A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  And he had given her Johnny. She looked at his son, boding to be as tall, and if not quite as ugly then as memorable in feature and as independent in personality. “I’m not a mommy,” she’d told Jack a long time ago, and he’d saddled her with a twelve-year-old son in response.

  Well, she still wasn’t a mommy. They were friends, her and the kid. She was older and tougher so she could make what she said stick, for now. Just because she had resorted to blackmail to keep his mother from taking him away didn’t mean anything. Except that she loved him, first for his father’s sake and now for his own. Johnny’s a gift, she’d told Old Sam, and it was the simple truth. He was a smart, funny kid who had grown into a young man of such promise it almost hurt her eyes to look at him. After a lifetime spent in a determined search for independence, she now had a hostage to fortune.

  Jack had to be laughing his ass off somewhere. Of course he’d had The Talk with Johnny at age ten. He would probably have had it with him at age six if he hadn’t recoiled from the need to use pictures to make himself understood.

  Today, Van and Johnny slid into the cab of the four-wheel-drive Ford Ranger XL long-bed Super Cab Kate had received as a fee for babysitting Mandy Baker’s Beacon Hill parents during their one and only visit to the Park. Mutt already took up a large portion of the bench seat but they managed to pull the door shut on the mashup.

  Four years ago, the truck had been bright red and brand-new, but there had been a series of unfortunate encounters with a Super Cub, a grizzly, and a Park rat with a .30-06, so the bloom was rather off the pickup rose. The previous owner of the truck was crossing the parking lot outside the school, and Kate rolled down her window. “Hey, Mandy.”

  “Hey, Kate. Hey, Mutt.” This as Mutt peered around Kate, ears pricked forward. “Hey, kids.” Mandy gave the pickup the once-over, followed by a mournful shake of her head and the rote comment. “My poor baby.”

  Kate gave the rote response. “Takes a licking, keeps on ticking. How’s your folks?”

  “Good. They might come up again this year.” Mandy smiled. “Seems they know some of the members of the board of GHRI.”

  Mandy Baker, known to the dog mushing world as the Brahmin Bullet, the fourth woman to win the Iditarod and the third to win the Yukon Quest, was now working as the dedicated Alaskan spokes-person for the Suulutaq Mine, at a hefty salary and with generous stock options that earned an even more generous amount of shares in Global Harvest Resources Inc.

  “Be good to see them again,” Kate said, and it wasn’t a polite lie. Mandy’s Boston Brahmin parents had turned out to be something of a surprise to everyone concerned, including themselves. She nodded at the school. “You signing up to get your GED?”

  “Very funny,” Mandy said.

  “I met your staff geologist today.”

  “Holly Haynes?”

  “Yeah, first she bought Auntie Vi’s B and B for the mine.”

  Mandy looked unsurprised. “They’ve been talking about the need for a place. I told them Auntie Vi’s B and B was the only suitable house in Niniltna for what they needed.”

  “And then she helped me break up a knife fight in the Riverside Café between a couple of your other employees.”

  Mandy swore under her breath.

  “Be careful what you wish for,” Kate said.

  Mandy heard the bite in Kate’s voice and gave her a sharp look.

  On a gruesome day the previous winter, Global Harvest’s former representative to the Park had met an end that was still discussed over the bar at Bernie’s with fascination, revulsion, and not a little awe. Up until that day, Mandy Baker had been a musher and a damn good one, but Iditarod and Yukon Quest purses went only so far, and besides she wasn’t placing in the money as regularly as she once had. Previously a trust fund had made up the difference, but in the current depression, with a hundred dogs to feed and vet bills and a live-in boyfriend who needed the occasional bail money, it didn’t go as far as it once had, either. She could have asked her parents for a loan on her inheritance, which would be considerable, but Mandy was a proud soul who didn’t like to ask anybody for anything. The only solution to the bills piling up on her kitchen table was to get a job.

  She was probably Kate’s oldest friend in the Park, after Bobby Clark. And she was Global Harvest’s new representative to the Park.

  “So, what were you doing at the school?” Kate said.

  Mandy nodded at Johnny and Van. “I’ll let them tell you about it. See you later.”

  She slopped through the mud to a Ford Explorer with the now familiar sunrise-over-the-Quilaks logo on the side and drove off.

  Kate put the Ranger in gear. “What’s she talking about?”

  Van was tucked beneath Johnny’s arm. They exchanged glances. “Mandy made a speech at the potluck. The mine’s offering summer jobs to kids sixteen and older.”

  “Really,” Kate said. “What kind of jobs?”

  “Roustabout.”

  Kate thought back to Jim’s definition of roustabout. “What would you be doing, exactly?”

  “Picking up trash,” Johnny said.

  “Washing dishes or making beds,” Van said.

  “Scrubbing pots.”

  “Janitor work.”

  “Typing and filing.”

  “Oh.” They bumped over a section of washboard without anyone being ejected out of the pickup, a minor triumph in the days between breakup and summer. “So the job’s just for the summer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hourly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Minimum wage?”

  “Yeah, but anything over eight hours is time and a half, and holidays are double time.”

  Federal minimum wage was currently $6.55 an hour. Time and a half would be $9.83. They were both sixteen. Kate didn’t know if state law required them to be eighteen to work overtime. She wasn’t sure if the state was geared up yet to send a labor inspector out to the Suulutaq, though, and it wasn’t like Johnny and Van didn’t know what a long day was like. “What’s the shift?”

  “Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, two weeks on, two weeks off. But Mandy says depending on how good we are and what needs to be done, there’s the possibility we could work back-to-back shifts straight through the summer.”

  Kate ran a rapid mental calculation. Twelve hours times seven days equaled eighty-four. Forty hours times $6.55 was only $262, but forty-four hours times $9.83 was $432.52. “Almost seven hundred dollars a week total,” she said out loud. Twenty-eight hundred a month. Even if you figured a third for taxes, it was still a fortune to a teenager. Especially one who lived in the Park, and with the economy in the toilet it looked like a king’s ransom. Kate had been squirreling away a quarter of every paycheck into Johnny’s college fund but this would at the very least pay for textbooks.

  “What about crewing on the Freya?” she said.

  Johnny looked uncomfortable. “Do you think Old Sam will mind much?”

  “He hates breaking in new help,” she said. It was true. It was also true that Old Sam had hired Johnny in the first place so he could keep Kate on as a deckhand. At least at first. However, Johnny had proved himself, both as a quick learner and as remarkably reliable for one of whom Old Sam referred to as the hormonally challenged.

  “It’s a lot of money, Kate.”

  Given the dismal predictions for this year’s salmon run, it was probably more than he’d make on the Freya.

  But money wasn’t his only consideration, and maybe not even his first consideration. Kate watched Johnny and Van exchange another glance, and the unspoken thought was mutual and obvious. If they both got jobs at the mine, they could be together over the summer. Kate wondered how good an idea that was.

  Well, at some point, you had to trust that you’d raised them right, and if she had little confidence in her own embryonic parenting skills she had a great deal of faith in Annie Mike’s. Nevertheless, she saw no harm in letting them sell her on the idea. Kate also had great f
aith in the child-rearing instincts of Lazarus Long, who had famously said, “Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.”

  “They’re going to hire the Grosdidier brothers to teach an EMT class so we can respond to emergencies,” Van said.

  “And the culinary union is going to send in chefs from Anchorage to teach institutional cooking,” Johnny said.

  “And we get paid to take the classes,” Van said. “It’d be part of our job.”

  GHRI going after the next generation with a vengeance. Still, Kate couldn’t detect a flaw in the offer of free education. She pulled into Annie Mike’s driveway and they trooped inside. Annie had coffee and lemon sugar cookies waiting.

  Annie already knew about Auntie Vi selling the B and B, so Kate favored her with a description of her heroic disruption of the knife fight in the Riverside Café, and Annie retaliated with an eyewitness account of Bonnie Jeppsen and Suzy Moonin bitch-slapping each other around the post office, as near as anyone could make out just for the fun of it.

  “Well, at least that won’t be Suulutaq related,” Kate said. “Annie, you hear about these summer jobs the mine’s offering the kids?”

  Annie nodded, her face placid and calm as ever. A short, plump woman with straight brown hair that fell in ordered strands from a side part to a pudgy chin and brown eyes that remained bland in expression no matter what the provocation, Annie dressed in Jelly Belly–colored polyester pantsuits that Dinah Clark freely speculated she had bought a gross of straight off the rack at JCPenney in 1963. No one disagreed, and besides, Annie’s rainbow figure was a welcome sight in the middle of a dark Alaskan winter. Her style, however retro, most decidedly did not make her a figure of fun.

  Kate thought of Annie Mike as an auntie-in-waiting, although given recent history she wasn’t altogether sure Annie would be flattered at the comparison. Annie Mike was half Athabascan and half Aleut, with some Swedish thrown in from a Cordova connection and a rumor of African-American on her mother’s side. This was attributed to Hell Roaring Mike Healy, who had scattered enough seed up and down the Alaskan coast in his time to have been the progenitor of all the residents of Ahtna, with maybe Fairbanks thrown in for good measure. It was indisputable that Annie was the granddaughter of one tribal chief and the widow of another, and she had served as secretary-treasurer of the Niniltna Native Association since its creation. Kate, less than nine months in office after succeeding Billy Mike as the chairman of the board of directors, had come to regard Annie as her lodestone. She relied on her for Annie’s institutional knowledge, which was second to the knowledge of no other shareholder. That bland expression and that blinding rainbow attire were misdirection, camouflage to distract attention from the sharp intelligence, the acute perception, and the unshakeable integrity that was the woman beneath. If Annie said something was okay, Kate had learned that it indisputably was.

  Kate licked sugar from her fingers and waited for judgment to be rendered. Johnny and Van, well aware of the esteem in which Annie Mike was held by her tribe, in the Park and not least by Kate Shugak, waited, too, with some anxiety.

  Annie frowned and the kids looked at first dismayed and then ready to argue, but Kate knew from experience that the frown was more an expression of deep thought than of disapproval. “I wish they’d proposed it to the board before they’d announced it to the kids,” she said.

  “That was my first thought as well,” Kate said. She meditated on her coffee. “However, I see their point in taking it directly to the kids themselves. For one thing, not everyone enrolled in Niniltna High School is a Niniltna Native Association shareholder.”

  Annie nodded. “They want to make the offer to everyone, not just Natives.”

  “Yes.” Kate looked at Johnny and Van and the corners of her mouth quirked up in a smile. “And they knew perfectly well that it’d be hard to say no to paying jobs for the kids, once the kids heard about them.” She looked back at Annie, smile fading. “Let’s face it, Annie. Fish and Game projections aren’t good for the Kanuyaq runs this year. The economy’s tanked. Sure, Global Harvest is trying to buy their way into our good graces. But it’s a pretty good paycheck for someone their age, and it’s not like our kids have that many options. I can’t think of any Park rats whose lawns need mowing.”

  Annie nodded again.

  Johnny and Van held their breath.

  Kate reached for another cookie, and paused for an appreciative moment to admire its golden brown perfection. Stevenson was right, sometimes it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive. “They’re going to pay that money to somebody, Annie.”

  Annie reached for a second cookie herself. “True,” she said. “It might as well be our kids.”

  Johnny and Van, recognizing victory, beamed.

  Kate took a bite of cookie and let the lemon and sugar dissolve blissfully on her tongue. Although arriving had its own rewards.

  It was at least a counterpoint to the uneasy feeling that she’d just consented to the thin end of the wedge.

  Kate and Johnny pulled into the clearing at the homestead as Jim was getting out of his Blazer. As usual Mutt leaped from the cab of the pickup to lavish an ecstatic greeting, her tail wagging hard enough to start a Force 5 gale.

  Although Kate couldn’t keep the smile from spreading across her own face, so who was she to talk. “I figured you’d be late. If you made it home at all.”

  “I told Maggie the hell with it and sent her home.”

  “Anybody left in the cells?”

  “Well, since Maggie told me she sprung Willard to the custody of Eknaty Kvasnikof on your say-so, only Petey Jeppsen’s left. Especially since I refused to arrest the bigamist.”

  Kate and Johnny exchanged a glance. “And thereby hangs a juicy tale,” Kate said.

  “Yeah, but first I need a beer.”

  They went inside, Johnny detouring through the shop, where his truck was in for maintenance. Kate hadn’t touched anything while he was at school. The deal was they’d do any necessary work on his pickup together, that was how he’d learn, but you had to watch her. She stole books you were reading, too.

  Jim went straight to the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Alaskan Amber. Uncapping it, he tilted his head back and took a long swallow. He felt better immediately.

  Kate was peeling Saran wrap off the top of a deep brown mixing bowl. She bent down and sniffed.

  “What’s the latest yeasty masterpiece?”

  She looked up and smiled at him. He didn’t see stars, he told himself, it was only his imagination. “Same as the last, only I halved the amount of yeast, and I’m going to knead the salt in between risings.”

  “You might as well be speaking in tongues,” he said.

  She laughed, the same low husky rasp that she’d rolled out at the Riverside earlier in the day. Mine, he thought, and even he couldn’t have said if he was referring to the laugh or to the woman. Both, probably. He wanted the whole package. Still. Amazing.

  Constancy wasn’t exactly Jim Chopin’s middle name.

  He went into the living room to consult the theater system with surround sound without which he had insisted no house was truly a home, and saw Johnny’s iPod in the sound dock. He hit Play and moments later Mos Def’s “Caldonia” from the soundtrack of Lackawanna Blues filled the air.

  “Oh yeah,” Kate said, and he grinned at her through the pass-through.

  “What’s for dinner?” he said.

  “Fried Spam and eggs.”

  “Excellent,” Johnny said, emerging from the bathroom to do a quick knee-drop to the beat.

  Jim looked at Kate. “Hey, what can I tell you?” she said. “It’s my Native culture calling to me. You know Alaskans are second only to Hawaiians in consumption of Spam.”

  “And I hear second only to Utah in downloading porn,” Johnny said, jumping into a hip slide across the floor to the door of his room, through which he slung his daypack.

  “How we can hold our heads up in public ever again,”
Jim said.

  “I don’t want to know how you know that,” Kate said, looking at Johnny.

  Johnny’s grin was cheeky. “Just wait till the Park gets online. Then we’ll be number one.”

  She thought of the computers targeted for the school and shuddered. She’d floured the counter, sprinkled two teaspoons of salt over the flour, and turned out the dough. Before they had begun construction, the Park rat house-raising committee had measured her from sole to waist and made the countertops Kate high, which coincidentally made it very convenient for Jim to stand behind her, slide his arms around her waist, and snug her head beneath his chin.

  She stilled. “I’m covered in flour.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Not to mention which,” Johnny said in pretend indignation, closing his bedroom door behind him with a distinct thud, “the kid’s standing right here.”

  “True,” Jim said. He felt Kate relax against him, a warm, firm presence. God, she felt good.

  “And waiting for the story about the bigamist.” Johnny looked at him, face eager. Troopers told the best stories, and he sensed this one would be a doozy.

  He felt Kate stir. “Unhand me, sir.”

  Reluctantly Jim let her go. He took his beer to the couch and stretched out so that he could watch Kate over the open counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. He took another swallow, and draped an arm around a furry neck conveniently offered. His women had him surrounded. He sighed. Mutt sighed. Eric Clapton started in on “Layla.” In the kitchen, Kate rolled her eyes and kneaded coarse salt into bread dough that she worried might be a tad bit too wet.