Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  He went to Canyon Hot Springs, and added the cabin and its outbuildings to Mac’s map. After that, he mostly stayed away, the hope and love of the young man who had built that cabin still too strong, too immediate, for him to tolerate for long.

  In the fullness of time Stephan Shugak married Zoya Shashnikof and their daughter Ekaterina Ivana was born. Old Sam took to her right off, and when her parents died so young, he stepped forward to share the privilege with Abel and the vest of the village of teaching her how to hunt and shoot and trap and fish. She was the child he had never had.

  There were times he didn’t think he deserved as much satisfaction as he had received in his life, a good boat, a good woman as independent as she was strong, a daughter so worthy of love and pride. There were times when he woke up from a dream of Emil Bannister laying on the floor of his study, his own blood drowning that gloating smile.

  At those times he would force himself up out of his bed and down the ladder to brew himself a mug up, facing down his ghosts with a dose of caffeine and a taciturn front, the sweat of fear drying along his spine.

  It seemed a small price to pay.

  Thirty-four

  Bernie’s.

  The belly dancers were out and in full regalia, castanets clicking, flirtatious glances beneath spangled veils tucked into knit caps, some of them wearing long underwear under sheer skirts. Pastor Bill’s congregation, which these days just fit at the big round table, held hands and sent up a silent prayer for help in leading the heathens to the path of righteousness. It was the wrong time of year for Big Bumpers, more’s the pity. Kate would have enjoyed watched Bernie force feed them Middle Fingers.

  The four aunties sat at their usual table in the corner, the current quilt spread over their laps. Their number had been augmented by one this evening. Annie Mike was sitting between Auntie Vi and Auntie Joy, her needle flashing quickly and surely through some bright red scrap of fabric. She had smiled at Kate when she came in but had gone directly to take her place in the quilting circle.

  An auntie in training.

  Tall, mostly black men chased a basketball across the big television hanging from the ceiling. At the table beneath sat a group of old fart Park rats, talking trash on every pass and play. They looked diminished, somehow, without Old Sam in their midst.

  On the other hand, Howie Katelnikof was nowhere in sight, which made for a good night in Kate’s book. She wondered where Willard was, and decided not to borrow trouble.

  The other big change was that the jukebox was gone, banished to that great old roadhouse in the sky, leaving a large rectangle of floor space much lighter than the surrounding wood. It had been replaced by a sound dock with an iPod, attached to a series of Bose speakers mounted on the walls, through which even Kate had to admit if only to herself Bon Jovi was presently keeping pretty good faith.

  “I can’t believe you got rid of the jukebox,” she said.

  “I heard you the first two times,” Bernie said, squeezing a quarter of a lime into her Diet Sprite, her sinful second in half an hour. “Admit it, this sounds better. And it’s a lot less temperamental, and it takes up one hell of a lot less room. Plus I get to make up my own playlists. There is no downside here.”

  Kate tried not to pout into her drink. Bernie ripped open another package of beef jerky and tossed it to Mutt, who had poked her head up over the counter in hopes of further largesse. She caught it neatly in her teeth and retired once more to the floor next to Kate’s stool.

  “You’ll spoil her,” Kate said.

  Bernie smiled. “She’s worth it.” Tall, thin to the point of emaciation, with what hair he had left gathered in a ponytail at the nape of his neck, Bernie looked the same, and yet not. He was still suffering the loss of his wife and son. He was still coaching the high school basketball teams, Johnny had told Kate, with only a little less than Bernie’s usual ferocity. Her eyes strayed over his head to the sign tacked to the wall. “Free Throws Win Ball Games.”

  His eyes followed hers. “They still do.” He looked at her. “They always will.”

  The door opened and Petey Jeppsen came in, a wooden box beneath one arm. He spotted Kate and threaded his way through the tables. “Got something for you.” He set the box on the bar next to her. Bon Jovi segued to Foreigner and urgent sax licks.

  “That the compass?”

  “Yeah. Hey, Bernie.”

  “Hey, Petey.” Bernie eyed Petey with some caution. The last time Petey had been in the Roadhouse, he and his mother had been shooting up the place. He’d been banned from the Roadhouse ever since, over four years now.

  Petey gave him a wry smile. “I come in peace. Can I have a beer?”

  Bernie hesitated, and then made up his mind. No one could ever call him unwilling to give a guy another chance. Petey got his beer, and Bernie went off to tell the latest waitress everything she was doing wrong, which since it was her first night was most everything she was doing. A bleached blonde with a spiderweb tattoo on the back of her neck, she looked halfway intelligent, and the next time the group of Suulutaq miners at table number five took turns pinching her ass she would call Bernie over instead of slapping one and dumping a pitcher of beer on another.

  Eric Clapton mourned the loss of Layla and was chased offstage under pressure by David Bowie and Queen. The dance floor, larger now by the size of one jukebox, was flooded with customers, about half of them single guys dancing, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, with themselves. Several of them were casting languishing glances Kate’s way. Kate readied herself to repel boarders, another unwelcome change. In a place where everybody knows your name, they also ought to know you don’t dance unless it’s in a circle at a potlatch. Since Suulutaq started up, there just weren’t enough Park rats of the female persuasion to go around. Not that there ever had been.

  On the other hand, it meant Keith Gette and Oscar Jimenez could dance together without occasioning comment. Not that they ever did anyway.

  “I heart the Park,” Kate said.

  Petey followed her eyes to Oscar and Keith, who were swaying together in a slow dance regardless of the music. Keith had his head tucked into Oscar’s shoulder, and Oscar had his thumbs in Keith’s back pockets. Petey gave a noncommittal grunt, which was better than calling them godless sexual deviants, which was what the old Petey Jeppsen would have done.

  Kate raised the hinged lid of the box and peered inside at the brass compass. “I’ll have to get some brass polish. Old Sam always made sure she shined.” She looked at him. “You got something to replace her?”

  “Hell, Kate, I got a GPS. Come to that, I got two.”

  He seemed taller somehow, and broader of shoulder and infinitely more mature. Owning property could do that for you. “Well, you need a compass,” she said, and nodded at the box. “It’s just going to sit around my house collecting dust.”

  For a moment he looked tempted, and then shook his head. “Old Sam wanted you to have her. He said so.”

  “He told you?”

  “Yeah, last summer in Alaganik.” A little awkwardly, he added, “He didn’t tell me he was leaving me the Freya then. That’s … I don’t think I would have believed him, Kate.” He looked at his bottle. “I’m not sure I believe it now.”

  “Better start,” Kate said.

  His smile was fleeting. “Anyway, he said he wanted you to have the compass. I couldn’t take it. Old Sam’s ghost would rise up and hang me from the boom by my testicles.”

  “Probably would,” Kate said, and grinned. He grinned back, and they touched glass to bottle in salute to the old fart.

  The door opened and Susie Kompkoff came in, her face glowing from the cold.

  “Excuse me,” Petey said, and slid from his stool to join her at a table.

  “Something going on there?” Bernie said, but before she could answer, CCR started rolling down that river and there was a whoop fit to raise the roof and Bobby rolled out on the dance floor in his wheelchair with his wife in his lap. She hopped to her
feet and he took her hands and they began some intricate dance that integrated rock steps with wheelie pops and underarm turns.

  CCR melted into Three Dog Night exhorting all the girls to hide their hearts. Bobby and Dinah never missed a beat.

  Dan O’Brian pulled up a stool and gave Mutt a good scratch between the ears.

  “Dan,” Kate said.

  “Kate,” Dan said. “I looked into the title of the Canyon Hot Springs homestead.”

  Kate’s spine stiffened. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. And I’m going to look into it a little more, but I think it’s yours.”

  Kate relaxed a little. “I think it is, too.”

  He looked serious, an expression she was not accustomed to seeing on his broad, freckled face. “I’d like the chance to talk you into selling it to the Parks Service,” he said. “Let us incorporate it into the Park.”

  Kate thought of the narrow pass that threaded its way up through the mountains and crossed the border into Canada. “I’m sorry, Dan,” she said. “It’s part of my family history. It isn’t for sale, at any price, not to the Parks Service.” She looked at him. “And I can promise you, not to anyone else, either.”

  He looked a little wary. “What will you do with it?”

  Kate smiled. “Nothing. Not one damn thing.”

  His face relaxed into a broad, relieved smile.

  The spiderwebby barmaid returned to load up her tray and departed again.

  Ruthe Bauman came in, stamping snow from her feet, and sat down next to Kate. “Beer and a bump,” she said to Bernie, and to Kate, “How you doing?”

  “Better,” Kate said.

  “Good.” She tossed back the whiskey and followed it by a long pull of beer. “Old Sam told me you might come asking, and that if you did I was to tell you his father’s name.”

  Kate, glass half raised, said, “What?”

  Ruthe nodded. “So I did.” She clinked her glass to Kate’s. “Here’s one for the old fart. Won’t be the last.” She got up and pulled a chair next to the quilting circle. Not into the circle, not without invitation, but near enough to hear the conversation, contribute the occasional comment. Kate saw the aunties exchange a look.

  Another auntie in training? Or Ruthe making peace because she was the one Dan had tapped to write down the Park’s history? Both, maybe.

  Coldplay drew a yellow line. Kate felt a cold draft of air. The noise in the bar fell to a muted level, then ceased entirely. She turned to see who had that effect on the Roadhouse besides herself.

  He was out of uniform, dressed in jeans worn white at the seams and a bomber-style jacket in a blue that almost matched his eyes. Almost, because nothing was as blue as those eyes, which were looking straight at her, steady, questioning.

  Mutt was on her feet, ready, willing, and able to render an appropriately besotted greeting, but something in Kate’s attitude made her pause. She looked from Jim to Kate and back again, her tail upright but absent of motion.

  Kate slid from the stool and walked toward him. The crowd parted before her.

  He had a few seconds to gain a confused impression of Kate’s eyes enhanced by a Technicolor rainbow of surrounding colors before, without breaking stride and in the same seamless motion that had begun at the bar, she made a single leap and landed with her legs wrapped around his waist. She looped her arms around his neck and swooped down for a kiss that took the breath of everyone watching.

  For one startled moment he didn’t move, and then he grabbed her ass and settled her firmly against him without breaking the kiss, and turned around and carried her outside.

  It was the closest Mutt ever came to getting her tail caught in the door.

  * * *

  The next morning Kate woke up to find him grinning down at her. “You’re glowing,” he said.

  “I am not,” she said, trying to roll out of bed.

  He wrestled her back into his arms. “Are too.” He kissed her, which evolved into something else that went on long enough for Johnny to leave for school.

  “Which was your plan all along,” she said.

  “You know my methods, Watson,” he said, watching her very fine ass head into the bathroom without him. This was obviously a gross miscarriage of relationship justice, so he padded after her. He pulled back the shower curtain and was instantly jealous of the water coursing down her upturned face, her body. This was not to be borne. He stepped into the tub. She smiled without opening her eyes.

  Breakfast was damp and interrupted often enough that the caribou sausage fried hard to the pan. Fortunately, there was bread for toast and butter and honey to go on it, and an unopened bag of Tsunami Blend for coffee. “Did you order this?” he said.

  “No,” she said, “it was the coffee fairy.”

  “Did you order it for me?”

  “No,” she said, “for the three other guys I took up with while you were gone.”

  They ate on the couch, leaning against opposite arms, legs entwined. Mutt had scraped the quilt into a pile and was sitting with her butt to the fireplace, yellow eyes fixed adoringly on Jim’s face as he told Kate the story of his trip south. She made him bring out his father’s writing case and show it to her.

  “Why did he want you to know?” she said, her hands caressing the silken wood.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Probably wanted me to know why my mother disliked me so much.”

  She looked at him.

  “She did, Kate,” he said. “She does. And she was jealous as hell of my relationship with my father. She interfered in it whenever she could. Dad wasn’t exactly affectionate, it wasn’t his style, but I knew he cared. And I knew she didn’t. I’d always figured it was because I ruined her figure. Now I know I didn’t even do that.”

  “What’s she like?” Kate said. “The sister? Uh, your birth mother?”

  “I only spent a day with her, but okay. Very much the doc. Smart, disciplined, analytical.” He remember a warm embrace, the firm press of lips on his cheek. “She’s got a heart, though.”

  “And she has kids of her own.”

  “One girl, one boy.”

  “So you have siblings.”

  He shrugged. “If I want to, yeah.”

  “Maybe they’ll come visit.”

  “Haven’t even met them, Kate.”

  “There are people in the world who share your DNA,” she said. “That’s not nothing.”

  “I don’t know them,” he said. “Be fine if they come. Be fine if they don’t.” He put his mug and saucer on the floor and reached forward to remove hers and set them on the floor, too, after which he picked her up and tucked her under his chin. She threw her leg over his and put her head on his chest. His heart beat strongly beneath her cheek. She’d missed that. “I missed you,” she said.

  “I missed the hell out of you,” he said. “What were you up to while I was gone? The shiners and the scar on your forehead tell me it has to be good.”

  “Well,” she said. “Funny you should ask.”

  The story took the better part of an hour. By the time she finished they were sitting up again, facing each other, Kate cross-legged in the circle formed by his legs. “And then Nick flew in and took the whole bunch of them off my hands,” she said, “and I went down to the clinic and let the boys clean me up. For what I sincerely hope will be the last time.”

  His eyebrows puckered. “Who was it at the hot springs the first time again?”

  “The first time? That was Bruce Abbott.”

  “Who was with him?”

  “Some lowlife from Anchorage Abbott hired on because he could handle a rifle. Abbott says he was scared of bears.”

  “Scared of Kate Shugak, more like.”

  Kate grinned. “He is now.”

  “So, Abbot was looking for…”

  “The icon.”

  “That Erland hired him to find.”

  “Abbott won’t admit to it, but he can’t explain how he knew about it otherwise.”

  “
Which icon you still haven’t found.”

  Kate’s enjoyment in the telling of the tale dimmed a little. “No.”

  “Okay,” Jim said, “Ben was looking for the Hammett manuscript. Erland, using Bruce, the tool, was looking for the icon. What were Pete and Sabine looking for?”

  “That’s almost the best part of the whole story,” Kate said. “Come to find out, Pete’s maternal grandfather was a stampeder, of the Pilz stampeders, no less, and Pete inherited the fever. He’s got gold pans and pickaxes all over the walls of his office, along with a poster of all the largest gold nuggets in the world. Most of which come from Australia, by the way. The biggest one in Alaska is the Centennial Nugget, two hundred and ninety-four point one ounces.” She looked at him expectantly.

  He waved his hand in a come ahead motion.

  “And he’s got a shelf full of books about gold discoveries, stampeder accounts about Dawson and Circle and Livengood and Nome. He’s a serious gold bug. I have no excuse for not noticing. I just took it all as Alaskana. Because the icon was the most valuable thing in Old Sam’s past, I figured that’s what everybody was looking for.”

  “So?” Jim said with what he felt was commendable patience.

  “So, when most of the residents of Niniltna and Kanuyaq were laid out in the great flu pandemic of 1918–1919, Mac McCullough was free to waltz in and out of every building in both places, taking everything that wasn’t bolted down. Hell, he had time enough to unbolt anything he wanted. Including the Cross of Gold Nugget.”