White Sky, Black Ice

by Stan Jones

  "Did you see this with your own eyes ?"

  "No, but everybody say it," Wilson said. "The oldest boy's about sixteen at the time and was sort of friendly with Frank Karl. He hang himself couple years later. Ever since then, them Clinton boys always kill themselves when they get to be about twenty. So far, the curse get them all. After George, Daniel only have one boy left."

  "Billy Karl says a few words and Daniel's boys just start killing themselves?" Active asked. "Come on."

  "It make sense if you don't think about it," Wilson said. "If you plant the idea in some dumb Eskimo's mind he's going to kill himself, he probably will."

  "Don't say that, Kinnuk." Active said. "The Inupiat aren't dumb."

  "Then how come we kill ourself so much?"

  Active knew the argument was pointless. Kinnuk had ab-sorbed the white man's contempt for the Inupiat, and it would take more than finger-shaking from a state trooper to erase it. But he took one more swipe at it. "It's called culture shock."

  "I just call it dumb Eskimos." Wilson shrugged. "That's why Daniel and his boys believe what Billy Karl say."

  "Your sons will take themselves away from you," Active re-peated. Despair blew through Chukchi's streets like the west wind. He wondered if he could endure it long enough to get his transfer to Anchorage.

  "Maybe if the first one didn't do it, the others would have a chance," Wilson said. "But them younger boys, seeing their brothers kill theirself, they start to know it's going to happen to them. Them dumb Eskimos feel themselves get smaller and smaller, pretty soon they're gone."

  "Sounds like you've been there yourself."

  "Sometimes I . . ." Wilson stopped talking and looked at Daniel Clinton's kunnichuk again. "Ah, I just go to that Dreamland and I get feeling good again."

  "Don't touch anything," Active said, and climbed down from the Suburban. When he glanced back, Wilson was pulling a fresh Oly from a pocket of his parka.

  Active went through the kunnichuk and knocked on the in-side door. He looked around while he waited, savoring the sharp, oily smells in the shed. Several parkas hung from nails on the walls, alongside some steel traps, a pair of caribou mukluks, and the hides of a marten and two foxes. Two red plastic jugs for snowmachine and boat gas sat on the floor in a corner. In another corner stood three rifles and two shotguns.

  Active walked over and inspected them. No 30-30 Win-chester carbine.

  There was a noise behind the door, and an Inupiat woman opened it. She was in her early fifties, Active guessed. Her eyes were red and she clutched a soggy ball of Kleenex in one hand.

  "Are you Mrs. Clinton?" he asked.

  "We already hear about George," she said. "You don't need to come here."

  "Well, I just need to ask a few questions for my report."

  She let him into one end of a hallway that divided the house in half. At the opposite end was a partly drawn green curtain, and behind it a bathtub and a toilet.

  "Daniel is in there." She pointed to a doorway off to the right. Active went in.

  Daniel Clinton sat at a Formica-topped dining table with a cup of coffee in front of him. He had a round, mahogany face above a squat, solid-looking body. A small black-and-white television on the table was tuned to the state Bush channel, which was showing a Wheel of Fortune rerun. Clinton paid no attention to the coffee or the television. He was looking out across the lagoon to the white folds of tundra beyond. Unlike his wife, he was dry-eyed.

  There was one other person in the room. A thin boy with long black hair, maybe fifteen, lay on a couch reading an Archie comic. If Kinnuk Wilson's story was right, this was Daniel Clinton's last son.

  The boy looked up and said, "Don't look at me," as if reading Active's mind.

  Daniel Clinton turned and saw Active. "You could go in the other room, Julius," he said. The teenager moved, but not to another room. Active heard the door out of the house slam, then the door of the kunnichuk. Clinton turned off the television.

  "Thank you for coming to see us, Mr. Active," Clinton said. "I'm sorry if we bother you."

  "I'm sorry for your trouble, Mr. Clinton."

  "It's my fault, from something that happen long time ago," Clinton said. "You was gone in Anchorage with your nalauqmiut parents then."

  Active wasn't surprised to find out how much Daniel Clinton knew about him. Since his arrival the year before, word had spread rapidly that the Chukchi baby adopted by white schoolteachers had grown up and come back as an Alaska State Trooper. Those who hadn't known his history had quickly dipped it from the river of gossip that coursed constantly through the streets of the village.

  "I think I might have heard something about that," Active said, to let Clinton know he didn't need to talk about the curse if he didn't want to.

  "Would you like some coffee, Mr. Active?" Clinton said. Obviously, Clinton didn't want to talk about it.

  Active nodded and, when Clinton had poured him a cup, asked if George had acted different lately.

  "No, he seem fine to me. He get a job at that Gray Wolf and he have some money, buy a new snowgo, he seem happy. He say he move out and get his own place pretty soon," Clinton said. "I start to think maybe George will be the one to make it. But I guess not."

  The Gray Wolf was a huge copper mine that had opened a few months earlier a hundred miles north of Chukchi on Gray Wolf Creek. A Norwegian mining company named GeoNord ran it, but it was on land owned by Chukchi Region Inc., the Native corporation that all the Inupiat in the area belonged to. So the Norwegians hired a lot of Inupiat, and the work schedule was tailored to people who liked to hunt and fish: two weeks on, two weeks off, with the company paying for the plane rides back and forth to the Gray Wolf, or giving the equivalent in cash to those who preferred to ride their snowmachines.

  "He just came back from the Gray Wolf?"

  "Monday, I think. He hang out with his buddies, go down to that GeoNord office for something about his job, go rabbit hunting behind the lagoon, stay over at Emily Hoffman's, just run around. You know how it is with them young guys. I think he was going caribou hunting if that ice on Chukchi Bay ever get good again from this warm spell we had."

  "Emily Hoffman?" Active wrote the name in his notebook.

  "His girlfriend," Clinton said. "She's pregnant, I guess. I was thinking maybe she'll be his wife pretty soon."

  "Do you know who he went to see at GeoNord?"

  "He never tell me," Clinton said. "He just say he have to straighten something out. When he come back he just say everything is fine."

  "They found a 30-30 rifle with him. Did he have one?"

  "I keep one in my hmnich.uk," Clinton said. "I could check if it's there."

  "No, I looked on the way in," Active said. "It's not."

  "He take that old 30-30?" Clinton said desolately in his husky, sibilant voice. "I teach him to shoot with that gun."

  He looked out over the lagoon again. "I remember the first time I take him out on the ice for seal. It's spring day, sunny, blue sky, not much wind. We go out on snowgo, maybe fifteen, twenty miles where there's lots of airholes.

  "I find pressure ridge by airhole that look like it get used a lot, and I put George up there to wait. He's just little guy, maybe eight or nine, but he lay there in his white parky real quiet for long time, watching that airhole.

  "Finally that seal put his head through and I think maybe George will shoot too soon and that seal will fall back through the hole, maybe we lose it. But George don't shoot, he wait. Pretty soon that seal haul out on the ice and take one more look around before he go to sleep and that's when George shoot him. George hit him right in the eye and he don't even flop around, he just drop his head down like he's going to sleep.

  "George, he look at me and he say, "I'm a real Eskimo, now, huh, Pop?' "

  Clinton stopped talking and picked at the edges of a triangular chip in the Formica. Someone had outlined the hole with a red crayon. "I never think he use that old Winchester for... for this."

  Clinton s
topped talking again and Active saw that now there were tears on his cheeks. Active closed his notebook and left.

  CHAPTER 2

  Wednesday Morning, Chukchi

  "YOU STILL HERE?" HE asked when he reached the Sub-urban. "That Oly is leaving this vehicle. It's your choice whether you go with it."

  Wilson tossed the beer into the ditch in front of Daniel Clinton's house. "What did old Daniel say?"

  "Police business, Kinnuk." Active started the engine and headed back uptown along Fourth Street. Fourth was on the back side of town. There weren't many houses, mostly just tundra pocked with rusting oil drums, dead snowmachines, and abandoned cars.

  "Hey, wait a minute," Wilson said suddenly. "That's Pukuk." He pointed at a black-and-white mongrel barking beside the road. "That dog never leave Tillie."

  "Tillie Miller? The old crazy woman?" Active remembered seeing her around town and hearing the city cops talk about her. As long as she was in city limits, she wasn't his problem, but he stopped the truck and started toward the dog with Wilson.

  Before they reached Pukuk, they spotted Tillie's mukluks sticking out of the willows where the footpath from the Dreamland came out of the tundra onto Fourth. A couple of hundred yards north along the trail, the city cops were still gathered around George Clinton's body, the blue-and-white Chukchi ambulance now pulled up beside them.

  At first Active thought Tillie might be dead too, but they heard snoring when they got close. She was lying on her back in the snow, and looked comfortable. One mittened hand cradled a half-bottle of the pure grain alcohol known as Everclear.

  "What you gonna do, Nathan?"

  "Maybe we should take her to the hospital."

  "She don't look sick to me," Wilson said, stamping his feet against the cold. "Just drunk and asleep. Besides, the hospital won't take her anymore. They know how mean she is."

  "Yeah, but she could have hypothermia." A gust of wind sucked a mouthful of snow off the tundra and spat it in Active's face. He pulled down the earflaps of his hat and turned sideways to the blast.

  "Sure, I heard of that," Wilson said. "It's when you get so cold you can't warm up. I'll try check." He dodged around Pukuk, who was yapping furiously in an effort to keep them away from Tillie, and slipped his hand down the neck of her caribouhide parka.

  "Nah, her titty's warm." He took the Everclear from her hand and put it in his pocket. "She's just passed out. She do this all the time. Her parky's good. We could just leave her."

  "I don't think so, Kinnuk." Active went to her head, put his hands under her arms, and tried to lift her to a sitting position. She was, he discovered, built like a buffalo: short, but solid and heavy. He let her flop down again.

  He couldn't arrest her, even for her own good. The courts had decreed that it wasn't a crime to fall down drunk in public in Alaska, however great the risk of being frozen like a Popsicle, watered by dogs, sucked dry by mosquitoes, or raped by passersby.

  There was a limited exception for someone in imminent danger, but where would he take her? The city cops wouldn't help. They were still busy with George Clinton's body and, like the hospital, preferred not to tangle with Tillie Miller.

  "We could take her home," Wilson said, pointing. "That's her tent."

  A hundred yards south and a block east, on Fifth Street, Active saw a wall tent with a wooden birdhouse mounted on the ridgepole, white canvas billowing in the wind.

  "Poor old lady, the birds live better than she does," he muttered. But in Anchorage, she would have been one of the lost Natives who slept in the homeless shelters in the winter and in summer camped in Visqueen leantos along the creeks to poach salmon. Maybe a wall tent, a birdhouse, and a reputation as the meanest woman in Chukchi weren't so bad.

  He crossed the road to open the clamshell doors at the back of the Suburban, then returned and put his hands under Tillie's arms again. Wilson took her feet and they staggered up onto the road and dumped her in. Pukuk was still yapping hysterically, so Active boosted him in too. He curled up on Tillie's chest and panted happily.

  Active drove to the tent and went in to look around. A cot on one side, a table with a Coleman camp stove on the other, cardboard boxes filled with Tdlie's food and gear, a small oil heater, a Coleman lantern hanging from the ridgepole, and a fifty-pound bag of dog food. He was surprised by the sense of order. Maybe Tillie wasn't as crazy as everyone said.

  The cot was covered with caribou hides and a sleeping bag. He pushed off everything but the bottom two hides, and went back outside to the truck. They hauled Tillie in and laid her on the cot and piled the rest of the hides and the sleeping bag on her. Pukuk stretched out on the cot beside her, licked his crotch, curled his tail over his nose, and went to sleep.

  They started to leave, but Active decided to check for himself that the old lady was warm under the hides and sleeping bag. He put his hand to the neck of her parka, chivalrously worked it around behind her head, and was wriggling it down to feel between her shoulder blades when she opened her eyes and spoke. The canvas of the tent creaked and popped in the wind, but he heard her clearly.

  "Don't touch me, Goddamn you nalauqmiiyaaq," she rasped. Then she shut her eyes, rolled over, and resumed snoring.

  Active knew a couple dozen Inupiaq words. Nalauqmiiyaaq was one of them. It meant half-breed. Actually, it was a little worse than that. It pretty much meant "almost a white man." He heard it a lot.

  "You're welcome, Tillie," he said. He shook his head and walked back to the Suburban.

  When he got back to the public safety building, Evelyn O'Brien handed him the morning's mail.

  The trooper secretary was a forty-something redhead whose husband sold Arctic Cat snowmachines. She was still attractive enough if you didn't mind a few extra pounds. Particularly on days like today, when her hair was a solid brick red. No trace of the gray that began to show toward the end of every month.

  "Was your hair this red yesterday?"

  "Shut up, Nathan."

  "I heard Henri was back in town." Henri the Hairdresser commuted from Anchorage once a month to coif and color the women of Chukchi.

  "Shut up, Nathan."

  "Your secret is safe with me."

  He flipped through the mail. Something from the state Division of Retirement and Benefits, something from trooper headquarters in Anchorage, a Wired magazine, a lingerie catalog addressed to "Boxholder," and a letter from the City of Nuliakuk.

  He knew he should type up his report on George Clinton's suicide and send a copy to the city cops, a copy to headquarters in Anchorage, and a copy to his case file, which he hadn't started yet but planned to close as soon as he did, because this, thankfully, was Jim Silver's problem. Instead, he decided to read the letter from the City of Nuliakuk first. It was from Carlton Crane, the village's elderly and revered mayor. "Dear Mr. Trooper Active, please pardon my write you," it began.

  As you will be know freezeup coming soon. Thats mean the snowmachine trail from Chukchi is opening again and thats mean ea* our bootleggers start up again.

  Last year, we ask Troopers three time to arrest our bootleggers, but they never arrest them. So we write again if you will come and arrest our bootleggers. Last year, they selling to kids and all old ladys, not just drunks, and we want them arrest before they do it this year.

  We having our city council to special meeting Thursday at 3 oclock, and we invite you to come and tell us about arrest our bootleggers. Now theres Eskimo Trooper in Chukchi, I tell city council maybe troopers will help us.

  Active folded the letter and put it back in the envelope, wishing there was something he could do for the old man. Liquor was legal in Chukchi but not in Nuliakuk, which was eighty-five miles up the coast at the mouth of the Nuliakuk River. And that was the root of Mayor Crane's problem.

  In the summer, when the only way to get from Chukchi to Nuliakuk was by plane or a long, cold boat ride on the ocean, liquor wasn't much of a problem. Long cold boat rides were too much work for bootleggers, so that left airplane
s. Arnold Frost, Nuliakuk's lone public safety officer, just met them at the village's beach airstrip, searched the luggage, and dumped out any liquor he found. It probably wasn't legal, but so far no bootlegger had hired a lawyer to bring an illegal-search-and-seizure case against Arnold.

  After freezeup, however, Nuliakuk was a few easy hours by snowmachine from Chukchi, day or night. The liquor traffic became impossible to police. Now it was late October and the snowmachine trails were opening up again, so Mayor Crane wanted Active to come up and cart away the local bootleggers before they started up in earnest for the winter.

  If Nuliakuk had had a year-round problem, he might have been able to wangle some help for the mayor. But, because liquor came in only during the frozen part of the year, Nuliakuk averaged less violence than most other villages around Chukchi. When someone had punched the buttons on the bureaucratic calculator in Anchorage headquarters, Nuliakuk had missed the cut for the next undercover sweep, which was due in January.

  Active grabbed the Chukchi region phone book from his desk and found Carlton Crane's number at home.

  "Oh, thank you for calling," the old man said when Active identified himself. "Can you arrest our bootleggers? Yesterday they try to sell bottle to my grandson. He's only eleven. I can show you who they are."

  "I know you can," Active said. "But it's not so easy for the troopers. We have to have something that will stand up in court."

  "I will stand up in court."

  "I know you will, but that's not enough for the courts," Active said. "We would have to send in an undercover trooper and let him live there until the bootleggers trust him enough to sell him some liquor. But that would cost too much. The state doesn't have so much money now that Prudhoe is running out of oil."

  The old man was silent. Active heard only the slight wheeze of his breathing.

  "We have to spend our money in villages that have more bootleggers," Active said. "Nuliakuk only has them in the winter."

  "Our winters are pretty long," Crane said.

  "Did you hear about our liquor election next week?"