A Taint in the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  One shot was all it would take, they had told him, so long as he hit the target. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes as his finger pulled the trigger, slowly, firmly, even gently, again as they had taught him. The stock recoiled against his shoulder as the high explosive round left the barrel. The sound of the shot rendered him temporarily deaf.

  Before he could raise his eye from the scope, the helicopter touched down on the pad and on landing seemed simply to shatter into a thousand pieces. The three-man crew died instantly, shredded by fragments from their own splintering aircraft, as did the one soldier on the ground standing fifteen feet from the landing pad, skewered by a flying piece of one of the rotors. All six of the soldiers waiting for their ride home fifty feet from the landing pad were injured as well, two of them mortally.

  The watcher upslope granted him just enough time to be amazed at the destruction he had wrought before putting a bullet into the back of his head precisely where his skull ended and his spinal column began.

  Two

  Thursday, January 14

  Niniltna

  EACH OF THE 103 PYREX BAKING DISHES WAS scraped clean. The mountain of gifts was reduced to a floor-covering rubble of plastic clamshells, price tags, and instruction books. The last person with a story to tell about Old Sam had finally and reluctantly abandoned the microphone. The heavy wooden double doors slammed shut behind the last guest with a finality that echoed off the hard sufaces of the gym.

  “A good potlatch,” Auntie Vi said.

  “Lots of the people come to say good-bye,” Auntie Balasha said, nodding.

  “Too many,” Auntie Edna said. “Look at this mess. Pigs.”

  Auntie Joy said nothing.

  “Vern Truax he come, too, see you?” Auntie Vi said. “And he don’t stay too long, just pay his respects. Good manners. Good business.”

  “You see Peter Kasheverof’s daughter canoodle in the corner with Lizzie Collier’s son?” Auntie Balasha said. “A marriage there soon, I think.”

  “There better be,” Auntie Edna said.

  Auntie Joy said, “I get the bags and the dust pans.”

  Auntie Balasha and Auntie Joy moved from one end of the room to the other with mathematical precision, a garbage bag in one hand and a dustpan in the other, scooping up debris. Auntie Edna and Auntie Vi followed with push brooms. When Auntie Balasha and Auntie Joy reached the far end, they exchanged the bags and pans for buckets and mops, followed in their turn by Aunties Edna and Vi with dry mops and polish. In both efficiency and productivity, it was an operation that would have made Henry Ford proud to be an American.

  In the kitchen, in bright yellow rubber gloves, Annie Mike presided over a double aluminum sink almost as deep as she was tall, filled with steaming, soapy water. Kate ferried in the dirty dishes, and when she set down the last load she said, “That was a good story Demetri told, the one about Old Sam and the sheep hunt. I hadn’t heard it before.”

  “Me, either,” Annie said. “For all that he lived right next door to us for the last thirty years, there’s a lot we don’t know about that old man.”

  Kate turned to look at the other woman.

  “Like the icon, I meant,” Annie said. She had seen Kate’s shoulders tense at her words, and wondered. “I’m ashamed to say I’d never even heard of it before now.”

  “Me, either,” Kate said. She was silent for a moment, thinking of the Sainted Mary, an ancient Russian icon triptych depiciting Mary and Jesus as mother and baby, mother and corpse, and mother and ascending son of God, that had only recently returned to the tribe due to the one-person scavanger hunt—that one person being Kate—orchestrated by Old Sam from beyond the grave. Tribal members had credited the icon with everything from healing the sick to granting wishes to finding loved ones lost at sea. After a sufficient amount of spiritual groveling first, Kate was sure. “You think Emaa knew about it?”

  “She was of his generation. Be strange if she didn’t.”

  Kate looked through the pass-through at the four aunties in the gym. “By that definition, most of them would have known about it, too. I wonder why they never said anything.”

  Annie ran more hot water into the dish encrusted with the remains of the Olga Kvasnikof special, macaroni and cheese with Spam. “Put yourself there, in that time. A third of them were dead from the Spanish flu. They were fifty-plus years into American sovreignty. There were ongoing repercussions from the Klondike Gold Rush and the Kanuyaq Copper Mine. White encroachment on Native lands. What amounted to a foreign government taking over. The introduction of the notion of private property when before, the whole state and western Canada, too, had been their oyster, without border or boundary.” She rinsed out the Pyrex dish and set it on the drainboard. “Their parents’ generation was being pushed, hard, by Western civilization. Could be their pride couldn’t take the extra hit, that they just couldn’t face up to losing an artifact the tribe regarded as holy. Be easier just to pretend it never existed in the first place.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Kate said, “but that icon had to have come into the Park relatively recently. We didn’t have a written language, but there were newspapers around in 1920.”

  Annie raised an eyebrow. “How many of them wrote about Alaska Natives?”

  Kate thought. “Yeah. So bottom line is, we don’t know when the first Kookesh brought in the icon. Assuming he did.”

  “Ask a Tlingit,” Annie said. “They never forget anything.”

  Kate laughed, and sighed. “God, I’m going to miss that cranky old bastard so much.”

  Annie looked through the pass-through, at the four aunties who were now getting out the folding chairs and setting them in neat rows for the next day’s annual January shareholder meeting. Auntie Joy was wearing an unusually solemn expression. “You’re not alone.”

  “Where is it now?” Kate said. “The icon?”

  “We’ve got it locked down in the NNA headquarters for now, but people are going to want to see it. It’s theirs, they ought to be able to, but I’m not prepared to spend shareholder money hiring a single employee dedicated to locking and unlocking the room it’s in every time someone walks in the door.” She paused. “We’ve also had some inquiries from scholars wanting to study it.”

  “And?” Kate said. Annie Mike was never this long-winded except when she wanted something.

  “We should give some thought to building something to house it and display it.”

  “A museum, you mean?”

  “Why not?”

  Kate remembered the oil lamp made of stone that Emaa had donated to a museum in Anchorage. No reason that kind of thing couldn’t have remained in the Park, had there been a place for it. “In his will, Old Sam told me that if and when Phyllis Lestinkof and her baby moved out of his cabin to turn it over to the tribe and make it into a museum.”

  Annie smiled. “The Samuel Leviticus Dementieff Memorial Museum.”

  Kate smiled, too. “He’d have loved to make fun of that. You want to bring it up at tomorrow’s meeting?”

  “God no,” Annie said, rinsing the last dish and pulling the plug on the sink. The water gurgled out as she stripped the gloves from her hands and annointed herself liberally with the lotion in the push-button dispenser on the drainboard. Her hands were square and brown and strong, the nails short and neatly trimmed. “The next board meeting is soon enough. For one thing, we don’t know that Phyllis and the baby will be out of Old Sam’s house anytime soon. Better to have a whole plan, with a site selected and a budget before we ask them to vote on it. It’s never a good idea to allow the shareholders to think too much for themselves.”

  Kate gave her an appraising glance.

  “What?” Annie said. She was a matronly woman in her mid-fifties with a fondness for polyester in primary colors. Today she was resplendent in a lipstick red double-breasted suit with black shiny buttons the size of dessert plates and shiny patent leather loafers to match the buttons. Be easy for someone to be fooled into thinking the bright
plumage was the most interesting thing about this plump-breasted, bright-eyed woman.

  But when the blinding effect wore off, there remained a dignified, self-assured tribal elder with a direct, steady gaze and an air of quiet authority that gave pause to anyone who might imagine they could bully or intimidate her in matters concerning the shareholders of the Niniltna Native Association, starting with board member and fellow shareholder Harvey Meganack and extending all the way up to Vern Truax out at the Suulutaq Mine.

  A good thing, since she was Kate’s handpicked successor as chair of the NNA board. “I used to think you were an auntie in training,” Kate said.

  There was the barest hint of a smile behind Annie’s solemn expression. “And now?”

  “And now I’m wondering if you aren’t the next Emaa.” Emaa being Kate’s grandmother, dead these six years. Sagacious, prescient, patient, iron of heart and of backbone, she had been more a Machiavellian force of nature than a human being, and had steered the Association’s ship of state from its creation by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act until her death. She had been succeeded by Billy Mike, who upon his own death was in turn succeeded, with extreme reluctance, by Kate. It had been the two longest years of her life.

  Annie’s face relaxed into a smile. “Be careful what you wish for, little girl.”

  Kate laughed again. It was getting easier.

  On the other side of the room, Auntie Joy looked up at the sound. Kate met her wounded eyes for a brief moment before Auntie Joy turned away again. Kate’s laughter faded.

  “Were they especially close?”

  “Sorry?” Kate said.

  Annie nodded at Auntie Joy. “Old Sam and Auntie Joy. She seems a lot more torn up than the rest of them.”

  After an infinitesimable pause, Kate said, “They went back a long way.”

  She was sure her expression hadn’t changed, but Annie gave her a sharp look before she turned to reach for a dishcloth.

  Three

  Friday, January 15

  Niniltna

  JIM’S CELL PHONE VIBRATED AGAINST HIS BELT. He jumped and swore. His dispatcher laughed. Shamefaced, he joined in. “Can’t get used to it,” he said.

  Maggie looked out the post window on the uphill side, through which could be seen Niniltna’s brand-spanking-new tower, a three-hundred-foot-tall behemoth (taller than Bobby Clark’s, and didn’t that just torque the hell out of the owner and proprietor of pirate radio station Park Air) that loured up from behind the school gymnasium, a massive presence in the brief light of a January afternoon. Through the openwork steel frame, she could see the alpenglow painting the snow-covered breasts of the Quilak Mountains a pale magenta. Less than a month after construction, the tower already bristled with a dozen antennas and dishes, some directed upriver toward Ahtna and the Glenn Highway, an equal number down, in the direction of half a dozen villages and, more to the purpose, the Suulutaq gold mine.

  The tower and the gymnasium were both surrounded by parked vehicles of every kind, make, and age—pickups, SUVs, snow machines, four-wheelers—and Maggie could even hear the howling of dogs, signifying the presence of teams tethered to dogsleds. Evidently some shareholders had mushed in to the annual Niniltna Native Association shareholders meeting.

  “This is probably how the old folks felt when the Kanuyaq Copper Mine ran the first telephone wire the whole four miles between Kanuyaq and Niniltna,” she said, and went back to writing the crime report for the Ahtna Adit, which could now, courtesy of one of the antennas on said tower, be emailed directly to the local weekly from her very own computer. Previously, she’d had to save the document, download it to a thumb drive, and trudge up the hill to the school, where until last month had resided the only Internet access to be found in Niniltna.

  Not that it was all joy, because with this all new and improved access to communications, the Park rats had taken to cell phones with a vengeance, and all of them seemed to have the trooper’s post on speed dial. January 10, she typed. A caller reported the theft of a four-wheeler from a residence on Riverside Drive, the third one this week. Jim had found it, like the other two, abandoned near the Suulutaq Mine, the product of yet another McMiner stealing a quick ride back to work.

  “Everything old is new again,” Jim said, still fighting to get his cell phone, still buzzing, out of his belt pouch.

  January 11. A caller from the Riverside Cafe reported a pickup being driven erratically down the Step Road.

  That had been the Park’s Chief Ranger Dan O’Brian, bringing his truck down from Park headquarters on the Step to Herbie Topkok’s shop in the village, without benefit of brakes. And erratically was Maggie’s euphemism for what Harvey Meganack had really said, which was distinctly inappropriate for a family newspaper, not to mention an official state record.

  January 11. An anonymous caller reported three individuals spray-painting slogans on the side of the Last Chance Creek bridge.

  Salvador Totemoff and two of his junior high peeps exercising their right to free speech. Maggie and Jim were less bothered about the graffiti than they had been about the fact that said bridge was three hundred feet above creek level. Not that, in the event of the very worst happening, it wouldn’t have been a case of self-correction on the part of the gene pool.

  The snap finally gave and Jim looked at the display. UNKNOWN it said. He bowed to the inevitable and answered anyway. “Jim Chopin.”

  January 12. An anonymous caller objected to cross-country skiers wearing parasails as they came down the bunny hill.

  Well, he might, as a launch from the ski hill had a trajectory that could put a parasailing skier on course with the windows of several homes of Niniltna’s most illustrious citizens, among them Demetri Totemoff and Edna Shugak. The aforesaid Harvey Meganack, in pursuit of his eternal quest to make his fortune, had cleared a path through a stand of spruce on a slope off the foot of the town’s airstrip, installed a rope tow, and built a shed from which Harvey’s cousin, that unrecovering alcoholic and heretofore unemployable Elias Halversen, rented out sleds, skis, and snowboards. Harvey’s plan had been to entice some of those Suulutaq McMiners into paying for a little harmless fun during their off time, totally ignoring the fact that said miners were mostly young men in their twenties and that when they got off their twelve-hour shifts all they wanted to do was score transportation to the Road house, the only purveyor of alcohol within a hundred miles.

  Well. The only legal purveyor.

  January 13. An anonymous caller reported two individuals were selling pints of Windsor Canadian in front of Bingley’s.

  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who the two individuals were, but as usual Howie and Willard had been long gone by the time Jim got there.

  This was the last item, and she saved and sent with a flourish.

  Jim was still standing in front of her desk, and something in the quality of his silence brought Maggie’s head up. His eyes had narrowed and his mouth was a hard line. After a moment he said, “Where are you?”

  He glanced through the window. “Cross the strip and follow the road down the hill. The post is the third building on the left after the school.”

  He hung up and went into his office, and she went back to work wondering what all that was about.

  Ten minutes later, the door to the post opened, and Maggie looked up. In purely instinctive feminine reaction, she sat bolt upright in her chair, sucked in her gut, raised her chin to smooth out the incipient wattle beneath it, and resisted the temptation to raise a hand to check her hair. “May I help you?” she said, and was proud her voice didn’t squeak.

  “I’m here to see Sergeant Chopin,” the Alaska state trooper, also a sergeant, said in a pleasant baritone, pulling the ball cap from his head. His name tag read L. CAMPBELL. “He’s expecting me.”

  “Certainly,” Maggie said. Jim’s door was closed, which was unusual. The only time Jim’s door was closed was when both he and Kate Shugak were on the other side of it. It took Mag
gie a moment to find the intercom button on her phone. “Sergeant Chopin? A Sergeant Campbell to see you.”

  “Send him in.”

  She released the button and nodded at Jim’s door.

  “Thanks.” He looked at her name tag. “Maggie.” Sergeant Campbell’s smile made her heart skip a beat. Tall but not too tall, thick dark red hair that just begged to be rumpled by a caressing hand, eyes the color of the sea at sunset, strong, square shoulders, narrow hips, and long, muscular legs. There just wasn’t anything not to like. When he turned to knock on Jim’s door, she couldn’t help noticing that the view going away was equally entrancing. His uniform was neither off the rack nor made of a material even remotely synthetic. It fit like it, too.

  A laconic “Yeah” sounded from behind the door.

  Campbell opened the door. “Jim,” he said.

  “Liam,” Jim said, and the door closed behind them.

  “Wow,” Maggie said softly. She had worked every day of the last three years with a man who was, to put it mildly, easy on the eyes. She would have thought she’d become inured to it.

  She’d always wondered if recruiters for the Alaska State Troopers selected for height. Now she wondered if they selected for looks, too.

  On the other side of the door, the two men in the almost identical uniforms exchanged a long, expressionless stare. Finally Jim said in a voice entirely without inflection, “Liam,” and nodded at a chair. “Have a seat.”

  “Thanks, Jim.” Campbell unzipped the heavy blue jacket and sat down.

  There was silence. “How long you been here?” Campbell finally said.

  “Going on three years,” Jim said.

  “Little different from Wasilla.”

  “That it is,” Jim said. “Not busting near as many meth labs and marijuana grows in the Park. Thank god.”

  Campbell nodded. “You looking to retire out of here?”