road one way into Niniltna, spent the weekend at Bernie’s Roadhouse, and then took a week to scrape back to Ahtna. The road stood up under this assault, as it had been first laid down as a railroad grade a hundred years before, engineered to get the copper out of the Kanuyaq Copper Mine and down to the port of Cordova. When copper prices fell in the thirties, the mine closed and they pulled up the tracks of the Kanuyaq River & Northern Railroad. Park residents followed behind, digging out the ties for use as needed in shack foundations, raised-bed gardens, creek bridges. Bernie had scavenged the last of them, back when he built the Roadhouse in the early ‘70s, to hold up the bar. The railroad roadbed was still flat, more or less, and still driveable, more or less, or it was in summer. In winter it wasn’t plowed, and the Park lay inviolate behind twelve-foot drifts of impassable snow. The most important traffic over it was the fuel truck, and the most important trip it made was the last delivery before Labor Day.

&
nbsp; Boats, snow machines, and dogsleds were all very well, but the preferred method of transportation was always and ever air. Everyone with a homestead had their own airstrip, and for those with lesser acreage there was the forty-eight-hundred-foot strip that ran right through downtown Niniltna, which served as the base of operations for George Perry’s semi-irregular air taxi service. When George wasn’t beating the water at Rocky River, or trysting with the latest girlfriend at his hunting lodge south of Denali.

  Kate shut down on all thought of George’s lodge and focused on the stage. It was cool in the cavernous room but with this many people it wouldn’t stay that way for long. The smells of dried salmon and fresh moose and curing hide and wood smoke saturated the air. She knew many of the people there by sight; others were new to her. Nobody looked like they were carrying, other than those who had knives strapped to their belts, although with Alaska’s new concealed-carry permit, available to anyone who trundled themselves down to the local police station to take the class, someone in this crowd could have a rocket launcher stuffed into their boot and she’d never know it.

  There was constant motion. In a crowd this big, there were always people on their feet, moving to a new seat, to the water fountain, to the bathroom, outside for a smoke or a drink or a toke. But on the whole, attention was focused on the stage, and on the debate. It surprised her. She had thought that rural Alaska had given up on politics years ago. Of course, Anne Gordaoff was one of their own. She was probably related to more people in the Park than Kate was.

  Anne Gordaoff was forty-six years old, a chunky woman with short brown hair in an untidy Dutch boy haircut, big brown eyes with laugh wrinkles fanning away from the corners, a pursed rosebud of a mouth that opened to reveal large, white, even teeth, and a double chin that went away when she raised her head to smile. She smiled a lot.

  She was dressed in a conservative brown pantsuit that looked straight out of the Eddie Bauer catalogue, and Kate was willing to bet that the lightweight T-shirt beneath the blazer was one of a dozen in the same color. All the better to disguise the wear and tear of travel. Practical. Comfortable. Conservative, except for the dancing-shaman brooch that dominated a lapel. If Kate had had a left nut, she would bet it all on the possibility that a Park artist had made the brooch and that the artist was in the audience tonight.

  The debate moderator was a plump woman with a neat cap of short blonde hair. She was also smart, articulate, and well informed on Alaskan issues. She pushed both candidates right into the deep end with a question on subsistence. Anne came down hard in favor of rural preference, Peter playing the same tune in a lower key and, as a consequence, sounding less radical and less angry.

  “The people who have been hunting and fishing these lands for the last ten thousand years ought to be the ones who have preference, especially in times of shortage,” Anne said in reply. “It is unconscionable for the state government to say to the upriver Athabascans and the downriver Yupik, ‘You cannot fish the Yukon River this year because we must meet quotas for the commercial fishermen.’ ”

  Jeff Hosford walked by Kate’s chair, talking into the cell phone that seemed to be permanently attached to his right ear. He looked up and saw Kate watching him. His smile was slow and insolent, and he stripped her with his eyes. It was obvious from his expression that she was now expected to leap into his arms and wrestle him to the floor. When she let her gaze drift past him as if he weren’t even there, he couldn’t stand it and walked over. “Ms Shugak, isn’t it?”

  “Mr. Hosford.”

  “You’re our campaign security?” The amused disbelief in his voice was provocative.

  “I am.”

  “A cute little thing like you?”

  “Yup.”

  “I’ve heard about you, you know. Everybody has. I don’t figure half of it’s true.”

  “Could you step to one side, please? I need a clear view of the stage.”

  He lurked around her peripheral vision for a few more moments, and then moved on. Jerk.

  “Well, now, Anne, in times of shortages, I’d have to agree with you,” Peter said, and gave the issue an adroit twist. “But what about the Natives living in Anchorage? There’s about thirty thousand of them, at the last census, and more moving in every day. They call Anchorage Alaska’s largest Native village. Are you saying that because they have chosen to live in an urban environment that they have lost all rights to fish and hunt where their parents and grandparents did?”

  Peter was trying to get Anne to say that she preferred Native preference, period, for hunting and fishing priorities, which was almost certainly true but which would lose her a lot of non-Native votes in the district and probably the election, but Anne was too smart for that.

  “I am saying, Peter, that the people who live off the land should be allowed to do just that in times of shortage, and that the people who have a cultural history of subsistence hunting and fishing should also be allowed to continue to do so.”

  Thus neatly including all non-Native Bush rats in her stand on rural subsistence, too. Anne smiled primly straight into the camera recording the event for later broadcast over the statewide television channel, ARCS, and that was when Kate realized that Anne Gordaoff had plans to run for governor. Kate looked at Pete and wondered if he knew. Probably. He might even vote for her.

  Doug Gordaoff passed her, his eyes fixed on the swinging behind of a young woman in very tight jeans, who tossed flirtatious glances over her shoulder as if she were leaving a trail of bread crumbs.

  The next question was about sovereignty. Again, Anne came down on the side of self-government for Native villages. “Why not?” she said, softening her voice in an immediate response to Peter’s lower key that Kate could only admire. “What have we got to lose? The whole theme for the Nineties was ‘taking responsibility for our actions,’ we were all supposed to shoulder our own weight, stop leaning on the federal government to take care of us. Well then, let us try, let the villages assume some of the duties and responsibilities of self-governance.”

  “For example?” the moderator said.

  “Law enforcement,” Anne said immediately. “There is no such thing as law enforcement in too many Native villages, who never see a state trooper from one year to the next unless there is murder done.”

  Kate thought of Jim, and of how he spent as much time in the air going from crime to crime as he did on the ground investigating them, and thought Anne had a good point.

  But this was too much for Pete. “There are only two hundred and seventy-three troopers in the state of Alaska. They can’t be everywhere at once.”

  “Yes, and why is that, Peter? Could it be that the state has failed to adequately fund the Department of Public Safety, so that there aren’t enough troopers to respond to any but the most serious crimes in the smaller communities?”

  Darlene was sitting in the front row of the folding chairs directly in Anne’s line of sight. She raised her hand in a signal that Kate couldn’t quite make out, but it made Anne, who had been gradually leaning forward, straighten in her chair and take a deep breath.

  Peter, who had come without handlers, yanked on his own invisible leash and dropped his voice, once again the voice of sweet reason. There was no arguing Anne’s point, so he didn’t try. “Anne, this issue was supposed to have been resolved with the passage in 1971 of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. For forty-four million acres and a billion dollars, the Native tribes of Alaska would cede aboriginal lands for the TransAlaska Pipeline right-of-way and form corporations to see to the needs of their peoples.”

  “Yes, and all ANCSA required in return was that Alaska Natives become white,” Anne flashed back. “We live in the Bush, not in boardrooms.”

  “What’s next, Anne?” Pete said coolly. “What comes after Natives gain sovereignty? You going to follow the ways of Outside Indian country? You going to open a casino in Niniltna?”

  A statement guaranteed to win all the votes there were from the religiou
s right wing of Pete’s party.

  It was at this point that Kate realized that Peter Heiman might have gubernatorial ambitions of his own. She didn’t think Anne would vote for him, though.

  Peter had won this round on points, but Anne had him on passion. Darlene tiptoed over to Tracy, standing next to the television camera and flirting with the cameraman, and whispered something to her. Tracy nodded and hurried out of the building. The cameraman yearned after her with a mournful expression on his face. Darlene pulled out her cell phone and speed-dialed a number.

  The next question concerned each candidate’s reaction to the recent initiative passed by an overwhelming majority of Alaskan voters to make English the official language of the state of Alaska.

  “A slap in the face to every Native in the state,” was Anne’s comment.

  “Unnecessary,” Peter allowed, and grinned. He had an attractive grin and he used it well. “I hear Tuntutuliak has passed an ordinance establishing Yupik as the official village language. I hope every time a federal bureaucrat has to fly in there to do business that he has to hire a Yupik interpreter, and I hope those Tuntutuliakers know enough to charge the red-shift limit for the service.”

  Even Anne laughed. Kate looked for Darlene to see how she took this, and couldn’t find her in the crowd.

  Erin Gordaoff, looking lost without Jeff Hosford at her elbow, scurried past. Kate watched her go into the ladies’ room.

  The moderator gave each candidate two minutes to sum up. Anne touched on her background in the health care profession, of her service to the community on various governmental committees, of her stint as a member of the University of Alaska’s Board of Regents. She invoked family icons, the how-many-times great-grandmother as a direct descendent of Baranov, of the grandfather who was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1955, of the aunt who worked on ANCSA. She thanked her campaign manager and cousin, Darlene Shelikof, and the rest of her supporters for getting her this far.

  She was articulate, humble, and smart enough not to attack Peter. Mudslinging didn’t work in Bush elections, where Native villagers in particular were unfailingly polite to candidates of either party whether they voted for them or not, and expected their children to be, too.