Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “I … I didn’t know,” he said, and Kate thought she saw his eyes tear up. But then he cleared his throat and straightened his shoulders. “No surprise, I guess. She was six hundred years old. I guess I’d better work up another obit.”

  Kate opened her mouth, and closed it again. Kenny Hazen would not thank her for spreading his business around town.

  But he had seen. “What aren’t you telling me, Kate?”

  She stood up. “Thanks for your help with the obituary. It reads a lot better than if I’d written it.”

  “Kate?”

  She opened the door and without turning around, “It’s Chief Hazen’s business now, Ben. Talk to him.”

  Mutt got to her feet and shook herself vigorously. She looked at Kate as if to say, Can we just go home now?

  * * *

  At least they were once again safely across the Lost Chance Creek bridge before the snow hit. When it did hit, it hit fast and it hit hard. One minute there was a low-hanging, dour gray sky, the next a nearly impenetrable curtain of giant fat white flakes so thick Kate had a hard time seeing the fluorescent road markers, which in her opinion were spaced too far apart on the side of the road. She slowed down, way down, picking her way from one marker to the next at twenty miles an hour. Another vehicle passed them, with the speed of its passage pulling up a cloud of snow behind it so thick that Kate had to slam on the brakes because for a few minutes she saw nothing but white. The engine stalled and the pickup bucked and skidded, the back end coming around a little until the freight in the back reminded the rear wheels it was there and stopped the slide. Mutt lost her purchase on her seat and did a kind of scrambling slam against the dash, letting out a very un-Mutt-like squeal. She righted herself and gave Kate a reproachful look.

  “Sorry, girl,” Kate said. She took a deep breath and let it out, and managed to unclamp her hands from the painful grip they had on the steering wheel. “What idiot passes in a whiteout?”

  Mutt growled.

  “With any luck we’ll find them in a ditch and you can teach them some manners.” The engine came back to life at a single turn of the key and Kate started down the road again, one marker at a time, as slowly as possible without stalling out. The pineapple tucked behind her seat gave off a tropical scent, incongruous in the present circumstances. The windows were starting to fog up, so she cranked the fan to high, and hit the on button on the CD player, which held the CD Johnny had most recently burned for her. Jimmy Buffett advised her to take another road to a higher place. Or was it hiding place? Either would have been preferable in her present circumstances. Still, she was on her way home, always a good thing, and she raised her voice in a rough-edged sing-along.

  Mutt put up with it, and with John Hiatt belting out “Child of the Wild Blue Yonder,” but when Tommy Tucker showed up in high-heeled sneakers she couldn’t stand it. Her head came up and she started to howl along.

  Kate started laughing and couldn’t stop, and they crept along, laughing and howling and blaring music down the road through the blizzard, one marker at a time. Each marker was seventy-eight inches high, made of white recycled plastic pressed into a single slender curve, the top twelve inches coated with super-high-intensity retroreflective sheeting, a blindingly bright yellow in color. Their official name was Standard Traffic Delineator. Kate knew this because at her instigation the Niniltna Native Association had bought them and, further, had hired this year’s senior class of Niniltna High School to install them on the Niniltna-Ahtna road in late August. Never had money been better spent. She whiled away a few miles by imagining the letter she would write to the state Department of Transportation. Just because the state didn’t maintain this road didn’t mean people didn’t drive on it.

  Even when they shouldn’t.

  Michelle Branch, “Sweet Misery.” Kate could relate, although “stay with me a little while” was a little too close to the target, especially when she was going home to a house that didn’t contain Jim Chopin.

  “So what?” she said out loud, irritated. If she had dared she would have used the skip button, but she was too scared to take her eyes off the road. Or the markers, because her headlights illuminated about three feet into a swirling cloud of white and that was it. The yellow tops of the markers were all she could see. She was amazed she could see that much. The pickup lurched a little. Great, now the wind was picking up, which meant the snow would begin to drift. She looked at the odometer. Another twenty-five miles to go. Crap.

  The windshield wipers beat back and forth in time to the music. Marc Cohn, “Walking in Memphis.” She’d never been to Memphis. She’d only ever been to Quantico, Virginia, for the FBI course, and Arizona and New Mexico on that vacation with Jack. Alaska was big enough. So various, so beautiful, so new. Who said that? Matthew Arnold, right. Typical dreary Brit. She’d take Robert Frost any day. Cranky as he could be, the old bastard still had a sense of humor. “At present I’d rather be living in Vermont, too,” she said out loud.

  Next to her Mutt stirred but made no reply. She was as tense as Kate, strung like bow, staring through the windshield as if by sheer force of will she could see through the whiteout to clear road on the other side.

  “If anybody can do it, you can, girl,” Kate said.

  Almost in response to her remark the snow eased for one fleeting moment to reveal two enormous cottonwoods on either side of the road, with immense ridged trunks and limbs like lightning bolts, before the snow closed in again.

  The Two Towers, a mile up from Deadman’s Curve, a bitch of a curve where the road from Ahtna met and married the old railroad grade that ran from Kanuyaq to Cordova. She slowed down to a crawl.

  John Hiatt again. “Drive South.” She was trying. Southeast, anyway. And she was with the one she loved. “Right?” she said to Mutt.

  It wasn’t like she could be mad at Jim for leaving. His father had died. Of course he had to go. Although from the phone call it didn’t sound as if he was enjoying himself. His mother must be a serious piece of work. Still, he had one, living. Maybe she’d mellow while he was there. Maybe she’d invite Sylvia Hernandez over for dinner.

  Easy, Barenaked Ladies. “I’ve been burned before…”

  “No kidding,” Kate said.

  But Jack had never burned her. Not once.

  Neither had Jim.

  Not yet.

  She kept waiting for him to, watching, knowing it was just a matter of time. The man was a dog, had been one long before she’d come along, would be one again when he moved on.

  Thing was, he showed no signs of moving on. Unless you counted getting on a plane for California.

  “God damn it,” she said out loud, spacing out the words with deliberation. “I’ve got other things to worry about than Jim Chopin. Who clobbered me? Who stole the judge’s journal? What was in it they wanted? Did Jane Silver surprise a random burglar in the act and he knocked her over on his way out the door? Or did she die because of what she wanted to show me? Something she had about Old Sam, and the same person who walloped me walloped her?”

  Bo Diddley. “Up your house and gone again.”

  She checked the odometer. Deadman’s Curve coming up. She slowed down to ten miles an hour. The markers moved to the left. She followed them carefully.

  Mutt sat up and barked, once, sharply.

  “What?” Kate said.

  Headlights, suddenly, right in front of them.

  “What the—Get out of the way!”

  The headlights were exactly at the height of her eyes, and they were so bright she could feel her eyeballs blister. She flinched and realized she couldn’t look away because the headlights were on the same side of the road. She laid on the horn and the brakes simultaneously.

  The headlights kept coming. The brakes locked up and the back end of the pickup started coming around. It was an older model, no anti-lock brakes, and she turned into the skid and pumped them.

  The headlights kept coming. In the very few seconds she had left to think abou
t it, she tried frantically to remember what was on which side of the road. A ditch? A meadow? A steep slope ending in a creek? Trees? Boulders?

  The headlights kept coming, and in the end she yanked the steering wheel to the left and hit the gas, hoping to pull the ass end of the pickup around, try for a controlled skid that would swing the pickup onto the other side of the road facing in the opposite direction, anything to get out of the way of the oncoming vehicle.

  She almost did it. The Chevy’s bed swung hard right, pivoting around the weight of the engine in front, so that they were facing back the way they had come.

  That helped, too, when the other vehicle hit them going at what later estimates put at thirty miles an hour. It didn’t sound fast after the fact.

  It felt like it, though, and it was more than enough to jolt the right front tire off the road, where the ditch caught it and flipped the pickup.

  The last thing she remembered was reaching for the ignition and turning it off.

  They landed upside down and the lights went out.

  May 1943

  Long before Pearl Harbor, even longer before the Japanese invasion of the Aleutians, General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. sent out the call for men schooled in the Alaskan Bush and skilled in survival to form a combat platoon to do reconnaissance and find landing zones for amphibious assaults on Japanese emplacements in the Aleutians. They were hunters and trappers, miners and engineers, doctors and anthropologists, whites, Aleuts, Eskimos, Indians. They were lightly armed with their own choice of weapon, and Colonel Castner went easy on the military discipline, which included saluting and shaving.

  Sam Dementieff signed up as soon as the unit was formed. He was twenty-one years old, a keen eye with a rifle, a steady hand with a knife, and a seemingly inexhaustible store of energy. He took everything Castner threw at them in training, accepted all the inevitable ragging and practical jokes from his older and more experienced brethren, Quicksilver, Aleut Pete, and Haystack, and came back for more. In the fullness of time and in recognition of his talent and abilities he was awarded his own nickname, Old Sam, in recognition of his relative youth.

  It didn’t have to make sense. This was war.

  On May 11, 1943, he was one of those hung by his heels over the side of a landing craft so he could help feel the way ashore through dense fog and perilous shoals to land on Beach Red, the first day of the Battle of Attu.

  The Japanese had the heights, and they’d had plenty of time to dig in. The Americans got lost in the fog and stuck in the mud and developed frostbite from the cold temperatures. It took twenty-four hours for their first meal to arrive, and all the while the enemy troops pounded at them with artillery fire. Five hundred forty-nine Americans and 2,351 Japanese lost their lives in nineteen days.

  Sam was among those who stayed on for the mop-up that followed, flushing Japanese soldiers out of the hills. One of them nearly shot him, would have if his buddy Mac the Knife hadn’t spotted the sniper and tackled Old Sam to the ground. The bullet missed him and hit Mac in the hip. Tore him up pretty good, and Old Sam toted Mac out of the hills on his back and got him on a destroyer bound for Adak and the 179th Station Hospital.

  A month later Sam finagled a ride on a C-47 to Adak to see how Mac was getting on, and found his bed in the ward surrounded by a bevy of nurses dressed in olive drab. His leg was in a cast and elevated but it didn’t seem to be slowing him down much.

  Mac looked up from his bed and saw Sam in the doorway. “Hey, buddy! Ladies, meet my partner, Old Sam.”

  “Old Sam?” one of the nurses said with a skeptical look. Sam had been unable to grow the trademark Scout beard.

  Mac grinned. “Skinny bastard’s old enough to know better but too young to die.”

  He held out a hand and the nurses scattered when Sam came forward and took the hand and a seat next to Mac’s bed. “Guess I don’t have to ask how you’re doing.”

  Mac laughed. “Aw hell, boy, I’m fine. They’re going to let me up pretty soon so I can start learning how to walk again. They say when I’m mobile enough they’ll ship me to a vet hospital Outside, put the expert mechanics to work on me. You?”

  “Looks like some of us will be riding out the rest of the war right here,” Sam said. “You coming back after?”

  “Who else’d have me?” Mac laughed, and then coughed.

  Sam didn’t like the look of him. Mac had lost a lot of weight, and there was an unhealthy flush to his cheeks. “Did you do anything in particular in civilian life?” Sam took care to be as nonspecific as possible. It wasn’t good manners to ask an Alaskan about his past, and in spite of the instant rapport the two men had felt when they met in boot, it still made Sam a little nervous to ask the direct question.

  But Mac was good-natured about it, shrugging a shoulder. “Fishing, hunting, a little prospecting. Did some longshoring in Juneau and Kodiak. Did some lumberjacking in Ketchikan. Why?”

  Sam leaned his hands on his knees and met Mac’s eyes. “Haven’t heard you mention a lot in the way of family, or a home. You need a place to go when this is over, I got one.”

  Mac raised his eyebrows. He was a tall man, almost as tall as Sam, with lighter hair, blue eyes, and a killer smile that explained the nurse contingent. He’d been very cagey about his age around the other Scouts, but he was one of those people upon whom the years sat lightly, and he could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty, although Sam did notice that recent events had deepened the lines in his face. “Where is this place?”

  “North and east of Cordova, on the Kanuyaq River. Little town called Niniltna. It’s about four miles from the Kanuyaq Copper Mine.”

  There was a moment of silence. Sam dropped his eyes. He didn’t want to see the gratitude, if gratitude there was.

  Mac stirred, and Sam looked up to see that Mac had linked his hands behind his head and was staring at the ceiling. “Thought I’d heard the Kanuyaq closed down.”

  “It did. But there’s plenty to eat walking around on four feet, and a man can stake a homestead in five years, as much as a hundred and sixty acres. Look.” Sam dug out his wallet. “I’ve got pictures.”

  Mac accepted the wallet and flipped through the black-and-white pictures in silence. He came to one of a couple, the woman a Native, the man also a Native, with something added to the mix. He looked at it for a long time, his expression unreadable. “Your parents?” he said at last.

  Sam nodded. “They live in Cordova. I’ll be claiming a homestead east of Niniltna.” He smiled to himself. “I’ve already filed on the spot. Here.” He took his wallet and flipped to another picture. It was a girl, another Native, plump and round-cheeked, dark of hair and eye. She ducked her head, as if she was shy, and looked at the camera from the corners of her eyes, but her beaming smile was impossible to hide.

  “Your girl?”

  Sam nodded. “We’re going to get married when the war’s over.” He looked down at the photo, and then, aware of Mac’s eye on him, closed the wallet and stuck it back in his pants. “When it’s over,” he said, “write to me care of general delivery in Ahtna. I’ll meet you there, get you started off right. There’s a pretty decent living to be made there if a man isn’t afraid to work.”

  “Sounds good,” Mac said.

  Sam was about to extend his hand to seal the deal when a gaunt soldier walked up to stand on the other side of the bed.

  “Sergeant Hammett, as I live and breathe, you’re back again,” Mac said. “You’re as bad as the nurses, you just can’t stay away from me.”

  “What can I say, Mac, you’re one of the best bullshitters on the base. I’m just naturally drawn to you.”

  Hammett was as tall as the both of them, with hair cut close on the sides and a sprouting mess of white turkey feathers on top. Heavy pouches beneath the eyes and a thick white mustache provided the only stopping places in a long face with cavernous cheekbones. He wore round glasses perched on a thin blade of a nose, and carried a notebook.

  “Pop, this is Ol
d Sam Dementieff, my buddy. Sam, this is the editor of the camp newspaper, so be careful what you say around him.”

  Hammett looked at Sam and raised an eyebrow. “Old Sam?”

  “It’s just a nickname,” Sam said, a little testily.

  Hammett looked at him a little longer, and then turned to look at Mac a little longer than that. “You brothers?”

  “Not hardly.” Sam was looking at Mac when he said it. Mac was looking at Hammett, and his eyes carried a clear warning.

  After a moment Hammett said, “Had a few more questions I wanted to ask for my piece on the mop-up.”

  Mac rolled his eyes, but Sam could feel his relief. He got to his feet. “I gotta get going; I got a pilot talked into a ride back to my unit. You know flyboys and how they don’t like to be kept waiting. Mac.”

  Mac took Sam’s hand in a painful grip. “Sam.”

  “Thanks, Mac,” Sam said. He looked at the leg encased in plaster, suspended with ropes and weights and pulleys. “Thanks a lot.”

  Mac shrugged. “You saved my ass on that friggin’ mountain a couple of times, way I remember it. Call it even.”

  He let Sam’s hand go, finally. Sam walked down the ward and paused for a look back, and saw Hammett and Mac both watching him. He raised his hand in half wave, half salute, and left.

  * * *

  Sam got back to his unit in time to board a ship bound for the navy base on Kodiak Island. He spent the rest of the war there, the tedium of camp life broken by occasional reconnaissance missions to the outer islands, but the Japanese had left before the invasion of Kiska and they didn’t come back. The Lend-Lease route for hop-scotching war materiel across Alaska to Russia was safe.

  Six months after the Battle of Attu Sam got word that Joyce had married Davy Moonin. He’d known of her parents’ opposition to himself, but it was still a very heavy blow. For the next year he did his duty in a robotic funk, until the end of 1944, when he heard that Davy had died and that Joyce was now a young widow. He began to be very anxious for the war to be over.