“So,” she greeted her namesake. “Katya.”
“Emaa.” Kate bent down to kiss the surprisingly youthful skin of the old woman’s cheek. “You look well.”
“You would know that already if you chose to live at home among your own people.”
Kate unzipped her snowsuit and sat down in the chair opposite her grandmother’s, not replying. There wasn’t any point in it; the argument was as old as she was, and Kate hadn’t come here for a fight. She looked across the table, her face expressionless, her eyes calm.
The old woman was eighty years old as near as anyone had been able to figure, as even that traveling social security representative hadn’t been able to get her to divulge her birthdate. And although no one with even the dimmest spark of self-preservation would ever dare insinuate that Ekaterina Moonin Shugak was growing senile, after eighty years some people tended to ideas that were fixed and immutable, and to hang on to them with their fingernails, teeth and toes. Kate reminded herself of this salient fact for the one thousandth time, and made what she hoped was a peace offering. “Is there cocoa?”
Her grandmother’s stern expression lightened. She rose to her feet and moved deliberately to the stove, the floor creaking beneath her weight. Her back, Kate noticed, was as straight as it had ever been, her head as high, and as proud. She pulled the teakettle forward from the back of the stove, filled it at the sink and put it on to boil. From the shelf over the stove she took a cast-iron skillet and a large bowl covered with a dishcloth. She removed the cloth to reveal a mound of rising bread dough, and cut off a piece. She poured oil into the skillet and let it heat, rolled the remaining dough into loaves and put them in the oven. When the grease began to sputter she tore off chunks of the dough she had retained and fried it a golden brown on both sides. She put the pieces on a chipped plate and set it on the table with a cube of butter and a shaker of powdered sugar. By then the water was boiling. From a cupboard she took two mugs, a can of evaporated milk and a 48-ounce can of Nestle’s Quik. She put three heaping teaspoonfuls of the powdered chocolate in each mug, punched holes in the can of milk and half filled the mugs, topping them off the rest of the way with boiling water. Steam rose and the smell of sweet chocolate mingled with the aroma of fried bread and made Kate’s mouth water. Ekaterina reached for a spoon.
“Don’t, emaa,” Kate said, reaching for the mug, the first completely natural movement she’d made and the first completely natural words she’d spoken since arriving. “You know I like it lumpy.” She took the spoon out of the mug, took a piece of fried bread from the plate, dipped it and took a bite, as absorbed in the right balance of cocoa to fried bread at thirty years of age as she had been at three. She smiled at the memory, and said around a mouthful of bread, “It’s quiet here today, emaa. Where is everyone? Usually you’re crawling with kids and supplicants.”
Her grandmother blew on her cocoa and sipped it. “It’s early, the kids are still in school. What’s a supplicant?”
Kate grinned. “One who grovels in return for a favor.”
“Oh.” The old woman thought it over, and permitted a gratified smile to cross her face.
Kate’s free hand sifted through the drift of papers on the kitchen table, and came up with a two-page document typed on legal-size paper. She read the first paragraph, read it a second time, and raised her eyes to look again at the old woman. “I thought this was a dead issue.”
Ekaterina twitched the paper out of her granddaughter’s hand and placed it out of reach. “Not quite. Not yet.”
“I thought Billy and the rest of the council voted it down.”
“They did,” Ekaterina said, taking a sip of her cocoa with the air of a connoisseur.
Kate sighed. “Oh, emaa.”
Her grandmother looked up. “You still think it’s a joke?”
“Oh, no, emaa,” Kate said, without the trace of a smile. “I don’t think of it as a joke.”
“What, then?”
Kate was silent in her turn. At last she said, “We invent so many prejudices on our own. Do we really need to impose new ones from the top down?” Ekaterina said nothing, and Kate said slowly, feeling her way, “Emaa, someday you are going to have to drag yourself, kicking and screaming if necessary, into this century. You want to keep the family at home, keep the tribe together and make the old values what they were.” She leaned forward, her fists on the table, and spoke earnestly, looking straightly into eyes so like her own. “It’s not going to happen. We have too much now, too many snow machines, too many prefabs, too many satellite dishes bringing in too many television channels, showing the kids what they don’t have. There’s no going back. We’ve got to go forward, bringing what we can of the past with us, yes, but we’ve got to go forward. It’s the only way we’re going to survive.”
Ekaterina nodded, and Kate, exasperated, said, “I hate it when you do that. I talk myself blue in the face and you nod and smile and nod and smile, and then you go on and do whatever you were going to do in the first place. It’s infuriating.”
Ekaterina nodded and smiled, and Kate gave a reluctant smile. “You’re impossible, emaa.”
“What you mean is that I am almost as stubborn as you are, Katya.”
Kate’s smile faded. “Maybe that is what I mean.” She drank her cocoa. “Emaa,” she said, knowing she was wasting her time but unable to leave her argument unfinished, “if you persist on this course, you will divide the people in the Park. Only this time it won’t be the greenies versus the strip miners and the lumberjacks, or the sports fishermen versus the commercial fishermen, or the Park rats versus Outsiders. This”—she indicated the paper—“this will split the races themselves, right down the middle. ANCSA was bad enough for the Anglos to reconcile themselves to. Some never have, and it’s hard to blame them. They don’t get quarterly dividends from Native associations, and can’t take their kids to ANS for free medical care. And now you want tribal sovereignty? One law for us, another for them? Do you want to start a war?”
Her grandmother smiled, a long, slow smile, and refrained from nodding. “Perhaps only a little one,” she said mildly. “Enough to wake up the Aleuts to their exploitation.”
Kate raised her eyebrows. “‘Exploitation’? Is that this month’s new buzzword? And don’t try that us-against-the-world, preserve-the-purity-of-the-race bullshit on me, emaa. Your great-great-grandfather was a hundred percent Russian cossack, your uncle was a Jewish cobbler who came north with the Gold Rush, and your sister married a Norwegian fisherman. We Aleuts are about as pure of ancestry as one of Abel’s dogs.” Before Ekaterina could reply Kate raised her hands palms out. “Okay. I’m sorry. Let’s drop it. It’s none of my business anyway. I will not let you suck me into this argument again.” She fortified herself with a gulp of cocoa and choked over a lump. “I’m here because I need a favor myself, emaa,” she said.
“You are a supplicant,” Ekaterina stated, with a faint smile.
Kate couldn’t help grinning. “I guess I am. I’m looking for someone. Two someones. One of them was a new ranger for the Park; he’d been here about six months before he went missing. His name was Mark Miller, Anglo, small, thin, dark hair, hazel eyes, twenty-one years old. Have you met him?”
Her grandmother took another sip of her cocoa and sat for a moment, not speaking. “Mark Miller,” she said at last, mouthing the name as if it spoiled the taste of her drink. Her eyelids were lowered, hiding her eyes. She looked almost asleep, and only thirty years of personal experience kept Kate from thinking she was.
The room was warm, and Kate unbuttoned the top buttons of her shirt. The kettle steamed on the back of the stove, the smell of baking bread teased her nostrils, the early afternoon sun sent thin, searching tendrils through the windows, and her grandmother was taking too long to answer.
“Did you know him?” Kate probed, not changing her relaxed position but alert for every word, every movement her grandmother might make. She liked this job less and less with every passing m
oment, but Ken was missing and it was her fault. No. She gave herself a mental shake. He was a grown man, and she had never minimized the dangers of the Park and its inhabitants, be they on four legs or two, which not least dangerous of the two-legged variety was the old woman sitting across from her now. She jumped when Ekaterina at last decided to speak.
She spoke slowly, deliberately, as if remembrance of the events were coming to her as she talked. “Xenia was seeing some young Outsider a month or two ago.”
“What was his name?”
The old woman shrugged, her eyes on the strong, wrinkled hands wrapped around her mug.
Kate said patiently, “Was it Miller, emaa?”
There was a long silence, and then the old woman said, “It might have been.”
Kate’s mind was busy creating and discarding scenarios. “A month or two, that fits. He hasn’t been heard from in six weeks.” Kate looked keenly at the old woman. “So he was seeing Xenia, was he?”
“Yes.” Her grandmother did not elaborate, and from her manner Kate knew she had said her last word on the subject.
“Well,” Kate said, “I guess the next step is to find Xenia and talk to her.”
“You said you were looking for two people.”
“Yes,” Kate said. “The ranger’s family has pull in Washington, D.C. They put the FBI on it.”
“The FBI?”
Kate laughed. “You look just like Abel did when I told him the FBI was on the trail, emaa.”
The old woman became, if possible, even more deliberate in speech. “Abel?”
“Yeah, have either of you robbed any banks lately? Anyway, the local agent asked Jack Morgan if he would look into it since he knew the Park, and he sent Ken Dahl out here.” She paused with her mug halfway to her lips, and her smile faded. “He’s been missing for two weeks.”
“The blond man,” her grandmother said. “I remember. You brought him to the potlatch this summer.”
Kate stiffened. “Yes, emaa, I brought him to the potlatch, and I have yet to hear the end of it.” Her grandmother looked bland, and Kate smacked her mug down on the table and said explosively, “It was only a party, for God’s sake; it’s not some holy tribal ceremony. I brought Jack—” Her mouth snapped shut, and she wondered bitterly what it was about her grandmother that could put her so instantly on the defensive.
“For the four years before that, yes, I remember him, too. Jack Morgan. A good man.”
“For an Anglo and an Outsider,” Kate agreed sarcastically. “Yes, I know.”
The two women were silent, listening to the kettle whistle on the stove. “Katya,” the old woman said at last, “I have a favor to ask you now.”
With Ekaterina, there was always a quid pro quo. Nothing was for free, not even for granddaughters anointed to follow in her footsteps. Perhaps especially not those, Kate thought. “What?” she said. “Another council meeting you feel I should attend? Another amendment to the Native association charter you feel it necessary I be present to vote for in person?” The old woman looked at her, and she looked away. “Sorry, emaa,” she said gruffly. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“I want you to talk to Xenia, Katya,” her grandmother said.
“I’m going to anyway, but what do you want me to say to her?”
“She wants to move to town.”
Kate’s shoulders slumped a little. It was always the same whenever she came home. It was one of the reasons she rarely did. In Ekaterina’s view, Kate was the elder sister of her family and Ekaterina’s personal sergeant at arms. It was, Ekaterina believed, one of Kate’s duties to mount a guard on the perimeter of the jail in case any of her cousins’ kids took it into their heads to escape the confines of family, village and park. Escapes went on all the time, some successful, some thwarted. “And I’m supposed to talk her out of it?”
“She wants you to find her a job. You won’t.”
Kate took a deep breath, and expelled it. “I might. If she’s really sincere about it, and willing to work, I might look for something for her to do. Maybe even in the D.A.’s office.”
“You will do no such thing.”
Kate met her grandmother’s stern eyes. “Why not?” she said. “What’s all that wrong with Anchorage?”
“Why did you leave it?” the old woman countered, and Kate flushed.
“What is there for her to do here?” she snapped. “Get pregnant so she can go on welfare? And then she needs more money so she has another baby, and then she needs more so she has another? Or maybe she could marry some guy from Tana who didn’t finish high school, who fishes all summer and drinks all winter and beats on her in between? And then he drinks too much to fish and she goes on welfare anyway and gets Bernie to cash her checks for her, and maybe because she’s lonely, or maybe because she just wants time off from the kids she starts drinking herself, and spending her weekends at the Roadhouse, leaving the kids to raise themselves, until one night she staggers out for a leak in the snow and passes out and dies of exposure? Is that what you want for her?” The last words were almost shouted, and Kate stood, glaring at her grandmother, breathing hard.
“Xenia is not your mother,” Ekaterina said softly into the angry silence of her kitchen.
They stared at each other. Kate looked away first. “Ah, the hell with it.”
Ekaterina allowed the silence to linger, for Kate to lose steam, and then she said softly, her words dropping quietly into the silence, “It was easy for you, Katya. It would not be so easy for Xenia.”
Easy? Kate looked at Ekaterina and laughed; she couldn’t help herself. For a change Ekaterina looked off-balance. It was a bitter and entirely unamusing sound, Kate’s laughter, and Kate let it die a natural death. She paced once around the room, her hands shoved in her pockets. “I went Outside last year, did I tell you? Jack has an interest in an apple orchard in Arizona. We rented an RV and drove everywhere. Beautiful country. Not like Alaska, but beautiful in its own way.”
“Sounds like fun,” Ekaterina said neutrally, alert to the seeming change of subject, watching her granddaughter with wary eyes.
“Mmm. One day, while we were driving everywhere, we came to a Indian gift shop by the side of the road, and we stopped. The man who was running it, a Navajo he said when we asked him, wanted to know where we were from. We told him, and he wanted to know, where do Indians live in Alaska? Jack said, a lot of the time next door. He didn’t believe us. I told him I was an Aleut, and he looked at Jack, and he looked at me, and he looked at our camper van, and he looked at my clothes, and he didn’t say anything, but it was obvious he didn’t believe that, either.”
Ekaterina chuckled, and Kate smiled. “I know. So we showed him pictures of where we lived, and he laughed. He wanted to know what kind of reservations we had, and we told him, none, or none like they do Outside. He still wouldn’t believe us, but he was too polite to call us liars to our face, and so he sold me this gorgeous silver bracelet and took us home for supper.”
Kate stopped next to the stove, her hands held out over it. “Home was a twenty-year-old Airstream trailer propped up on bricks and insulated with newspapers, sitting next to a dry creek bed. No power, no running water, but the creek ran most of the year, he told us. His oldest girl was thirteen. She was pregnant. They wanted to know about Alaska and we had a map and showed it to them, and they couldn’t read enough to understand it. His wife was drunk from the moment we stepped into his trailer, and before we left her sister and her sister’s husband showed up with another bottle. It was a school day, but none of the kids had bothered to attend. What was the point? He asked us. There were no jobs on the reservation.”
The old woman looked at her, one arm on the table, the other planted on a knee, her face impassive, and Kate said gently, “They stay home, emaa. They never leave it. And do you know who they have for tribal police? The FBI. There’s your self-determination. There’s your sovereign nation. Don’t you see, that by forcing Xenia to stay here, you would be forcing her to
give up any chance she has at a future?”
Ekaterina sat still, again her eyes half-closed. She said, “Billy Mike was in Prudhoe last year when the Barrow whalers landed that bowhead. They were not in kayaks, they were in Zodiacs with outboard motors. Their harpoons had exploding heads. One of the oil companies provided a tractor with a come-along and winched the whale ashore, after the hunters had struck three times and finally killed it. A third of the meat was ruined by the time the carcass was beached. Another third spoiled before it could be harvested, before even the polar bears could gather to finish it off, the way they were put here to do. This is your twentieth century, Katya. This is your civilization. Don’t you see that if Xenia leaves, she abandons the culture that gave her birth?”
Kate smiled at the old woman, and flicked the switch next to the door, plunging the room into arctic afternoon gloom. “And yet you have electricity in your house, emaa. You have running water in your kitchen and bathroom.”
“Provided by the association for its members,” Ekaterina said composedly.
Kate flicked the switch again, restoring the light. “Funded by taxes on Prudhoe Bay oil, emaa.”
Four
UNFORTUNATELY KATE KNEW exactly where to find her cousin Xenia.
Bernie’s Roadhouse was twenty-seven miles away from Niniltna, which put it exactly nine feet, three inches outside the Niniltna Native Association’s tribal jurisdiction. A road of sorts, following the west bank of the Kanuyaq River, connected the two. It was a road created and maintained from the wear and tear of truck tires and snow-machine treads. Any other road with that much traffic would have qualified for federal matching funds.
The bar was a low, sprawling place built of the inevitable plywood and two-by-fours flown in piece by prohibitively expensive piece, strapped to the struts of a Super Cub whose young pilot paid off the loan on his plane with that job. A satellite dish hung precariously from the eaves. There was a shack for the generator, another for the water tank whose contents Bernie pumped out of the Kanuyaq each fall, and the house in which Bernie and his wife, Enid, born a Shugak, and seven children lived and from which Bernie fled nightly into the Roadhouse. A half dozen tiny cabins, where Bernie put his children to work as soon as they were tall enough to change sheets on a bed, were rented out year-round to the stray tourists and Demetri Totemoff’s hunting parties.
A Cold Day for Murder (Kate Shugak #1) Page 5