White Sky, Black Ice

by Stan Jones

  "Maybe George's baby doesn't like beer for breakfast," he said.

  "Fuck you, Nathan." She wiped her mouth and nose on her parka sleeve, leaving a glistening stripe of pizza fragments and mucus on the green nylon.

  "There's some Kleenex in the glove compartment." He put the Suburban in gear and pulled away, following her somewhat belligerent directions to her mother's place.

  "Good," Emily said as they stopped in front. "Mom's four-wheeler's not here. She's still at the store, I guess."

  Emily's mother—he didn't ask if there was a father in the picture—lived in what people in Chukchi called a BIA house: twenty-four feet wide by thirty-six feet long, plywood sides, aluminum roof, and a little kunnichuk in front. They were sprinkled all over town, the fruit of some forgotten program from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

  This one was run-down, but not as badly as some Active had seen. The paint was an ambiguous gray that might once have been red, and one corner of the kunnichuk sagged slightly where a supporting post was sinking into the tundra. But all the windows had glass and the place was free of the scorch marks that would indicate it had ever caught fire, the fate that seemed to befall most BIA houses sooner or later.

  They climbed out of the Suburban and Emily led him into the house. It was much nicer inside than out, reasonably clean, done in bright colors, with framed Bible scenes hung on the walls.

  Emily took him to a door near the back. A sign on it said Emily's, without explaining Emily's what. She let him in and he looked around.

  It was a teenage girl's room, with posters of rock stars on the walls, and one dresser top entirely covered by makeup and the tools for applying it.

  The bedspread was fringed and covered with a pattern of big bright flowers. It was a single bed, and Active wondered how Emily and George had managed to share it and get any sleep, assuming they wanted to. He also wondered why the mother consented to the sleepovers, but decided it was, like the whereabouts of Emily's father, a subject best left unexplored.

  He looked around the rest of the room. The top of a chest of drawers beside the bed was filled with pictures in departmentstore frames. Many were of Emily with various combinations of girlfriends—at school, in an aluminum riverboat pulled up on a gravel bar on a sunny summer day, at slumber parties. But several showed George Clinton, alone or with Emily.

  In one corner, a pyramid of stuffed animals rose nearly to waist level.

  In another corner he saw a duffel bag and a backpack. Both were open, the contents spilling out onto the floor. Active pointed at the mess. "Is that George's stuff?"

  At Emily's nod, he knelt, picked up a wrinkled pair of Levi's, and went through the pockets. Nothing. Next, a red plaid wool shirt. Nothing there either.

  As he worked through George Clinton's possessions, he was vaguely aware of Emily moving around the room, then he heard the bedsprings squeak.

  When he finished the search, he turned and saw that she was sitting on a corner of the bed watching him. She held George's red plaid shirt against her chest.

  "The schematic's not here," he said, studying the girl. He decided to try a long shot. "Did he say anything about showing it to Aaron Stone?"

  "He never say, but he might do it." Emily sniffed the shirt, then lay back on the bed and hugged it. "They were kind of friends. Aaron was teaching George how to work on the machines. George wanted to get mechanic's job, make more money now that we were getting married and having baby."

  Emily took a picture of George, grinning in sunglasses from the saddle of a snowmachine, off the chest beside the bed and studied it, resting the frame on the little potbelly caused by her pregnancy. "Why he leave me, Nathan?"

  "Maybe he didn't do it on purpose. Maybe it was some kind of accident."

  She brightened, but then the smile faded. "Nah, it don't seem like accident to me, out on the tundra by himself in the middle of the night like that." She closed her eyes and now hugged both the shirt and the picture.

  "You never can tell." A yellow blanket was folded at the foot of the bed. He pulled it up over her. "Sometimes it happens when people carry guns while they're drinking."

  "I guess," Emily said drowsily, snuggling under the blanket. "I don't want my mom to see me like this," she said. But her breathing soon slowed and he realized she was asleep.

  Active tiptoed out and closed the door with the Emily's sign on it. As he came out of the kunnichuk, an Inupiat woman pulled up on a Honda four-wheeler towing a little trailer filled with groceries in boxes. She killed the engine, glanced at the Suburban, studied him in his uniform, and said sharply, "Is it something with Emily?"

  "She's fine," he said. "She's in her bedroom asleep. I brought her home."

  "You get her away from that nalauqmiut painter? That's good. Will she stay now?"

  "I don't know," he said. The woman lifted one of the boxes from the four-wheeler trailer and hurried past him into the house.

  He climbed into the Suburban, picturing Aaron Stone's cabin in his mind. Could the schematic be there? He doubted it. He had searched it carefully. On Stone's body or his snowmachine? He doubted that too. He had gone through the Yamaha and Stone's clothing before shipping the corpse off to Anchorage for autopsy.

  He started the engine and drove to Clara Stone's house. She was just coming out when he pulled up. She wore a flowered parka with a wolf ruff and a handsome pair of caribou mukluks that Active supposed were the product of Aaron Stone's hunting prowess.

  He rolled down his window. "Good morning. Can I give you a lift?"

  She walked across the gravel street to talk to him. "I'm going to Arctic Mercantile," she said.

  "Well, get in and I'll take you. I wanted to ask you something else for my report anyway."

  She came around the nose of the Suburban and climbed into the passenger seat.

  "How you doing?"

  "Not too bad," she said. "Little better since my daughter come down from Nuliakuk with her kids."

  "Yeah, I remember you said she was coming."

  They bounced along Beach Street until Active broke the silence. "Can you talk about it a little bit if I ask some questions?"

  "I guess," she said. "What is it?"

  "I was just wondering if Aaron said anything about having a picture or a drawing when he called you from the Gray Wolf." He turned the Suburban east on Lake Street, towards the lagoon and Arctic Mercantile.

  "No, he just say he's going caribou hunting, so he'll send his paycheck, some other stuff, home by mail, same as always. He don't like to bring it on his snowgo, might get lost or wet or something."

  "Was there anything unusual with his paycheck when it came?"

  Her eyes widened and she clapped a hand over her mouth. "You know, I never check the mail since last week. I'm too upset to remember, I guess. We could go get it now."

  Active made two more right turns to get them back to Beach Street, then a left to take them to the old wooden post office overlooking Chukchi Bay. Clara went in and he watched through the big front window as she opened a mailbox, pulled out an armload of mail, and returned to the Suburban.

  She flipped through the stack to a thick manila envelope hand addressed to her at Box 114 from"Aaron, Gray Wolf."

  "That's funny," she said. "Usually he put his check in regular envelope. Wonder what's in here." She put a finger under the flap, ripped it along the top, and pulled out the contents. There was a small window envelope that apparently contained a paycheck and a big sheet of paper that had been folded to fit in the manila envelope. Clipped to it was a sheet of typing paper with a handwritten note.

  Clara read the note, then handed it, still clipped to the big paper, to Active.

  "My Sweetie," Active read. "Please keep this for me till I'm home with you again. Might be very important!—Your loving Aaron."

  He unfolded the sheet enough to see a complicated technical drawing, then refolded it and looked at the woman. "Can I have this?"

  "Maybe I could just keep his note?" Tears glist
ened on her round brown cheeks.

  He handed her the note. She read it again, put it back in the manila envelope, folded that in quarters, and put it into her purse. "What he send?"

  "I'm not sure," Active said. "But I think it might help us stop the fish kills on the Nuliakuk."

  "Yeah, I know Aaron worry about that." Clara took a tissue from her purse and wiped her eyes and cheeks. "He say if the river's going bad, it will poison the water at Nuliakuk village, hurt our daughter and her family. He sure love those grandkids." She blew her nose and looked straight ahead.

  "You want me to take you back home?"

  "No, it's OK. You can take me to Arctic Mercantile. I need chocolate chips to make cookies for those grandkids."

  Active dropped her at the big store by the lagoon, then went to his office in the public safety building, closed the door with the briefest of nods to Evelyn O'Brien, and spread the schematic out on his desk.

  It was about eleven by seventeen inches. The label at the top identified it only as Sewer System. Most of the sheet was filled with a tangle of lines and boxes that could have been pumps and pipes.

  One of the lines—the biggest one—led out of the tangle toward a stippled area in the lower right corner of the page. But parallel jagged marks slashed through it about halfway there.

  If he remembered correctly the little he had learned about mechanical drawing, those jagged marks represented a break in the diagram, meaning the stippled area was farther from the tangle of machinery than the drawing suggested.

  Not that it mattered much. No scale or compass rose was printed on the drawing, so it wouldn't have been possible to figure the distance or direction to the leach field anyway, if that was what the stippled area represented.

  Active studied the drawing more closely. It wasn't dated either, nor did it bear any clue to the identity of the company that had prepared it.

  Perhaps the drawing showed a leach field, perhaps not. One thing was certain, though: It was as much a puzzle as a drawing, and he couldn't decipher it.

  But he knew someone who could, someone who knew a lot about the Gray Wolf and sewer systems and dead fish on the Nuliakuk. Someone whose amazing blue eyes were probably at this very moment training the crosshairs of a hunting rifle on the kill spot at the base of a caribou's neck.

  He dialed Lienhofer Aviation and was gratified to hear the smoky scrape of Cowboy Decker's voice on the other end of the line.

  "Your Super Cub running? I need to go to Jade Portage right now."

  "Right now? It's almost lunchtime."

  Active looked at his watch and was shocked to see that Decker was correct. Where had the morning gone? "I'll get some hamburgers at the Korean's and we can eat on the way."

  "Make it two double cheeses with fries and you're in business," Decker said. "I'll go gas 'er up."

  Active made two copies of the schematic and locked the original in his desk. Twenty-eight minutes later, he pulled the Suburban up beside the red-and-white Super Cub. Cowboy squatted at the tail of the plane, smoking a cigarette and doing something underneath of the tail. A roll of gray tape rested on top of the tail.

  Active grabbed the paper bag, translucent with grease, from the seat beside him, walked over, and dropped it onto the front seat of the Super Cub. Then he squatted beside the pilot. "Something wrong?"

  "Ah, I put a little rip in the fabric when we landed at Stone's camp the other day," Cowboy said. "Tail must have caught some brush. But I can't fix it today. Damned duct tape won't stick in the cold."

  He stood up, a strip of the insufficiently sticky tape clinging to the fingers of his right hand. He flipped his hand up and down until the tape spun off into the snow.

  "Don't worry," he said at Active's look of alarm. "We flew around with it like this half that day when we were looking for Aaron. Takes more than a little rip in the tail to bring down a Super Cub."

  Active shrugged, climbed in, put the food bag between his feet, and waited as Decker went through the preflight ritual. He pulled off the engine cover, took out the preheater, snuffed the heater out, and stowed both in the little cargo bay behind Active's seat. Then he checked the oil, climbed in, and started the engine.

  He taxied out to the runway and shoved the throttle forward. The engine roared and then they were in the sky again.

  CHAPTER 15

  Monday Afternoon, Jade Portage

  AS THEY CLIMBED OUT to the east, Active realized something he had been too preoccupied to notice until now: the Arctic was at its shameless best again today. Clear and sunny, the snowy ridges etched so sharply against the fierce blue of the sky they felt like knife blades on his eye. It wasn't even that cold—maybe five or ten below, low enough to interfere with ducttape stickum, but with the sun shining like it was, not bad for humans.

  They left the Chukchi Peninsula and crossed Isignaq Inlet to the mouth of the Isignaq River. It was the next major drainage south of the Katonak, and slightly larger. It also drained slightly gentler country. While the mountains along the Katonak tended to be bare jagged crags, the summits along the Isignaq were rounded, with more spruce on the lower slopes and even stands of birch and poplar in the riverbottom. The valley opened out before them, a white embrace.

  "What about those burgers?" Decker said through the intercom.

  "Oh, yeah." Active wrenched his attention from the scenery, took a Diet Coke and cheeseburger from the bag for himself, and passed the rest up to Cowboy.

  They chewed in silence as the valley glided beneath them, Active feeling slightly ashamed to be eating a cheeseburger here in the middle of this white wilderness. They should be eating frozen fish dipped in seal oil.

  "What's at Jade Portage?" Cowboy said in a muffled voice, presumably because his mouth was full of the Korean's cheeseburger.

  "Kathy Childs," Active said. "She's up here with her dog team. I have to talk to her about something."

  "Like what?"

  "Like police business."

  "Uhhuh." Decker sounded skeptical. Perhaps he too had noticed Kathy Childs's blue eyes.

  Active didn't say anything.

  "Will I be waiting till you finish your, ah, business or would you like me to come back tomorrow?" Decker asked with a snicker. "Or maybe you'll be mushing back with Kathy?"

  "Maybe I'll fly the plane back and you'll stay," Active said.

  "Maybe I'll just do that," Decker said.

  "And maybe your wife will just strip you naked in divorce court," Active said. "You'll be out in the snow in your underwear."

  "Good point," Decker said. "I'd probably best leave the sport hunting to young marksmen like yourself."

  As they got farther up the Isignaq, they saw more and more caribou moving across the tundra south of the river.

  Finally Jade Portage itself came into sight, the famous spot that the western Arctic caribou had chosen as the only suitable crossing of the Isignaq on their annual pilgrimage to the wintering grounds in the valleys to the south.

  Now they saw caribou on the tundra north of the river too, moving along tramped-down trails through the snow toward the two-mile-long sandbar that marked the portage. A big band, maybe two or three thousand, Active estimated, milled on the tundra a mile or so off the river, and a few roamed the willow and alder thickets on the higher ground at the back of the sandbar, but Active didn't see any at the water's edge. No doubt the caribou, in their inscrutable fashion, would all decide to cross at once.

  Though they had seen open water at the fastest riffles on their way upstream, the river was frozen at the portage, except for a trail of broken refreezing ice that led from one side to the other. The caribou, driven by their ancient urges, couldn't wait for thick ice. They would cross the river, even if it meant breaking through and swimming.

  There were a dozen tent camps along the sandbar, villagers from up and down the river also converging on Jade Portage to lay in meat for the winter.

  Decker dropped the Super Cub to a few feet above the river ice and buzzed the
camps on the bank. Most had snowmachines drawn up in front but one, at the downstream end, had a dog team staked out in the willows higher up the bank. Five caribou carcasses were scattered around the tent, and a figure with a long-bladed knife in its hand knelt beside one.

  The figure looked up as they passed over. Active thought he recognized Kathy Childs but it was hard to be sure because sunglasses covered the eyes. The Carhartts definitely looked right, though.

  "That's gotta be her, huh?" Decker asked through the intercom.

  "Must be," Active said. "Let's go check."

  Decker brought the Super Cub around again and dropped the fat tundra tires onto the snow in front of the white wall tent with the dog team. They bounced to a stop, Decker cut the engine, and Kathy Childs bounded over as they climbed out.

  "Macho Man!" she said delightedly. "You change your mind? How long can you stay?"

  Active was sure he glimpsed a knowing smile on Decker's lips as the pilot turned away to cover the Super Cub's engine.

  "Not long." He hoped she'd take off the sunglasses so he could see the blue eyes again. "I'm here on business, believe it or not."

  "Shit, that would explain the uniform," she said. "I'm trying my damnedest not to think about anything even close to business up here. Can't it wait? Like till next year maybe?"

  "No, it's pretty urgent. Can we go in the tent?"

  She shrugged and started up the sandbar. Then she turned and looked at Decker, who was just tying down the last lace of the engine cover.

  "Hey, Cowboy," she said. "That's some of the best caribou stew you ever ate on the Coleman there." She motioned at a little field kitchen set up in front of the tent. "Why don't you crank it up and we'll have some after Macho Man finishes his business?"

  Cowboy shook his head. "We ate on the way. I'm full."

  "Me too," Active said.

  "What, Lienhofer's has food service now?"

  "We brought some of the Korean's hamburgers," Decker said.

  "You're passing up fresh caribou stew for those grease bombs?"

  Decker looked glum, but shrugged and said nothing.