A Study in Sherlock

by Laurie R. King

  THE EYAK INTERPRETER

  A KATE SHUGAK SHORT STORY

  Dana Stabenow

  A PARK RAT’S BLOG

  [Note to my twenty-seven Park Rat followers, who think reading along is such a hoot. This blog is a yearlong assignment for Mrs. Doogan in my honors English class. Don’t screw with my grade by being trolls in the comments. I can delete you, you know.]

  Tuesday, October 25th, by Johnny

  We’re not in the Park anymore, Toto.

  I hate dentists. I floss and brush and all that stuff every day, I don’t know why I had to have a cavity. I hate Kate, too. She’s never had a cavity in her whole life. Makes me want to hold her down and force-feed her a five-pound bag of sugar.

  Although this dentist she took me to in Anchorage, Dorman, was okay, even if he was way too tan to be an Alaskan. He likes Kate, I can tell, but then every man she’s ever met likes her. Except maybe all the ones she put in jail, and sometimes I’m not so sure about them. Except if she’s never had a cavity I don’t know why she needs her own dentist. She sure was awful quick to get us on a plane when I got my toothache.

  Here’s the grossest picture I could find of a cavity on the Internet. Mine was a lot smaller.

  So here we are in Anchorage, staying at Dad’s town house on Westchester Lagoon. Kate and Mutt are out for a walk on the Coastal Trail. There’s nothing on television and I don’t want to go anywhere until I don’t drool when I talk. Disgusting. So I’m sitting here writing a post for my twenty-seven followers (Bobby, you better not read this one over Park Air like you did the one about counting caribou with Ruthe Bauman. She didn’t speak to me for a week). We’d be on a plane back to the Park right now if the weather hadn’t socked in behind us. Van texted me that it’s blowing snow and fog and Mrs. Doogan strung a rope from the front door to the bullrail so everyone could feel their way to their vehicles. I checked the National Weather Service website and the forecast is for more of the same for the next day and maybe two.

  I’d still rather be there than here. Too many people in Anchorage, going too fast in too many cars.

  So would Kate, and Mutt. We’ve been weathered in in Anchorage before and they both get antsy and cranky and snappish. Mutt I can understand, but Kate doesn’t want to go to the movies or shopping or out to eat, she just keeps looking east, trying to get a bead on what’s coming next out of the Gulf, and if it’s flyable.

  Okay, a few minutes later, they’re back and Kate got a call (she actually answered her cell phone!) and we’re going to go see somebody. Later …

  Comments

  Bobby says, “Too late, kid.”

  Ruthe says, “I’m still not speaking to you.”

  Van says, “Miss you, babe.”

  Katya says, “johnny bring me a unclmilton moon form toyzrus”

  Katya says, “mom says please”

  Mrs. Doogan says, “Good narrative flow, Johnny, if a little elliptical on occasion. Topic sentences aren’t mandatory in journal form, but you do want the reader to be able to follow the thread of the story. Resist the parenthetical phrase, too. For a moment there in the fifth paragraph I thought you were in Anchorage with Ruthe, not Kate.”

  Tuesday, October 25th, that evening, by Johnny

  We have a case, and I get to help!

  Well, I get to go along, anyway.

  We went downtown to this old restaurant on Fifth Avenue, the Club Paris, and met this old fart named Max. He’s a retired state trooper (here’s the Alaska State Trooper website) and I mean really retired, he’s so wrinkled he looks like he shrunk in the wash and then got left in the dryer for a week. He’s kind of feeble, walks with a cane, but he’s even smarter than Kate and he sure can put away the martinis. The waitress, a total babe named Brenda, calls him by his first name and she never lets his glass get more than half empty before she’s got a refill on the table. Brenda gave Kate a funny look when Kate ordered a Diet 7UP. Real women drink martinis, I guess.

  Best steak sandwich I ever ate. About halfway through it Max said, “Heard a weird story last week. Grandson of an old flying buddy from Red Run.”

  “Red Run?” Kate said.

  Max nodded. “I know, last village on the Kanuyaq before you hit the Gulf. Why I thought to tell you about it.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “He’s a Totemoff.”

  “Which one?”

  “Gilbert.”

  Kate forked up a big hunk of New York strip and chewed with her eyes closed for a minute. She swallowed and opened her eyes and said, “Chief Evan’s grandson.”

  Max nodded.

  “What’s his story?”

  “He got kidnapped.”

  Kate actually stopped chewing. “What?”

  Max nodded. I felt cold air on the back of my neck as the door opened and Mutt’s ears went up. “But I’ll let him tell you the story himself. Gilbert, you know Kate Shugak.”

  Gilbert Totemoff was short and stocky with dark hair that had been cut under a bowl and big brown eyes like a cow’s. His Carhartt’s looked like they’d started life going over the Chilkoot Pass in 1898, and he smelled like woodsmoke and gasoline and tanned moosehide. His voice was so low I had to lean forward to hear him. He had a little bit of an accent, too, sounded like one of the aunties when they’re going all Native in front of a gussuk they don’t like. Village raised, for sure.

  Max was right. Totemoff’s story was a weird one.

  He had come to town on a Costco run the week after the permanent fund dividend came out from the state (http://www.pfd.state.ak.us/), the same week as the Alaska Federation of Natives convention (http://www.nativefederation.org/convention/index.php). He took his pickup on the fast ferry from Cordova, where he lived in the winter, to Whittier and then drove up to Anchorage.

  “I met up with some cousins from Tatitlek and we went down to AFN and spent the afternoon there. That night we went to the Snow Ball to check out our old girlfriends.”

  Kate grinned, Max laughed, and Totemoff blushed. “But there wasn’t much going on, so my cousin Philip said we should go somewhere else.”

  “Where else?” Kate said.

  Gilbert wouldn’t look at her. He mumbled something.

  “Where?” Kate said.

  He still wouldn’t look at her. “The Bush Company.”

  Again he shut up. This time I think he was more embarrassed at telling a woman he’d gone to a strip club, especially a Native woman, especially a Native woman who was his elder. Brenda came over and gave us the fishy eye but Max winked at her and she went off and brought him back another martini. His third. Might have been his fourth.

  Totemoff said that he and his cousins had a lot to drink, and between that and the lap dances they had their PFDs spent before midnight. Totemoff didn’t say all this, of course, but you can read a lot into a Native silence.

  They were just about to leave when these two guys they knew showed up.

  “What two guys?” Kate said.

  “They were at the convention,” Totemoff said. “Not Natives, but hanging around the craft fair. One of them said he was looking for an ivory cribbage board for his mother. We got to talking, they asked us what tribe we were, and they seemed interested when we told them Eyak.”

  So the two guys sat down at their table at the Bush Company and offered to buy them a round. One round turned into two and maybe more. Totemoff didn’t know what time it was when he got up to go to the john. When he stepped out of the door, somebody hit him, hard, a couple of times, and while he was trying to get his knees back up under him they threw a blanket or a bag or something over his head and carried him outside and tossed him in the back of a car.

  “I was in and out,” he said. “Felt kind of sick. Maybe we drove for fifteen minutes. Maybe longer. Next thing, the car stops and they pull me out and toss me in the back of an airplane.”

  “What kind of airplane?” I said. Totemoff stopped talking again. Kate frowned at me, Max said, “Shut up, kid,” and even Mutt gave me
a dirty look. I could feel my ears turning red, and we had to wait until Totemoff started talking again.

  “We flew about an hour,” he said. “I think. My head was hurting pretty bad and I barfed all over the inside of the blanket. They cussed me out and one of them hit me again and then I was out of it until we landed. They pulled me out of the plane and walked me into a cabin and pulled off the blanket. It was the two white guys from the convention who showed up at the bar.”

  The cabin was one room, built of logs. “Looked pretty old,” Totemoff said. “The wind was whistling through the holes where the chink had fallen out.” There was a woodstove, the table a plywood sheet laid on a pair of sawhorses, some mismatched dining chairs, and a cot in one corner.

  On the cot was an old man. A very old Native man, bruised and emaciated.

  The whole time Totemoff was telling his story, Kate sat without moving a muscle, staring at her plate. I’ve seen her do this before. It’s a Native thing that you don’t look directly at the person speaking to you, but it’s like she’s listening with every cell of her body.

  The old man was tied to the bed. The younger of the two kidnappers brought a chair and the older man forced Totemoff down on it. “Ask him if he’ll sign the papers,” the older one said.

  “I didn’t know what he meant,” Totemoff said. “I was confused, so I didn’t say anything. He hit me, knocked me off the chair. When my ears stopped ringing, I heard the old man say something. In Eyak.”

  Kate seemed to sigh, and sat back a little in her chair.

  “They got me back in the chair and the young one hit me this time,” Totemoff said. “ ‘Tell him to sign the papers,’ he said.”

  He was silent again for a while. “I was afraid,” he said. “They wanted me to talk to the old man in Eyak. But they don’t know that there’re no Eyak speakers left. When my grandmother died, the language died with her. I know what it sounds like, but I don’t have more than a couple cuss words.”

  Eyak, Kate told me later, was an Alaska Native language from east of Cordova and west of Yakutat. The Tlingits crowded it out from the south and the Athabascans from the north and the Aleuts from the west, and Kate says after the whites took over, the elders wanted the kids to learn English so they wouldn’t be at a disadvantage when they grew up. When the kids got sent away to the BIA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau of Indian Affairs) schools in Sitka and Outside, they could even be beaten for talking anything but English. So most of the Eyak speakers are gone, except maybe a few elders.

  Like the old man in the cabin.

  “They brought me a long way, used up a lot of gas getting me there,” Totemoff said. “If they found out I couldn’t speak Eyak, I was afraid they would kill me.”

  He was quiet again. I was getting used to his silences. They had a rhythm to them, he’d get so many words out, and then stop for a while like he was recharging. The tougher the story got, the more his grammar deteriorated. “The old man figured it out before they did. He started making signs when they’re not looking. I think maybe he spoke English just fine. From the way he looked at them sometimes.

  “When they hit me I’d say the few words I knew. Wet snow. Dry snow. Snow drift. Bear. Wolf. Fish. Beaver. Titty.”

  I don’t think he meant to say that last word because his face got red again.

  “I mixed them up and changed the way I said them so they would think I was saying whole sentences. They made me tell him, over and over again, to sign the papers. The younger man pulled out a bunch of papers and waved them at him. The elder, I think he was pretending to be weaker than he really was, he’d just shake his head and moan.” Totemoff smiled for the first time. “What words he said that I understood, I’m pretty sure my mom would have washed my mouth out for using.” He shrugged. “But they don’t know the difference.”

  Another silence. “I was there for a day and a night, I think. They had the windows covered up. It was a long time.” He paused. “Once when the younger man was outside and the older man was feeding the stove, the elder, he whispered something to me.”

  We waited. Again, Kate didn’t move a muscle. I’m not sure if me and Max and Mutt even registered on her peripheral vision, she was concentrating so hard on every word Totemoff said.

  “I was hungry and thirsty and hungover, so I’m not sure, but it sounded like he said, ‘Tell Myra I said no.’ ” He was quiet for a long time then.

  “I think I must have passed out, because the next thing I knew I was on a bench in front of the convention center and the guy from the Community Patrol was trying to wake me up and get me into the van to take me to the Brother Francis Shelter. There was a cop there, too. I tried to tell him what happened, but I guess he figured I was drunk and he wouldn’t listen.”

  Kate didn’t say anything but I wouldn’t be that cop for a million dollars.

  “I stayed at the shelter for a couple of days, until I felt better. I didn’t know what to do. And then I remembered my dad’s friend Max.”

  For the first time he looked directly at Kate. “I’m worried about the elder.”

  He sat back in his chair. He was done talking.

  Max waited a minute before he drained his fifth—or maybe his sixth—martini and cleared his throat. “Victoria’s got me up to my ears in a security overhaul,” he said, looking at Kate. “My life ain’t my own anymore, thanks to you, or I’d look into this myself. When I heard you were in town, I thought you might take it on.”

  Kate looked at me. “We’re weathered out of the Park for the next day or two anyway. Might as well.” She turned to Totemoff. “I have to ask you some questions, Gilbert. No right or wrong here, okay? Take your time, tell me as much as you can remember.” Totemoff nodded without looking up.

  “When you took off in the airplane. Was it on pavement, or on gravel?”

  “Gravel.”

  “Could you hear any other planes?”

  He started rubbing his legs and he still wouldn’t look at any of us, but he nodded.

  “What kind of planes? Small planes? Jets?”

  “Both,” he said.

  “Jets? Like they were close by?”

  “Real close,” he said.

  Kate nodded. “Do you have an idea of what kind of plane they put you in?”

  “Sounded like a Cessna,” he said. “They were both sitting up front. Maybe a 172. But maybe a 170.”

  “Okay. What about a description of the two strangers? What did they look like?”

  “They were white.”

  “Young? Your age? Or old? Like Max?”

  “Old,” Totemoff said. “Like you.”

  Max laughed. Well, it was more like a cackle. Kate ignored him. “Tall? Or short?”

  Totemoff shrugged. “Little taller than me, maybe.” He was about five foot six.

  “Fat or thin?”

  Totemoff shrugged again. “The older guy was kind of bony. The younger guy had all the muscle.”

  “Hair long or short? What color?”

  “Old guy never took his cap off, but he looked gray around the ears. Young guy was blond, lots of hair scraggling down the back of his neck.”

  “How did they talk? Southern, like somebody from Tecks-ass, yawl? Or northern, like somebody from Bahstan? Or, I don’t know, like Sylvester Stallone, dem and deese and dose?”

  Totemoff shook his head. “Just white.”

  Kate nodded. Not once did she seem impatient or irritated. “How were they dressed?”

  “Jeans. Boots. Jackets. Baseball hats.”

  “Hats?” Kate said. “Anything on them? A logo, like for Chevron, or the Seattle Seahawks?”

  Totemoff thought. “The young guy’s hat had an Anchorage Aces logo on it.”

  “Anchorage Aces?” Kate said.

  “Local semi-pro hockey team,” Max said.

  “You didn’t know the elder?” Kate said to Totemoff, who shook his head. “Not that many Eyaks left,” she said. “You sure?”

  Totemoff shook his head again.
“Never saw him around Cordova. He doesn’t come from Red Run. Never saw him in Anchorage.”

  The only three places Gilbert Totemoff has been in his life, I bet. That’s one more than a lot of people who live in the Bush.

  “Know anyone named Myra?”

  Totemoff shook his head again. “No.”

  “How much longer are you in town?”

  “Saturday. It’s the soonest I could get a space on the fast ferry back to Cordova.”

  “Got a phone number?”

  Totemoff produced a cell phone.

  “All right,” Kate said, getting to her feet. “We’ll be in touch.”

  Comments

  Bobby says, “Auntie Balasha was my on-air guest on Park Air this morning. She’s going downriver tomorrow to teach a quilting class in Chulyin. She says an Eyak family used to live there and she’ll ask around for Myras.”

  Katya says, “did you get it yet”

  Katya says, “mom says please”

  Mrs. Doogan says, “Watch out for run-on sentences, as for example in paragraph 19. Remember the compound clause rule for commas. This may seem nitpicky to you, but if your followers can’t trust your punctuation (or spelling, or grammar), why should they trust anything you say?”

  Van says, “Mrs. Doogan has been reading your blog out loud in class. Can you tell?”

  Van says, “Wait a minute. A total babe named Brenda?”

  Bernie says, “Busted.”

  Wednesday, October 26th, by Johnny

  Kate was making breakfast in the kitchen by the time I got downstairs. I had my computer and I was writing the previous post. “What are you writing?” she said, so I told her.

  “Can I see?” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  She laughed. “Anything in there that isn’t about Vanessa?”