A Fatal Thaw

by Dana Stabenow

  Half a dozen people groaned and laughed and climbed down out of the bleachers to join the costumed tribal dancers on the floor. They crouched over bent knees, stepping from one foot to the other and shaking their hands in time to the beat.

  “Athabascan!”

  An old, old man in beaded buckskins and wearing hearing aids in both ears made his slow and stately way out onto the floor. He was using a walker, but he had his dancing slippers on, made of buckskin and heavily beaded.

  Bernie noticed Kate standing very still. “What is it?”

  She took a breath. “It’s Chief William. From Tanana. He almost never leaves his house nowadays. Emaa must have asked him to come as a personal favor to her.”

  “Who’s Chief William?”

  “He’s the oldest chief of any tribe in Alaska. He’s probably the oldest Alaskan there is, for that matter.”

  “How old is he?”

  “He was born in 1867. The year Russia sold Alaska to the United States.”

  Bernie whistled, a long, low whistle. “That’d make him—what? A hundred and… ?”

  “A hundred and twenty-five.”

  “And still dancing,” Bernie said, marveling. “I should be in such good shape when I’m a hundred and twenty-five.”

  Kate shook herself, resisting her awe. “He was born somewhere up around Ahtna, way before there was a town. He doesn’t have a birth certificate, so they can only guess at his age. He’s probably younger.”

  “He could be older,” Bernie suggested.

  Kate’s breath expelled on a short laugh. “So he could. I never thought of that.”

  The other dancers made way for the old chief’s slow but steady progress out into the middle of the floor. As small and wrinkled as he was, as hampered by the walker as he was, his dancing was deliberate, dignified and kept to the beat of the drums, which had slowed to accommodate him. His voice was small and weak when he called out, but somehow the words echoed clearly across the big room and brought responding shouts from everywhere in the crowd. Accompanying him was a young boy of ten or twelve, wearing jeans and Nike tennis shoes and clutching an eagle feather in each fist. He was a little clumsy but enthusiastic as he followed his great-great-grandfather around the floor, stamping his feet and shaking his eagle feathers.

  “I didn’t know there were so many of you,” Bernie said, staring in wonder at the crowded floor.

  “Not so many,” Kate said, too low for him to hear. “So few.” As always, the dance of her ancestors stirred opposing emotions in her. There was much joy in the sight of so many of her people together in one place, celebrating their heritage. There was as much sorrow. They were so few, barely enough to fill this gym.

  Bernie looked from the dancers to the short, lithe woman standing next to him, her pensive expression emphasizing the beauty of her flat, high cheekbones, the clear, light brown, almond-shaped eyes with the hint of the epicanthic fold in the crease of the upper lid, the wide mouth, held firmly, even a bit primly, the clear, golden skin stretched tautly over good bones, the shining black fall of hair braided severely back from her face. She looked like a walking, breathing advertisement for “How the West Was Won,” except that if Kate had been there he wasn’t sure it would have been. He ran through what he knew about Kate Shugak. She never touched alcohol. She could turn her hand to any task in the Park and perform it in an efficient and competent manner. Her sense of humor was strong. He had seen the sense of responsibility she felt toward the people of the Park, which warred with her veneration for personal freedom, the ability to think and do as one chose. He had also seen the way people of the Park looked at Kate, with respect verging on awe. Their voices dropped when they spoke of her; they drew back where she walked. Her deeds were legend, from her apprehension of the child molester that had resulted in the scar across her neck, to the brutal if efficient ejection of the bootlegger last winter. Abel Int-Hout’s suicide four months ago and the two murders that had preceded it were still being talked about over the bar at the Roadhouse, and with each retelling Kate’s part in the events became ever larger than life.

  Now, Bernie looked at her and for the first time saw a Native Alaskan, a hard, tough descendant of a thousand years of Great Land Darwinism. “What’s he wearing?” he said, in a voice soft enough not to break the spell. “Chief William. It looks like something out of a museum.”

  “It probably should be in one. It’s a hunter’s tunic and leggings.”

  “Made out of what?”

  “Tanned caribou hide, probably. Maybe moose.”

  “What’re the decorations?”

  “Beads and dentalium shells.”

  “The earrings?”

  “More beads and dentalium shells. The nose pin’s a dentalium shell, too.”

  Chief William paused, one hand on his walker. With the other he pulled out what looked like a long, brown, hollow tube. “What’s that?” Bernie said.

  “A sucking tube. Made of antler. Shamans use them to suck the evil spirits from the sick.”

  The tube raised to his lips, Chief William sucked in, once, twice, three times. The drums picked up speed, and the crowd shouted their approval. Chief William put the tube away and made his stately way back to his seat.

  “Aleut!” Ekaterina called.

  A shriek went up fit to raise the roof and half the bleachers took to the floor in a stamping, shaking mass.

  “Koniag!”

  A woman moved out from the crowd to dance directly in front of Ekaterina. She wore a skullcap made from strings of brightly-colored glass beads that hung in fringes over her eyes and down her back, and an ivory-and-feather finger mask on each hand. The beads swung and sparkled in the light, the feathers on the finger masks swept wide arcs through the air. Her face was broad and bronzed, her eyes merry, her hair long and straight with reddish gleams beneath the light. Her movements were deft and graceful and she looked delightful, and if her flirtatious, up-from-under glances at the male dancers were any indication, she knew it.

  “Hawaiian!” Ekaterina called. “Come on, Keoki!”

  An enormous man wearing a high, plumed helmet and a floor-length cloak made of brilliant yellow and red feathers took to the floor and hurled himself into a hula, and there was a roar of approval.

  “The black man!”

  The circle of dancers drew back and looked around. No one came forward. The drummer whacked the drum louder, and Ekaterina repeated in a voice pitched to be heard in Oregon, “The black man!”

  Bobby wheeled out of the crowd amid a roar of approval. “See, Bobby, I knew you were here!” Ekaterina called.

  Bobby moved the wheels of his chair backward and forward with the beat of the drums and walked his head and shoulders like an Egyptian. A circle of high-stepping, gyrating dancers formed around his chair, and he threw back his head and howled, his black face gleaming with sweat, his mouth split wide in a grin.

  “The white man!” There was a whoop and a holler and one lone Rebel yell and a dozen more people took to the floor.

  “I thought a potlatch was for naming a baby,” Bernie said to Kate, raising his voice over the increasing roar of the crowd.

  “It is. It’s for a lot of things.”

  “It’s like a, what, religious rite?”

  Kate shook her head. “It’s more social than religious. In the old days, it was so the people could come together and help share the work and the food. A village would throw a potlatch to celebrate the raising of a new totem pole, or a big chief would have one to show how rich and powerful he was, or maybe a couple’s parents would throw one for their wedding.” She smiled. “I remember when I was a little girl, my cousin Martin’s parents had a potlatch to name him when he was a year old, and another when he turned five and had his first haircut, and a third for when he shot his first caribou.” She sighed. “Then, when my Aunt Mary and my Uncle Bob were cheated out of their homestead by a bank in Fairbanks, their children had a potlatch to show them how many people loved them, to take t
he hurt away. You can have a potlatch for anything, when it comes from deep down in your heart.”

  “And this one?”

  “This one’s for the ten people who were killed here last month.”

  “I thought they were all white.”

  Kate gave him an impatient look. “It wouldn’t matter one way or another if they were. They lived here. They were our neighbors.”

  “Even Mac Devlin?” Bernie asked with the lift of an eyebrow.

  “Even Mac Devlin,” Kate said firmly. “Nobody likes him and I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody shot at him again someday, but he was part of the event, the… the tragedy, if you will. And, not that it matters, but Tina Weiss was a quarter Aleut. I think we were related in a shirttail sort of way through my father’s family in Cordova. And the Jorgensens had lived here forever, and Pat’s brothers still do. And who wouldn’t grieve over the deaths of two newlyweds and their unborn baby?” Kate was speaking dispassionately now. “Emaa had this potlatch to call their spirits back one more time, to remember them with joy instead of sorrow, to celebrate their life and friendship, and then let them go.”

  Potlatches, she could have added, were also held to put the guests under obligation to the host. She looked across the room at Ekaterina, broad, ageless face creased in a wide grin, and thought, No, Emaa never does anything for only one reason.

  The drums gathered force, and as each individual dancer took to the floor and fell in with the rhythm, the crowd began to take on the look of a single, joyous entity. Bobby’s Fifth Annual Celebration of the Twentieth Anniversary of the Tet Offensive had been a dirge lamenting useless death and a senseless war. By contrast, the potlatch was a paean to life and to those who lived it, a remembrance of the dead, an act of homage. If the dancers mourned the passing of the dead, they also rejoiced in the lives those individuals had lived, and rejoiced as well, unashamed, in their own. Kate thought of the quilters and the mushers and the parishioners and the belly dancers at the Roadhouse on Wednesday, and smiled suddenly. Even The Rite of the Middle Finger, that Flipping Off of Fate by Big Bumpers who had made it all the way to the top and lived whole and entire to tell the tale, was part and parcel of the same service.

  Ekaterina threw back her head and called in a voice that rang off the rafters, “Everybody!”

  “This is incredible, Kate,” Bernie said. “I’ve never seen anything like this.” There was no reply and he looked around. “Kate?”

  She was down on the floor, moving among the dancers with fluid grace. Her legs were bent at the knee, her arms were up, and she leaned forward, stepping from one foot to the other, always in time with the beat of the drums. The drums became louder, until they filled the room up to the ceiling and bounced back down again. Kate threw back her head and called, to whom or to what Bernie didn’t know. Half a dozen people called back, and the beat increased in speed and decibel level. Chief William’s great-great-grandson tossed Kate an eagle feather, and she caught it deftly in her right hand and used it to draw graceful pictures in the air as she danced. The Koniag girl threw her a finger mask, and she slipped the carved ivory-and-feather hoop over her left index finger. Her braid loosened, and her hair fell free and hid the white bandage on her temple, and she began to toss her head and throw her long black hair back and forth. She lunged at a group of dancers, calling to them, and they lunged and called back. The boy with the eagle feather and the Nikes caught up with her, and for a while they danced together, Kate slowing down so that he could keep up. She turned and danced away; he followed. Another fell into line, a third, and soon all the dancers were stamping their feet and shaking their hands in a line that snaked around the floor and doubled back on itself half a dozen times. Kate led the way, up the floor and down, in and out of the corners, around the tables and back again.

  On the floor, Kate’s pulse seemed to beat in time with the beat of the drums, her breath to come and go with them, her steps dictated by them. The drums guided her through the dance with a firm hand, taking over her body and leaving her mind free to grieve.

  Abel. She had not thought of him, or had tried not to, in months. Abel, her uncle-by-choice, her uncle-by-honor, who had died if not by her hand, then as a result of actions she had put in motion. He had guided her steps throughout her childhood as the drums guided her steps now, had taught her everything she knew of woodcraft, of hunting and fishing. His missing presence was a constant ache at the back of her mind. Suddenly she saw him, standing at the edge of the crowd, his grizzled old face grinning at her, his faded blue eyes twinkling, as if to say, “Well, girl? Ready to do a little poaching with the old man?” He turned as if to go, and she faltered slightly, and then the beat of the drums caught her up and swept her away.

  She saw Pat and Becky Jorgensen, hand in hand, smiling warmly at her, their fingers smeared with ink and marked with paper cuts from sorting their neighbors’ mail. The thin, intense figure of Steven Syms stared over at her with a fanatical expression. He’d been a born-again Baptist type, Kate remembered, who never went anywhere without a Bible and who had staged a one-man protest demonstration, with sign, in front of the Roadhouse when a movement to reform Alaska’s twenty-year-old legal abortion law was quashed in the state legislature. Next to him, Lisa Getty, blond and blue-eyed, slender and seductive, smiled the smile that enticed and mocked at the same time. Max Chaney, appropriately enough, stood on her other side, looking around with a puzzled expression, so new to the company that he did not yet understand his presence in it. Other figures appeared dimly, figures she knew must be the Longstaffs and the Weisses, coming to bid her farewell.

  She strained to see her mother, her father, but it had been too long since their deaths, and nothing was left of their spirits on earth except what she carried within her.

  The drums began to slow and ease in volume, and Kate’s movements slowed and eased with them. The song ended on a long fade, Kate’s dance with a last, graceful flight of eagle feather through the air. The music stopped as she came to a halt before Chief William. She reached for his gnarled, twisted old hand and, bending forward from the waist, held it for a moment to her forehead. She returned the finger mask to the Koniag dancer and held both hands out, palms up and eagle feather lying across them, to the boy. She said something to him, and he blushed and ducked his head.

  Bernie was awed, by the dance, by the spirit it invoked, even in him, a practicing cynic, the only philosophy a working bartender could hold to and survive. “That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he told Kate when she returned to his side.

  Her face was flushed and she was out of breath. She laughed at him, and then he saw her smile fade and a guarded wariness replace the joy in her eyes. He turned and saw the square, stately figure of Ekaterina Moonin Shugak approaching, and in that moment he remembered something else about Kate Shugak. She didn’t get along with her grandmother.

  “Emaa,” Kate said, inclining her head stiffly. Her temple gave a vicious throb.

  “Katya,” her grandmother said. She gave a regal, dismissing nod in Bernie’s general direction. Bernie, amused, had watched the stout old woman make her progress through the crowd, smiling at someone, stopping to shake hands with someone else, holding up a baby and exclaiming over its beauty, in a manner that reminded him irresistibly of Elizabeth II of England outside Buckingham Palace. He managed now to remove himself from her presence without quite bowing and backing away.

  “Bernie, wait,” Kate said, “I need to talk to you. It’s why I came. Can we go—”

  He raised a dismissive hand. “Later.”

  “Not later, now. Bernie, it’s important. I have to talk to—”

  “Whatever it is’ll keep. I’ve got a team to psych up.”

  “I am glad to see you here, dancing with your people,” the old woman said to Kate.

  Kate watched Bernie’s back moving rapidly in the opposite direction and swore under her breath. She almost went after him but couldn’t quite bring herself to turn her
back on her grandmother and walk away, and cursed again. “I enjoyed it, emaa,” she said out loud. Determined to give the devil her due, she added, “This potlatch was a good idea.”

  “It was the right thing to do,” her namesake said simply.

  “Yes,” Kate agreed. “And a good thing, for all of us. Friends,” she added, emphasizing the word, “as well as family.”

  There fell an awkward silence. At least for Kate it was awkward. The last time Ekaterina Moonin Shugak might have felt awkward was during the birth of her thirteenth child, some thirty years previous. Kate doubted it. Ekaterina Moonin Shugak ruled her family, the Niniltna Tribal Association, the Park, the Alaska Federation of Natives and much of the Alaska state legislature with the same firm, unshakable, unfumbling hand with which she would have ruled Kate, had Kate let her, and she was never, ever awkward.

  Kate cleared her throat. “Well, I came to see someone, emaa. I’d better get to it.”

  The old woman delayed her. touching a forefinger to the bandage at her granddaughter’s temple. “You’ve been hurt.”

  Kate shrugged away. “It is nothing.”

  Ekaterina’s hand dropped back to her side. “Have you heard from Axenia?”

  Kate went on alert. “Yes.”

  “How is she?”

  “She’s fine, emaa. Jack found her an apartment and a roommate. She’s enjoying her job. And she’s enrolled in an accounting class at the University of Alaska. She sounded very happy the last time I talked to her.”

  Kate couldn’t help the defensive sound her words took on at the last. The old woman did not reply, but her silence was immensely eloquent, at least to Kate. “Well, if that’s all, I’d better get going.”

  “Katya.”

  “What!”

  Her grandmother looked mildly surprised at her tone, and Kate was immediately ashamed of herself and as immediately determined not to show it. “I only wanted to say, Katya, that you may have been right about Axenia.”